Why Male Plasma is Being Preferred for Covid19 Related Treatment

I received a ‘forwarded message’ in Whatsapp which contained a list of plasma donors related to Covid19 treatment with their blood groups and contact details. It was a long list with more than 60 volunteers and the message asked to forward it to more people so that the needy can benefit. I forwarded it to a few people.

After a few days, I saw a message from someone which said that “male” plasma was being preferred instead of females. That got me wondering if it was a kind of “gender bias” or if there was a real medical reason behind that. I went back to the plasma donor list shared earlier and I found that all were males! Hence, I searched on the internet and found below article from BBC:

Coronavirus: Male plasma contains higher levels of antibodies

23 June 2020

Studies suggest men are more likely to become seriously ill and therefore produce higher levels of antibodies than women. This means their plasma could be more useful for saving lives. Of the donations from men, 43% had high enough levels of antibodies to be used in trials, compared with 29% of those from women. Higher antibody levels were also more often found in older patients, Asian patients and those who had been treated in hospital for Covid-19. Prof David Roberts, associate director for blood donation at NHS Blood and Transplant, said, "More plasma donors are needed. But we would especially want to hear from men."

Source: BBC

I noticed a few things from the above article summary:

1. Males are more prone to become infected with Corona virus and I have read this in many articles before. So far, I have been believing that this may be due to the fact that males are more exposed to outside environment since they have more compulsions to go out of homes in order to earn or support their families.
2. Since males are more prone to become infected, they also exhibit higher resilience and generate higher levels of anti-bodies to fight Covid19.
3. The difference between males’ and females’ proportions of higher anti-body count is not much: it is 43% for males Vs 29% for females. I doubt if it is so significant that even doctors and hospitals should start openly saying that they would prefer male plasma donors. But I am not an expert and hence I won’t like to conclude from scientific angle.
4. There are more categories of people who develop higher levels of anti-bodies, e.g. older people, Asian people, and those who recovered at home and never visited a hospital for Covid-19 treatment. But mostly, only “males” are being highlighted as “ideal donors”, perhaps due to gender related cultural bias.  

I don’t know if the higher proportion of males having higher anti-bodies is really due to some inherent gender-specific advantage because the same article mentions that it is so because males are more prone to get serious illness from Covid19. But I can see that with doctors, hospitals and media clearly preferring male donors, it means that a lot of eligible female donors would not be coming out to donate their plasma. This will be a loss to the cause at an overall level. In fact, in many such cases whenever media or government make something a “gender issue”, it harms the cause at the overall level.

I would want the medical professionals to stop spreading a message of “preference for male plasma donors”. Blood plasma has no gender and let it come from whichever gender of donor chooses to volunteer. Hospitals are not in the state of luxury that they need to differentiate between "higher level" vs "not so high level" plasma; since plasma is in shortage. The fact that there was not even a single female plasma donor’s name in the list I received on WhatsApp proves that this open gender preference is leading to female recovered patients not coming out to donate plasma. Hope our hospitals and government would be more aware and sensitive of how their actions and messages lead to unfavorable results and would be careful in future.

- Rahul Tiwary