Unvaccinated, Terminally-Ill Alberta Woman Denied Transplant Despite Proof Of COVID Natural Immunity
- Unvaccinated Terminally Ill Alberta Woman Denied Transplant Despite Proof of COVID Natural Immunity
by A terminally ill Alberta woman who was removed from an organ transplant list because she wasn’t vaccinated for COVID-19 continued to be denied access to the medical procedure even after obtaining an independent medical report showing that she has natural immunity, says the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF).
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Sheila Annette Lewis has been challenging the constitutionality of the vaccine requirement put in place by Alberta Health Services (AHS) for transplant candidates.
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On March 28, Lewis provided her doctors in the Alberta transplant program with a privately-funded medical report, which established that she has strong natural immunity to COVID-19 and had overcome previous COVID-19 infections, the JCCF said in a press release on April 18.
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The report, provided by the Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation on March 24, said Lewis’s blood sample “clearly supports the presence of SARS-CoV-2 immunoreactivity.” It also noted that she was likely infected with the disease around mid-September 2021 and was reinfected again more recently, and thus has “extremely high levels of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2.”
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Lewis asked her physicians to test her blood for COVID-19 antibodies nearly a year ago to see if she was naturally immune, and they refused to do so, according to JCCF.
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Response
After Lewis provided her Kinexus report, one of her transplant physicians informed her on April 3 that despite the test results, “nothing had changed in regards to healthcare policies pertaining to COVID-19 vaccination requirements” and that she would still need to be vaccinated before the hospital would give her an organ transplant, the JCCF said in its press release.
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