This is my time to shine - I know the cause of this mistake. Like the article mentions, international trade is specified using the HS (Harmonized System) encoding mechanism.<p>Now, product groups for which data is most frequently and easily available is the 4-digit level, which is quite broad. If you look at the code 3002 in the HS classification system (of which there are many versions but we'll ignore that for now), you'll find a category, succinctly named:<p>> "Human blood; animal blood prepared for therapeutic, prophylactic or diagnostic uses; antisera, other blood fractions and immunological products, whether or not modified or obtained by means of biotechnological processes; vaccines, toxins, cultures of micro-organisms (excluding yeasts) and similar products; cell cultures, whether or not modified:"<p><a href="https://hts.usitc.gov/search?query=3002" rel="nofollow">https://hts.usitc.gov/search?query=3002</a><p>People new to trade data, especially programmers, with some hubris, tend to think this is way too long a category name to fit in a title or dropbox, so they chop it at the semicolon and call it good, resulting in "Human Blood" or similar. Better data sources tend to shorten these based on the real world percentage of the subcategories, e.g. see here "Serums and vaccines":<p><a href="https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore/treemap?exporter=country-840&view=markets&startYear=2012&product=product-HS92-1012" rel="nofollow">https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore/treemap?exporter=count...</a><p>If you search for 3002 (Serums and Vaccines) in the US's exports in 2023 you'll see the figure 1.58%:<p><a href="https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore/treemap?exporter=country-840&startYear=2012" rel="nofollow">https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore/treemap?exporter=count...</a><p>Which seems to me to be how they arrived at that incorrect number - some other website showing comtrade / us trade data with bad category names.<p>Lesson here: classification systems are hard.