There's obviously a bit of confusion here...In the United States...

There's obviously a bit of confusion here...

In the United States no-one actually gets paid for donating blood. Although it's not technically illegal to pay blood donors, the FDA requires that blood from paid donors is labelled as such, and, in practice, hospitals decline to use it. In extremis, that may change, but at this point it doesn't seem likely; as the article pointed out, once the American Red Cross's regular donors understood the urgency, they started once again to donate.

CSL's centres don't actually collect whole blood, but rather plasma. Essentially they take out whole blood, separate the plasma, and put the blood cells and other components back into the donor. There's no prohibition on paying plasma donors, since the plasma never gets transfused into another person, but is instead broken down into its many component proteins, which CSL uses to manufacture its pharmaceutical products.

Since the United States is the only country to operate commercial plasma collections centres, there's no empirical data to help in assessing the likely effect of this pandemic on donors' willingness to continue to attend and donate.

My opinion, for what it's worth, is that if donations fall off, CSL can always just jack up the price that it's willing to pay; that should work.