The Brigham and Women’s Hospital located in Boston said that if the transplant patients have not had the vaccine, they will not get the organs they need.
A statement was released by the hospital regarding Ferguson.
Many transplant programs in the U. S. say that the COVID vaccine is just one of several vaccines that are required for people needing transplants in the Brigham hospital system so that they have the best chance for a successful surgery and also the survival of the patient after transplantation.
Ferguson’s father, David Ferguson, told the reporters that his son does not believe in getting the vaccine.
“It is against his basic principles, and he does not believe in getting vaccinated,” David Ferguson told reporters. “They are strictly enforcing this policy and due to the fact that he refuses to get vaccinated, they removed him off the list for a heart transplant.”
Dr. Arthur Caplan is the head of medical ethics at New York University Grossman School of Medicine, and he said it this way.
“The cold can kill you; the flu can kill you, COVID can kill you,” Caplan said. “The organs are limited; we are not going to give them to a person who has less chance of living when people who are vaccinated have a stronger chance of surviving after surgery.”
Why are hospitals now requiring the donors to get vaccinated also if organs are scarce?
Mike Ganim, 52, was vaccinated and was days away from a kidney transplant that would save his life but his donor had not been vaccinated and all of a sudden that was a problem.
“Living donation is a life-saving treatment for organ transplantation, but it has risks to the donor. For the living donor, protecting against COVID close to the time of a surgical operation is very important,” said in a statement from Ganim’s hospital.
This is an unusual statement from a hospital considering we have known for a while that the vaccine does not keep people from transmitting or catching the virus. What happened to “My organs, my choice”? We should be allowed to donate an organ to someone we love.
A Colorado healthcare system recently said that donors and donor recipients both are required to be vaccinated. With stage 5 renal failure, Leilani Lutali is on the list for a new kidney to save her life. She found a donor. They are both unvaccinated. The rules changed and suddenly Lutali changed too inactive on the list.