The teen’s adoptive parents are arguing the hospital’s requirement violates their religious beliefs, (fetal cells that came from elective abortions in the 1970s and 1980s to test the vaccines) although a medical expert said the transplant puts her at greater risk of death from infectious disease.
Jenna Campau of Fennville adopted the 17-year-old identified in court documents as A.C. from Ukraine in 2021, according to the complaint Campau filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan. The teenager has one kidney, chronic kidney disease and other medical issues and receives dialysis at DeVos Children’s Hospital in Grand Rapids.
DeVos hospital require vaccines for COVID-19, influenza and human papillomavirus. To receive transplants.
“From the point of view of health care justice, a surgeon, physician, would want kidneys to go to individuals who have good prospects for seven- to 10-year survival,” Fleck said. “A patient who is refusing the COVID vaccine would have a substantially reduced likelihood of surviving seven to 10 years, especially if we see COVID as something that’s not going to end in the next week or two, or month or two. It looks like it’s going to be with us for a long time.”
Leonard Fleck is a bioethicist at Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine.
The median wait for a kidney in the U.S.A. is 3.6 years.
There are 101,000 people waiting for a kidney. Only 17,107 kidney transplants were done last year.
