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A growing number of medical facilities across the country are directing coveted organ donations to patients who have been vaccinated against COVID-19, pushing unvaccinated people down or even off transplant waiting lists.
The idea behind this decision is simple: with transmission of the pandemic coronavirus still high in the United States, unvaccinated transplant candidates face an extremely high risk of COVID-19, which poses a danger to them and puts them in danger. jeopardize the usefulness of the few, saving people. organs.
Receiving a transplanted organ requires patients to take immunosuppressive drugs that will prevent their bodies from rejecting the new organ as foreign. But this immune suppression also makes recipients very likely to be infected with the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, and to develop severe COVID-19. Some experts estimate that the risk of death for COVID-19 transplant recipients can be as high as 20-30%.
The chances of survival have long been taken into account in the prioritization of people who will receive organs. And demanding vaccinations against devastating infectious diseases is also the norm. Organ recipients usually already need to be vaccinated against hepatitis A, hepatitis B, influenza and tetanus, among other illnesses.
Uproar
Still, COVID-19 vaccines, which were recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration, are fresh on the lists. On August 13, the American Society of Transplantation and the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation (ISHLT) issued a joint statement recommending that “all recipients of a solid organ transplant be vaccinated against SARS-CoV- 2 “, as well as” all eligible households and close contacts “of these recipients. More and more transplant programs are adopting this policy, but not yet all.
The reality of unvaccinated patients being kicked from certain organ waiting lists recently made headlines with the story of an unvaccinated Colorado woman named Leilani Lutali. UCHealth in Denver refused Lutali’s kidney transplant because she was not vaccinated and informed her in a letter that she would be listed as “inactivated” on a waiting list for a kidney transplant if she did. did not receive a first dose of vaccine within 30 days. Lutali, who told The Associated Press that she is a born again Christian with no denomination, says she opposes vaccines on religious grounds. With the nationwide patchwork of vaccine requirements for transplant patients, Lutali is now seeking a transplant in another state, such as Texas or Florida, at facilities that do not require COVID-19 vaccinations.
“I feel like I’m being pressured into not being able to wait and see and have to take the picture if I want this life-saving transplant,” Lutali told Kaiser Health News.
The outlet noted that there are nearly 107,000 people waiting for organs in the United States – more than 90,000 of them, like Lutali, are waiting for a kidney. Dozens of people in need of various organs are dying every day while waiting, KHN reported.
“We mandate the hepatitis and influenza vaccines, and nobody has a problem with that,” Dr. Kapilkumar Patel, director of the lung transplant program at Tampa General Hospital, Florida, told KHN. “And now we have this vaccine that can save lives and impact the post-transplant recovery phase. And we have this huge outcry from the public. “
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