The Decibel - Why Canada’s biggest paid plasma collector has paused operations

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

Plasma is the golden fluid part of the blood and it’s used to make life-saving medications for people with immune deficiencies. In Canada, plasma donors were historically volunteers, for the most part. While paid donation was legal in some provinces, it wasn’t especially common. But in 2022, Canadian Blood Services partnered with Grifols, a Spanish company, to expand paid plasma donation. Now, they operate 17 sites across six provinces. After the deaths of two donors in the past year, however, Health Canada has been examining the company’s procedures. Earlier this month, Grifols announced they were pausing operations. Chris Hannay covers the business of health for The Globe. Today, he’s here to talk about what we know about Grifols’ temporary closure, what we’ve learned about the deaths, and what this all means for Canada’s access to plasma-based medication. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

After months of intense scrutiny, Canada's largest for-profit plasma collector has paused its operations. In Canada, plasma used to be mostly collected by voluntary donors. Plasma is the fluid part of the blood. It's a golden color and is used to make life-saving medications for people with immune deficiencies. In 2022, Canadian blood services started partnering with a Spanish company, Griffles, to begin paid donations in Canada. They have 17 sites across six provinces. After the deaths of two donors in the past year, Health Canada has been looking into the company's procedures and practices.

Chris Haney covers the Business of Health for the Globe. He's been reporting on Gryffles since it was first announced they begin operating in Canada. He's here to talk about what we know about the temporary shutdown, what we've learned about the deaths, and what this all means for Canada's access to plasma-based. medication. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Chris, thanks for being here today. Thanks for having me. So, Chris, we last had you want to talk about what's happening with Griffles back in May, and we've learned a lot more since then. We're

going to get into that. But first, what do we know about why Griffles is pausing operations? Griffles has been a subject of quite a number of Health Canada inspections this year. Health Health Canada inspections can be routine. I mean, any establishment that collects blood or blood products, whether it's Gryffles or, you know, nonprofits like Tameblood Services or hospitals even, they need to have inspections from Health Canada. They need to be licensed. But some of the inspections that Health Canada has done of Gryffles have found more problems

than usual. And over the course of the summer, Health Canada issued Griffles a number of letters saying we are finding problems and you're not. properly addressing them. And that finally culminated August 12th when Health Canada sent a letter that apparently suggested that Griffith could be shut down if this continues. And Griffith said voluntarily that it will pause its operations. August 13th, it announced that publicly. And then as of August 14th, they haven't been taking donors.

We don't know how long the pause is going to continue, but the company says that right now it's investing more time in staff training, going over records. trying to fix all the issues internally that Health Canada has been finding. So Griffiths put out a statement after this pause. What else did we learn from that statement? Like what did they say about this situation? Yeah, Griffles says it's going to use the pause to try to improve things. It said that this was due to unfounded attention on paid plasma collection in Canada, which is paying people, paying donors to give plasma.

has always been somewhat controversial in Canada. There's a long history of that of back and forth. Some provinces have banned the practice and don't allow it. But I think really this year, it's really been more of a safety issue. It's been about Health Canada inspectors finding problems and asking the company to address it. Okay, let's get into what Health Canada found. So over the last few months, there were flags from Health Canada. What did they say?

So there's quite a number of issues that have been raised. Both at inspections at different facilities around the country and also at Griffle's head office. Inspections for in Winnipeg have found that there were not always physicians on site or what are called physician substitutes, which are often nurses that act in the direction of physicians. So Health Canada found that sometimes there were no physicians or physician substitutes on site at all. And that would be important in case something would happen to somebody while they're donating, right? Yeah, exactly, to be able to respond to problems. or at least one instance when there was too many people, there were more than 100 people on site and only one physician substitute,

whereas the ratio is supposed to be like max of 100 per physician substitute. Health can inspectors have found that staff either weren't trained properly or weren't following standard operating procedures. So, for example, they found at least one case where, you know, when people are hooked up to a donation machine, there can be alerts that sound if something's going on. if something's not quite right. Sometimes those alarms can be relatively minor or just require a little bit of an adjustment.

Maybe they adjust the needle a little bit or maybe they reposition the arm, something like that, and that can fix the problem. But one of the health candidate inspections found that there was at least one case where the donations should have been terminated because of one of these alarms and it wasn't. And unfortunately, that was the case where somebody died. Yeah. Part of the reason that Griffith is under so much scrutiny is because two people died, after donating plasma in the last year.

What have you learned about that? Yeah, so since we last talked, we've learned some more details about one of the cases. So the two donors who died donated both in Winnipeg, although at different sites in Winnipeg. Griffles has two sites in Winnipeg. One of these deaths was a 22-year-old university student named Rodiette Alibade. She died last October. And her family and friends have made her identity known publicly. and since we last talked, they were able to get more information from government agencies,

and they share those documents with the globe and we've reported on them. So what we know publicly about her case was, you know, she was a 22-year-old woman. She went to give plasma for the first time last October, and over the course of her donation, plasma donations are much longer than blood donations. Typical blood donation can be under 15 minutes. They just take the blood out and you're done. With plasma donations, they take some of your blood out. The machine separates the red blood cells from the plasma and then puts the red blood cells along with some saline back into your body.

The blood kind of cycles in and out of you. It takes a longer process, usually at least an hour. In this young woman's case, according to Griffell's records that were shared with the family, there were alarms that sounded over about 45 minutes. At least one of those alarms, according to the operating manual for the machine, Healthcan inspectors said that should have terminated the procedure that shouldn't have kept going. And after about 45 minutes in the donation, she began exhibiting symptoms. The exact symptoms depend a little bit on the different documents.

Even within Griffle's documents, there's slightly different descriptions of what she was doing. And the autopsy report also had slightly different descriptions about what happened. So some say she just sort of lost consciousness and stopped moving. Others say she convuls with seizure-like symptoms at this time. Others say that she was alert but not able to really verbalize what she was feeling. So the family still has some questions about what happened there. But ultimately, she began to have cardiac problems. Her heart rhythm deteriorated.

Griffle staff tried emergency procedures. They tried CPR. They tried the fibrillator. It didn't work. Paramedics arrived and took her to hospital. And unfortunately, she was pronounced dead soon after arriving at hospital. And there was an autopsy carried out after her death by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Manitoba. That autopsy also found that she had an enlarged heart.

The official cause of death is a sudden cardiac death that was related to her enlarged heart. Something you mentioned there is that there were these alarms that went off, right? Do we know what the alert was that Health Canada said should have made them start? the procedure? Yeah, the alert was for high return pressure. That, you know, when I talked before about the, you know, the process of donating plasma, that fluids can go in and out of your body. And so in this case, the alert was that the, essentially the blood pressure in her vein

was too high and that according to the operating procedure based on the pressure that it was at that time, it should, procedure should have been terminated. It's maybe a good time here just to remind people that actually, we're describing here what's what's happened in this case, but by and large, plasma donation is very safe. So it is very rare. Health Canada has said it only has records of three deaths that might be related to plasma that happened since 2018. And we know in the United States where plasma collection is much more common, that deaths still there are relatively rare. So this is, you know, by and large, there's a very safe procedure. You know, it's really important to point that out too, for sure.

Yeah. Has Health Canada said whether her death was caused by donating plasma? Health Canada has said a few different things. Health Canada in April told media that it believed there was, quote, no linkage between her death and the plasma donation process. Health Canada has also said it's not its place to determine the cause of death. at the same time, an unnamed member of staff at Health Canada produced a document that was a medical summary of her death. It was later obtained by the family and also sent to members of parliament on the House of Commons Health Committee. That medical summary said that her death was temporally coincident with the donation, but not caused by it.

Health Canada has said that that report was largely based on information provided by Griffiths. and by the autopsy. And so when we say temporally coincident, that means what exactly? The writer is saying that those things happened at the same time, but that one was not caused by the other. Got it. Her family has not really been satisfied with that answer, I would say, because based on what other things they have learned from other reports and from Griffle's account, I mean, she was in the midst of donation when she began having heart problems. So that's why they're kind of calling for further investigation. Have you learned anything more about the other death?

Yeah, less about that one. So that was another donor who died in Winnipeg at the end of January of this year. We don't know quite as much about this death because the family hasn't been speaking publicly about it. So we don't know the person's identity or some of the details of them. What we've been able to glean from documents obtained from the government under access to information is that this donor donated one day in the afternoon and went home and began experiencing symptoms and was taken to hospital early the next morning and passed away that day. These government documents mentioned that the person had a heart attack.

They also suggest the person may have been taking a lot of medication, but beyond that, officially we don't know anymore. Okay. Okay, so we've learned about some of these concerns that Health Canada has raised. We also learned more about these two deaths. What other new information has come out about Griffles? Well, there's also been some discussion around what are called serious adverse reactions. So under the federal regulations that any kind of blood collector operates under, there's a requirement that essentially if anything bad happens either during a donation or within 72 hours after donation, the company needs to report that to Health Canada.

The most serious of these are called serious adverse reactions. That includes permanent disability. That could include life-threatening conditions or surgical interventions to prevent life-threatening conditions or serious injury. And it can also include death. So up until recently, Health Canada said, had told people publicly, including Globe and Mail, that it had records of Griffles and predecessor companies filing a total of

25 serious adverse reactions since 2018. And I mentioned predecessor companies just because when Griffles came in, there had already been some private plasma

collectors. There were two other companies that were doing it. And Griffles bought those up. And so they're all now kind of one network. So some of those reports were filed

before Griffles bought them. So just to be clear on that. So this summer, Griffiths said that after Health Canada disclosed those numbers, Griffiths went back and looked at the reports and reclassified them and now says that there were only, only six of those 25 incidents actually should have been classified as

serious reactions. When we asked Health Canada about this, Health Canada said that it is the role of the blood collector to classify these reports. And Health Canada said it's not taking any further action on that. And by comparison, Hema, Quebec reported that it had three such incidents, all in 2019 and 2020, and Canadian Blood Services has had no such incidents of serious injury or death. We'll be right back. Okay, Chris, I think it's worth reminding people about this company at the center of this and why they operate in Canada.

So what is Griffell's story? So Griffles is one of a handful of companies that create drugs out of human plows. So this is a really kind of unique part of the pharmaceutical industry. This is kind of the one part of the pharmaceutical, big, sort of big scale part of the pharmaceutical industry where there's medication that is like derived essentially from the human body. The sort of highest demand one, the one that's really growing, is a product called immunoglobulin, which is used to help treat different kinds of immune deficiencies that can be treated

from plasma-derived drugs. Right. Okay. So plasma is a very important thing here in Canada. right? And I understand that Gryffles is like a company that it operates in over 100 countries and they kind of do this idea of like end-to-end supply for plasma medication. Is that, is that right? Yeah. So Gryphals is based in Spain. They're headquartered in Spain. They're publicly traded there. And they are one of the global giants in this area. They're a little bit different from some of the other

from some of their competitors in that they really just do this. They do sort of end-to-end collecting plasma and the manufacturing the drugs and selling those drugs all over the world. So traditionally, like most similar companies, that collection has been in the United States. The United States is the main country where paying people for their plasma is normal. Most of the plasma-derived drugs used globally come from plasma that came from donors in the United States. And there's a handful of other countries where this is a lot of too, like Germany. Griffles itself has been talking in its sort of financial statements telling investors sort of Its goal right now is really focusing on geographies.

So it's been talking about how instead of the U.S., all the U.S. products being exported globally, making the U.S. more self-sufficient, making the U.S. kind of more of its own thing, and then setting up other areas, other kind of regions around the world where they also have that self-sufficiency. They've been working on a big project since 2020 in Egypt, where this public-private partnership with the Egyptian government, where they're collecting a lot more plasma from Egyptians and, and manufacturing it there. And a lot of those products actually are destined for Europeans. So they sort of ship it north. And they also talk about Canada being a big place where this happened. So Griffles has been selling these drugs in Canada for quite some time, at least a couple decades.

But what kind of changed was that they, starting in 2022, when they sort of signed this agreement with Canadian Blood Services, was the idea that they would sort of create a self-sufficient operation in Canada where the plasma. was, where they weren't just selling products here, but the plasma was being collected and manufactured here for Canadians. Why does it matter that we have a plasma supply at all in Canada? Like, what is like the benefit for Canada to have like this self-sufficient supply? Yeah, there's, there's different arguments for it.

So, I mean, you know, a big concern has been the possibility that there could be shortages. By the same token, the CEO of Canadian Blood Services has also raised the possibility that you also don't want to be totally self-sufficient. You don't want to have a totally closed ecosystem because theoretically that could also create its own dangers. When he was asked about this at a Senate committee hearing a few years ago, he said that one of the risks of having a completely closed ecosystem would be, you know, he cited the case of the UK in the 1990s when they had the mad cow scare. When that came up, when you have a big issue with a transmittable disease, that means you can't use any of your supply.

Canadian Blood Services has been talking about trying to find a balance there. So their goal has been about, they hope that about 50% of the plasma-derived drugs to come from plasma donated by Canadian donors. Okay, that's really interesting. If plasma is so important, is there enough plasma supply in Canada with the Griffle sites being closed right now? So Canadian Blood Services has said earlier this year that Griffles has been, been collecting about 17% of Canada's needs in Canada. So certainly there will be less plasma collected in Canada while Griffles is shut down.

But Canadian blood services has also said that, I mean, it does have multiple suppliers of these drugs. Canadian blood services has said it doesn't, at least for now, have any concerns about supply of these drugs and that, you know, patients shouldn't worry. Obviously, we'll see how long the shutdown lasts. and whether anything ends up changing in the future. Okay. So, of course, you talked about this already, but there are public donations as well as these private donations. Given that Griffiths is at least pausing collections for now,

does that reopen the debate on whether Canada should have paid plasma donations at all? Yeah, so if any listeners, still want to give plasma or blood, I mean, Canadian blood services remains open so they can take plasma donations. And if you live in Quebec, you can go to Hema, Quebec to donate. And those are all voluntary donations. Yeah, the subject of whether or not to pay donors has always been a big topic, you know, opponents of paid plasma. You know, go back to the Tainted Blood scandal and say that there can be concerns if you're financially incentivizing people to donate. Generally, the industry has said that, you know, since the 80s screening has become a lot better and manufacturing has become a lot better.

So the concern about transmitting diseases through these products is like very minimal now, they say. As well, the industry tends to say that the only way you can convince enough people to donate plasma, particularly because the fact that this is, again, a longer procedure, it's, you know, at least an hour that somebody's going to be there. The only way that you can really get enough supply of plasma is paying people. That's kind of their argument. So we'll see, you know, Canon in the last few years has been experimenting with having both. And there are countries, many countries like Germany, where both exist simultaneously. And so, yeah, we'll sort of see where that debate evolves.

You mentioned the tainted blood scandal. Can you just remind us of what that was all about? Yeah, the tainted blood scandal sort of arose in the 1980s where there were a number of patients who contracted HIV and hepatitis from blood donations, from blood transfusions or transfusions of blood products. really horrible tragedy. That led ultimately to the Crever Commission, as it's called, named after Judge Crever, who headed the commission in the 1990s that looked at essentially how to prevent that from ever happening again. In that report, they did talk about that one of the possible reasons why there was more contaminated blood, one of the possible of many causes could have been paying people incentivizing donors to pay who maybe shouldn't have been donating.

I didn't know that. That's kind of why it's always been a fraught topic in Canada. Yeah. Okay. I didn't know that there was actually a report that pointed that out. That's really interesting. Is there a difference between paid donations versus public donations from a health and safety perspective? Canadian blood services has always said no, but there is not.

They have always said that research shows that products made from paid donors versus unpaid donors are equally as safe. Again, because of advances that have been made over the years in screening donors. So, for example, when you give. blood, they'll take some tiny vials and they'll ship them off to a lab and they'll test them for HIV and hepatitis and other transmissible diseases. And that, you know, the donation that you made will essentially sit in storage until those tests come back and they know that it's safe. So that's one thing. And then in the manufacturing process for these drugs made from plasma, there's also been advances there to hopefully kill any diseases that are present in it.

So, of course, one way to ensure Canada has enough supplies to collect more plasma. In a lot of griffles pausing their operations, what have you heard from experts about how they're thinking about regulating supply? Canada has always been one of the highest per capita users of this category of drugs. For like 20 years at least, that's been the case. And so there have been initiatives to try to collect more plasma. essentially, like, you know, if you think about it from supply and demand, right? So there's been lots of initiatives from Canadian blood services to build more centers to collect more plasma and also have this deal with griffles to collect more plasma.

That's increasing the supply. But then there's also a lot of debate within the medical community about how to control demand. Because demand for these drugs just kind of keeps escalating. It's, you know, double what it was 15 years ago. Canadian blood services projects demand could go up 50% in the next five years. So, you know, one of the things you could try to do is just can we use less of it? This is an active conversation among a lot of medical professionals right now. There's an interesting initiative, actually, Saskatchewan about this recently,

where Saskatchewan has told me about, you know, five years ago, they were one of the highest per capita users among provinces. They were above the provincial average, and they said, okay, we got to, what can we do to try to better manage this? Because with these kind of drugs, there's, you know, there's always the cost. They are expensive, tens of thousands of dollars per patient per year, just like many other drugs. But then there's also, we've talked about the fact that it comes from the human body. And there's also those sensitivities.

Are there special responsibilities we have with these drugs that over and above other kinds of drugs? So Saskatchewan took under what it called a stewardship program to try to better track the use of immunoglobulin and make sure it was being prescribed really just for the cases where it really had to be. It wasn't being overused in that the supply was being managed properly. And they found within five years

that they cut their use of it by a third, by 34%. And they're now one of the lower provinces on it. So that's really an example I think other provinces are looking at. That's really interesting with Saskatchewan is doing something that perhaps other provinces

can look at as well. Yeah. Chris, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. That was Chris Hane. the Globe's Business of Health Reporter. That's all for today.

I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy McLaughlin, and Mahal Stein. Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor.

Thanks so much for listening.