Organ Transplant Centers Need Patients To Get Their Covid Vaccine Shots

Many organ transplant health care centers have now made it mandatory for every patient going through a transplant, to be fully vaccinated or else they would be bumped down to a waiting list.

A kidney transplant candidate from Colorado was bumped to an inactive status since he did not receive his covid-19 vaccine shots and he has now been considered as a public example of an argument that is seen rolling down in more than 250 organ transplant centers.

Organ Transplant Centers Need Patients To Get Their Covid Vaccine Shots

 With the growing numbers of transplant programs across the nation, has been selected to either bar patients who do not agree to take any widely available vaccine dose from the receiving transplants, or are given lower priority on crowded organ waiting lists.

No such restrictions for other transplant programs are applied, as of now.

Not just themselves the transplant patients who do not agree to get their vaccination doses are being put at a higher risk for serious infection but the thrown away rare organs that can benefit other people. The argument is constantly demanding that smokers must mandatorily quit smoking cigarettes for at least, six months before doing their lung transplants. Addicts are required to refrain from alcohol or drugs before they receive their new livers.

This is an active debate, said Dr. Deepali Kumar from the University of Toronto, who is an expert in transplant infectious diseases. She adds that in many programs, this is in flux.  The lady who refused to get her vaccine shots due to religious beliefs, Leilani Lutali, was 56 years old and she received a letter from the UCHealth on September 28th, in Denver, which stated that if she did not get her vaccination doses within the next 30 days, she would lose her spot on the transplant waiting list. In her case, both, herself and her living donor, who was Jaimee Fougner who is 45 from Colorado itself, refused to get their vaccine doses and her donor had the same reason o justify her refusal towards getting the vaccination shots.

Italy also mentioned how she has too many questions that remain unanswered at this very moment. She said she feels like she is being trapped into enabling to take a moment and decide in peace on whether she has to take the shot or whether she wants this transplant, in the first place. Italy stated that she offered to be tested for COvid-19 infection before the surgery and also offered to sign a waiver, discharging the hospital from any legal risk since she refused the vaccine shots. She asked that at what point does one no longer become a partner in their care, regardless of one’s concerns?

Italy now only hopes to take her transplant issues to Texas, where many health care centers that include Houston Methodist and Baylor University Medical Center, which isn’t in Dallas, do not ask for Covid-19 vaccine certificates to accept active candidates for the waiting list which is nationwide.

There are few differences in policies, in Denver and Dallas, and probably elsewhere too, which is the underscore tense national divide. Dr. Krista Lentine, who is known to be a nephrologist at the Saint Louis University, School of Medicine, says that fewer than 7% of transplant programs around the nations have reported inactive patients who were not fully vaccinated or partially vaccinated against the Coronavirus, as of late April. But, she adds further, that was known to be fluctuating as all coronavirus-related practices were seen rapidly changing.

To sum it up, to have long-term survival of their patients, every organ transplant center will eventually mandate covid-19 vaccine doses.