Heart like a MAGA wheel
By 
A 31-year-old father of two small children, with a third on the way, was at the head of the line for a life-saving heart transplant, but has been deemed ineligible because he won’t get the COVID vaccine:
“It’s kind of against his basic principles — he doesn’t believe in it,” David Ferguson says. “It’s a policy they are enforcing and so, because he won’t get the shot, they took him off the list (for) a heart transplant.”
Brigham and Women’s released a statement saying, “Like many other transplant programs in the United States — the COVID-19 vaccine is one of several vaccines and lifestyle behaviors required for transplant candidates in the Mass General Brigham system in order to create both the best chance for a successful operation and also the patient’s survival after transplantation.”
Wow, this is just like Buck v. Bell or — wait a moment, I understand we have RFK Jr. on the line — Dr. Mengele’s experiments!
Dr. Arthur Caplan, the head of medical ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, explains that being vaccinated is necessary for this type of procedure.
“Post any transplant, kidney, heart whatever, your immune system is shut off,” Caplan said. “The flu could kill you, a cold could kill you, COVID could kill you. The organs are scarce, we are not going to distribute them to someone who has a poor chance of living when others who are vaccinated have a better chance post-surgery of surviving.” . .
“We are aggressively pursuing all options, but we are running out of time,” David Ferguson said.
And while the family says DJ has received great care from doctors and nurses at Brigham and Women’s, they just don’t agree with the heart transplant COVID vaccination policy.
“I think my boy is fighting pretty damn courageously and he has integrity and principles he really believes in and that makes me respect him all the more,” David Ferguson said.
Which is why the family is sticking by his side and hoping for the best. “It’s his body. It’s his choice,” Ferguson added.
All the LGM commenters who start burbling about “eugenics” any time somebody suggests that, for example, being vaccinated against COVID should be a requirement for admission to our overflowing ICUs — and to be clear I’m fine with vaccinating such people when they show up for admission; after all we are not murderers, despite what this undertaker says — are welcome to explain why this case right here is a totally different thing.
. . . Come and see:
Last week (the 17th) I ran out of platelets — a consequence of my treatment — and started bleeding from the eyes, mouth, skin — pretty much everywhere, internal and external. It was platelet transfusion or die PDQ. Except … Montana was out of platelets. Zero in the blood banks, zero in the queue. It seems that the current COVID surge was sucking up platelets for various reasons, pretty much all unvaccinated.
We were about to leave for an ER in Utah when the hospital called to tell us that my oncologist, by means best not questioned, had claimed a unit from Bozeman which was on the way by means I don’t like to consider given Montana winter roads. Anyway, the unit kept me going until they could dump some more into me in Utah, else I would have become one of those “COVID-related but not from CVID” mortalities.
Just in case anyone needs a verifiable example.
Longtime LGM commenter D. C. Sessions