AIDS, Blood Transfusion, and Jehovah’s Witnesses

“Within the past year or so, the risk of AIDS in blood and blood products has raised fears of ‘bloodbank roulette’ to a new high. New blood tests (with their inevitable percentage of false negatives) to determine AIDS carriers provide no guarantee that the agent which transmits AIDS will not seep into our nation’s blood pool. On the other hand, because of their concomitant inevitable rate of false positives, these tests expose blood donors to the risk of being mistakenly identified as AIDS carriers. This kind of labeling may have profound sociologic, occupational and educational implications for the unfortunate blood donor. In this computer age, efforts to insure confidentiality are woefully inadequate . . . They [doctors working with AIDS] know the link between the nation’s blood supply and AIDS . . . Are they unwilling to admit that scientific evidence is now supporting the religious opposition of Jehovah’s witnesses (the objects of deep hatred by the practitioners of modern medicine) to blood transfusions?”​—The People’s Doctor, A medical newsletter for consumers, volume 9, No. 5, by Dr. Robert S. Mendelsohn.