Grifols operates about 400 blood plasma donor sites worldwide, including a donation centre in Whitby, Ont., and collects 16 million paid donations a year.Shay Conroy/The Globe and Mail
It’s time for Grifols, the private plasma collector, to get its act together or get out of Canada.
And it’s well past time for the regulator, Health Canada, to do its job and enforce safety rules more seriously.
Globe and Mail reporter Chris Hannay has, for months, been diligently reporting the grievous failings at some of Grifols’ 17 plasma collection sites.
Rodiyat Alabede, a 22-year-old student, died following a visit to a Winnipeg site where she experienced cardiac problems while donating plasma in October, 2025. A second person died after visiting another Grifols site in Winnipeg in January, but details have not been released.
Rodiyat Alabede, a 22-year-old university student, began experiencing cardiac problems during a donation at a Grifols site on Taylor Avenue in Winnipeg and later died.Courtesy of family
Last week, Health Canada finally suspended the licence of the first Winnipeg site after determining it had failed to take corrective measures after the death.
The problems include failing to accurately assess donor suitability and not thoroughly investigating some errors.
But the regulator acted only after Grifols itself suspended all of its operations in Canada on Aug. 14 to start retraining staff.
Explainer: What we know so far about Grifols’s plasma pause and Health Canada’s safety concerns
Grifols is one of the world’s biggest suppliers of plasma-derived medications, a booming market. It operates about 400 donor sites in North America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, collecting 16 million paid donations a year.
But its Canadian operations are a mess.
At Grifols’s Regina site, inspectors found donors with multiple punctures and bruises on their arms (telltale signs of IV drug use) were allowed to donate.
There are multiple reports of donors inappropriately being made eligible to sell their plasma, including people with a family history of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or after disclosing they had a history of sexual contact with a person with HIV-AIDS.
Even Grifols’s Canadian head office failed an inspection for its bad record-keeping.
Yet, Health Canada has done little but issue strongly worded memos. Surely, for repeated safety violations, fines are in order, and so are licence restrictions.
And what of the future?
One can’t overstate how important plasma-derived medications – and hence plasma donations – are for treating patients with immunodeficiencies.
Canadian Blood Services (CBS), founded in 1998, has done a remarkable job of rebuilding the blood system after the tainted blood scandal. There has not been a single recipient of blood or plasma infected with HIV, hepatitis C or hepatitis in nearly 30 years.
Yet the spectre of tainted blood, which left 2,500 hemophiliacs and transfusion recipients infected with HIV and another 25,000 with hepatitis C infections, still looms large.
From 2017: Have we forgotten the lessons of the tainted blood scandal?
In his landmark report on the tainted blood scandal, Justice Horace Krever said, going forward, safety must be paramount. He recommended there be no paid donations, except in special circumstances, and that Canada must aim for self-sufficiency in the production of blood products.
CBS (like most of its counterparts around the world) has been incapable of meeting demands for plasma with voluntary donations, and we are a far cry from self-sufficiency.
Hence the partnership with Grifols, which pays donors $50-100 per donation (incentivizing frequency of donation), and it has built a blood fractionation plant near Montreal.
The alternative is for CBS to expand its own network of plasma collection sites. But the provinces and territories have been unwilling to fund that, and even more reluctant to allow payment for donations.
What we have instead is an arms-length, hold-your-nose arrangement with Big Pharma.
Politically and practically, it’s probably a best-case scenario.
Critics hate Grifols because it’s a for-profit company that pays for blood. But the reality is that, while about 100 countries worldwide ban paid plasma donations, all of them buy blood products made with paid blood, mostly from the U.S., which supplies two-thirds of the world market for plasma.
Ideally, the gift of life should be freely given. But, while the cookies-and-juice model functions well enough for blood donation, it doesn’t cut it for plasma.
The collection of plasma has grown markedly since Grifols began operating. That’s good – but it has to be done safely, not in a slapdash manner.
Canadian Blood Services has repeatedly defended Grifols, saying the safety of medicines has never been compromised. CBS has to stop worrying that bad publicity will dissuade donors and focus on improving the safety of the donation process.
In short, CBS has to be more demanding of its partner, not be an apologist. Plasma is important, but the integrity of the system even more so.
But, most of all, the regulator, Health Canada, needs to grow a spine.
The tainted blood scandal occurred because Canadian Red Cross, which operated the blood system, came to see itself as infallible, its mission to produce blood products more important than the safety of donors and recipients. Health Canada never called them to order.
We can’t afford to repeat that calamity.
Editor’s note: The caption accompanying the second photo in this article has been updated to correct the details of Rodiyat Alabede’s death.