A Boston hospital has refused one of its 31-year-old patients a heart transplant on the grounds that he is not vaccinated against Covid-19 and that the transplant would therefore be doomed to failure.
A spokeswoman for Brigham and Women’s Hospital confirmed in a statement that the coronavirus vaccine is “required” for all organ transplant candidates.
“Pushed to its last entrenchments”
It was David Ferguson, the patient’s father, who testified in the American media, on CNN and ABC, of his son’s fight against “death”, affirming that he was “pushed to his last entrenchments”.
The 30-year-old, who is to undergo a heart transplant in this Boston hospital, refuses to be vaccinated against the coronavirus: “It fundamentally goes against his principles, he does not believe in it”, justified Mr. Ferguson . And as the Brigham and Women’s Hospital “applies this policy (…) they have removed him from the list of heart transplant recipients”, he despairs.
The Boston hospital explains that its “care system requires several vaccines recommended by health authorities, including the vaccine against Covid-19”.
Vaccination coupled with a “life discipline create for the candidate for a transplant the best conditions for a successful operation and optimize the patient’s survival after the transplant, in particular because the immune system is drastically weakened”.
In fact, for Dr. Arthur Caplan, of New York University, quoted by CBS, “during any transplant, the immune system is shut down. The Covid can then kill ”.
And so, in the absence of vaccination, “patients come off the waiting list” for transplants, the Boston hospital further justified, where David Ferguson’s son is still being treated.
The latter says he respects his son’s “choice” and plans to transfer him to another establishment, but the “time is running out” for this already very weakened patient.
The United States, where only 62% of the population is fully vaccinated against Covid-19 due to very marked political divisions on the issue, has so far recorded nearly 60 million contaminations and 872,000 deaths.