Hacker News Reader

Comment by glofish | Hacker News Reader

For some reason, possibly because it is overly dramatic, ridiculous and has no real data sources the article immediately felt made up, aka fake news.

Then I saw this in the Wikipedia about one of the alleged sources labeled as "interviews by MintPress":

> By 2016, MintPress News had begun reprinting copy from RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik.

View on HN

On that note, corn appears to be a ~$10B export and blood a ~$1B export making the article completely wrong, unless these sources or my interpretation completely incorrect.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenroberts/2019/01/14/corn-is-o...

[2] http://www.worldstopexports.com/top-blood-exporters-by-count...

It's not clear where the numbers on that site come from, but the MintPress story has this actual source:

https://oec.world/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/export/usa/all/...

> Human or Animal Blood; HS92 ID: 3002; Export Value: $28.6B; Export: RCA2.30; Percent: 2.3%

For all of the HS data used throughout the site (1995 - 2017) we use the BACI International Trade Database2. The original data comes from the United Nations Statistical Division (COMTRADE), but is cleaned by the BACI team using their own methodology of harmonization. (https://oec.world/en/resources/data)

According to worldbank.org, HS92 3002 includes human and animal vaccines:

> Antisera and other blood fractions

> Vaccines for human medicine

> Vaccines against foot-and-mouth disease

> Other vaccines for veterinary medicine (excl. f

> Human and animal blood; microbial cultures; tox

http://wits.worldbank.org/data/public/CountryProfile-Product...

According to this; blood is a $21b export:

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-world-s-top-exporter...

I love it when "fake news" is flagged as such to cover up .... reality. Wonder if the people who thought up this meme actually thought of that.

The author of the oec.world site used as the source for the original article already updated the site to be more clear and posted in this thread because this was, in fact, fake news. The $21B number includes human and animal vaccines, which is the overwhelming majority.

Citations needed: most of it is actually blood plasma as far as I can tell[1] [2]. Just because you don't like the messenger doesn't mean the message is false.

[1] https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/wtf-why-does-the-us-expo...

[2] https://www.newsweek.com/two-percent-us-export-income-blood-...

The most important attribute of fake news is the appeal to emotion and outrage, and using that to paint a manipulative picture - that's is the primary reason for this being a fake news. Not even wether or not blood is the biggest export.

As it turns out the "blood category" was a mislabel, it included vaccines as well - thus this fake news lost even that shred of credibility.

But even if this tidbit were true the main original article is still nothing more than propaganda.

Spouting "fake news" for shit you disagree with is just beyond lame.

It's fine to argue that "MintPress News" is not a reputable source, but that MintPress News article is loaded with verifiable sources that you can easily look up yourself:

https://oec.world/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/export/usa/all/...

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/plasma-...

https://oec.world/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/export/usa/show...

But instead of arguing about the interpretation of the data, or pointing to other data sources, you choose to parrot "fake news" because that's apparently what passes for logical discourse in this day and age.

From your oec.world source, "Human or Animal Blood is also known as vaccines, toxins.

Human or Animal Blood is a 4 digit HS92 product."

What does that even mean? I think they're looping in vaccines and more in their human or animal blood category.

https://oec.world/en/profile/hs92/3002/

Edit: among other things, they seem to be including all of the following as "human and animal blood", among others:

* 300220 Vaccines; for human medicine

* 300230 Vaccines; for veterinary medicine

* 300290 Toxins, cultures of micro-organisms (excluding yeasts) and similar products

https://www.foreign-trade.com/reference/hscode.htm?code=3002

I wonder if that is a historical or legal artifact.

Medicine wasn't always so refined to the point that the vaccines were pure pathogen in chemical carrier and didn't have some human specimen material trace or otherwise when isolating. Both for transport safety concerns and exemptions (no arresting the doctor for carrying vaccines even if he technically is guilty of transporting importing dissected human remains not fuffiling legal burial requirements when it takes a microscope to detect the human cells) would make sense.

They offer data for direct download in finer resolution[0], here are the relevant figures from HS6 rev. 2007 (2008 - 2017) - Product Trade by Year and Country (6 digit depth):

    $ awk 'NR == 1 || ($1 == 2017 && $2 == "usa" && $3 ~ /3002../)' < year_origin_hs07_6.tsv
    year    origin  hs07    export_val      import_val      export_rca      import_rca
    2017    usa     300210  396430658.00    59890506.00     2.838   0.258
    2017    usa     300220  1581667842.36   5492721193.76   0.829   1.734
    2017    usa     300230  735316335.89    15520567.21     2.725   0.035
    2017    usa     300290  24682749156.47  20875470805.73  2.452   1.249

So, $396M, assuming that 300210 is the sum of all the ones with "blood" in the descriptions from your HS code reference.

"Human or animal blood" seems like an odd choice of abbreviation for "Human blood; animal blood for therapeutic, prophylactic or diagnostic uses; antisera, other blood fractions, immunological products, modified or obtained by biotechnological processes; vaccines, toxins, cultures of micro-organisms (excluding yeasts) etc"[1], but hey.

(Though America still has a problem with exploiting poor people for blood products, even if it's not a billion dollar industry.)

[0] https://oec.world/en/resources/data/

[1] https://www.foreign-trade.com/reference/hscode.htm?cat=5

Hello, I am the lead developer on the OEC. I was brought here by an open issue someone made referencing this article. @articfox you are 100% correct in that the data is factual (or as reported by source) but the text is missing some context. The HS product 3002 does include vaccines and this was missing from the label.

One should NOT accept any extreme view that sounds outrageous without data sources. The whole point of fake news is to appeal to emotion.

If it is that easy to make a point as you claim, if all it takes is a link, then the journalist should put that source into their piece. It should not be the readers that are sent on a wild chase.

Do your links really prove the point? Is the category labeled as "Human or Animal Blood" the same thing as donated plasma supposedly extracted from poor people?

This is the reaction of much of HN to virtually every article that isn't their wheelhouse. Yet a one second search confirms the situation regarding blood product exports...

Look at the mental gymnastics, misdirections and pearl-clutching a few are engaged in, and where there is any possible variance, in their opinion, surely it must be in favor of their argument. It is simply bizarre.

A few days ago there was a post about the oceans warming and what that meant to sea life (a report from a massive scientific org). The top post -- what HN's collective genius felt was the take-away -- was an absolutely ignorant bit of "why this is all wrong according to me, some random guy who read something on reddit". It is absolutely the Stupidification of Western society, and is idiocracy writ large.

Except it does not.

Human or Animal blood is not donated plasma. As a matter of fact the sources that are cited state that the biggest exporter is Ireland:

> Ireland: US$3.2 billion (37.8% of total blood exports)

Are you arguing that Ireland has more blood plasma donations then the US?

"Human or Animal blood is not donated plasma."

Plasma is a sub-category of blood. None of this discussion has been about just plasma.

"Are you arguing that Ireland has more blood plasma donations then the US?"

a) I'm not "arguing" anything, b) Ireland...what? What are you even talking about now c) even if this was remotely a part of this discussion, exports and domestic production are two dramatically different numbers. Some countries produce for export, some export barely any. Trying to misrepresent one for the other is not a reasonable tactic.

The entire discussion is about paying people for their blood and the main argument backing up the exploitation was the size of the exports.

All I am showing is that a country can export lots of blood even when they don't allow paid "donations" (like Ireland) - thus demonstrating that the magnitude of the blood exports has nothing to do with the paid or unpaid nature of donations.

Thus the whole article is little more than fear-mongering and fake news.

That being said, I would not be surprised to learn that there are people that get exploited. I would not be surprised to learn that there may substantial problems and we should work on solving those. But exaggerating and fake news does not help anybody.

I think what glofish and arcticfox are arguing is that these export numbers include things like animal blood and vaccines that have nothing to do with "the blood of poor Americans", which is the article's outrageous claim.

Ireland is relevant because it has comparably sized exports to the U.S. in this category but vastly fewer people, indicating that most of what's included in this category isn't obtained from humans.

Are you kidding? That source is including human and animal vaccines in the category, like I included in my other comment. That is a massively larger industry. I am going to contact the oec.world author about it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com