In an appearance on The View Tuesday, Bravo host and producer Andy Cohen blasted the U.S. government’s policies barring him, as a gay man, from donating plasma amid the COVID pandemic.
“I knew that gay men were not allowed to give blood,” Cohen explained. “This has been something that has been going on for years. And it was something that I took as fact in the early days of HIV in the ’90s if I ever tried to give blood. The testing for HIV was far less sophisticated and accurate and fast as it is now. You can get an HIV test like that. It’s screened twice.”
Cohen said he was “surprised” and had signed up for a program with Mt. Sinai because they needed plasma from people who had survived COVID. “I was hurt.”
“I just thought, ‘Well, this is crazy,'” he added. “Technology has come so far that you’ve got to be looking at this. Now I had another test last week for COVID to see what my antibodies were. And the doctor said, ‘Oh my God, your antibodies are so robust,’ which she found to be highly unusual four months after having originally testing positive for COVID.”
“Once again I thought, ‘What a loss.,” Cohen continued. “Here I have these robust antibodies and I can’t share my plasma and possibly help anybody.’ So, extreme disappointment.I think that this is something that I’ve been speaking up about because I think that … we need help here.”
When Sunny Hostin said it felt “discriminatory” to her, Cohen replied, “It is discriminatory. I don’t understand it. I’m HIV-negative. You can find that out and you can test my blood a couple times before putting it into a system.”
Cohen also spoke about the Real Housewives franchise and filming Watch What Happens Live from home.
