I think a good enough reason to forbid it would be to prevent companies from paying donors more (or at all) and diverting blood that could be used for necessary medical treatments.
I should be free to decide for myself what to do with my own body, and which authorities to trust on matters beyond my domain of expertise. If you have a good argument for why this is a waste of resources then make the argument, don’t legistlatively prohibit me from thinking for myself.
Another example of this process is vaccines. If herd immunity is too low, then vaccination cannot work, although it is a perfectly good solution if everyone is on board.
A second point is that you probably are no expert on the topic of human plasma. This could motivate the enforcement of rules under certain circumstances, given that you are unable to personally judge if the use of such precious material is a waste or not.
I personally, think that your opinion is the epitome of selfishness.
If that is your point of contention, you could replace "cannot work" by "may do more harm than good at a social level".
For instance if I say, as I have tried to enunciate above, "if herd immunity is too low, vaccines may do more harm than good at a social/epidemiologic level", does that still seem very very wrong to you?
To be clear, your above comment gave the impression that you thought that a low herd immunity could not increase deaths due to disease compared to no herd immunity at all, which is wrong and was probably the reason why you were downvoted.
Not quite zero. There is at least some evidence that it might treat Alzheimer's disease. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5950663/
https://www.leafscience.org/the-fountain-of-youth-could-be-c...
What if the gov puts in place a simple regulation, like “X% of all harvested blood must be donated to local blood banks”. Now you have a market for rejuvenating blood, AND more blood available to hospitals. Only downside is an increase in price for Peter Thiel.
I’ve noticed taking such a moral stance tends to limit creative thinking around such topics (why spend time thinking about it when you’ve already dismissed it as immoral?). A bit of creative problem solving can sometimes turn a potentially problematic situation into a net positive for everyone.
Edit: Ok, now I see what you mean. I do not agree with you, although it is a matter of opinion. My opinion is that there are more important social priorities than making rich old geezers live longer and that your plan depends on numbers that could go one way or the other. You could easily build a scenario where your plan decreases hospital blood availability, and this seems likely to me given the financial incentive.
If on the other hand, that is just an excuse because you're morally opposed to old rich people living longer... ?
Right now, we don't have enough just for the people in the ER. Not saying it can't work, but it seems to me that the potential for catastrophic failure on a social level is quite high.
Your thinking on this is a bit short-sighted. Right now, this might only be available to “rich” old geezers. With test-tube burgers already under development, it seems likely that test-tube blood isn’t much further off. By the time you are an old geezer, blood will be a cheap commodity. But only if we get started on the problem now, instead of shooing people away with moral scare-mongering.
So I prefer to rely on verifiable present-day fact to decide on socially critical issues.
Relying on a partially captured government to set the right price is dangerous in this case.
If people find commercially viable uses for blood, it might result in the available supply being boosted greatly.
The amount of blood which could be donated is finite, yes. But it is also far, far greater than the amount which is donated.
Also, it is possible, if unproven, that the benefit to seniors is great, while it is known that the cost in health of donating blood is minimal, and may be beneficial. That, too, would be positive sum.
You want to call it creepy and vampiric? I admit, that’s how it strikes me as well.
But you didn’t say that, you said it was zero-sum. Not so.
You can look at it every way you want, maintaining the elderly population is certainly not a logically positive thing in a ressource-constrained environment. And by ressource, I don't mean blood. That we have morals (which is good) does not make it good from a general logical point of view disregarding social ties.
Or are you just saying that there are too many people, and think we should have fewer?