Charter not violated in denying transplant to patient who refused COVID-19 vaccine, court rules

Clarification: A earlier model of this story included extra particular particulars regarding Annette Lewis’ medical situation. That data has since been eliminated because of a court-ordered publication ban.

It isn’t unconstitutional to refuse an organ transplant to a girl who refuses to get the COVID-19 vaccine, an Edmonton choose has dominated.

Annette Lewis went to courtroom looking for to protect her spot on an Edmonton-based transplant program’s wait-list after medical doctors advised her she wouldn’t be eligible as a result of she will not be immunized towards COVID-19.

In a choice filed Tuesday, Courtroom of Queen’s Bench Justice Paul Belzil dismissed Lewis’s argument that her Constitution rights had been violated.

He dominated the Constitution has no utility to scientific therapy choices and, specifically, has no utility to medical doctors establishing standards for organ transplantation. There’s a publication ban on figuring out the particular organ.

Lewis was recognized in 2018 with a persistent, progressive illness with no remedy.

Medical doctors advised her {that a} transplant was her solely hope of survival. After in depth testing, Lewis was deemed wholesome sufficient to qualify for a transplant, based on particulars in Belzil’s resolution.

Starting in 2020, she was suggested to get a collection of vaccinations, together with childhood vaccinations, as her immunization historical past couldn’t be situated. She agreed and acquired all of the vaccines.

However in March 2021, when she was advised that she required a COVID-19 vaccine in an effort to obtain the transplant, she refused.     

“Taking this vaccine offends my conscience,” Lewis wrote in an affidavit filed with the courtroom. 

“I should have the selection about what goes into my physique and a life-saving therapy can’t be denied to me as a result of I selected to not take an experimental therapy for a situation — COVID-19 — which I shouldn’t have and which I’ll by no means have.”

Shortage of donors, threat of COVID-19 elements

In response, Alberta Well being Providers and the medical doctors and hospital concerned in Lewis’s case filed proof about how the transplant program works, how sufferers are chosen, the dangers of COVID-19 an infection to a transplant recipient and proof that COVID-19 vaccines are protected and efficient.

The names of the medical doctors and the hospital had been redacted from Belzil’s resolution. The transplant program in query supplies companies for sufferers in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, jap British Columbia, Northwest Territories and elements of Nunavut. 

Choices so as to add a affected person to the transplant checklist are made by a committee of medical consultants who think about the recipients’  severity of want and probability of survival.

Courtroom heard that as a result of these organ donors are scarce, one in 5 folks on the Edmonton wait-list die earlier than getting a transplant. 

A affected person may be rejected if the transplant would unacceptably improve the affected person’s threat of dying and not using a significant likelihood of enhancing the standard and length of life. 

As soon as the COVID-19 vaccine grew to become out there, specialists with the transplant program decided it was in the very best curiosity of pre-transplant candidates to be vaccinated due to the numerous threat COVID-19 presents to extremely immunocompromised transplant recipients.

Courtroom heard that in the course of the fourth wave of the pandemic between September and November 2021, almost 40 per cent of comparable transplant recipients in Edmonton who had been contaminated with COVID-19 ended up dying.

In his causes for resolution, Belzil agreed that it was “past dispute” that Lewis is the only decision-maker about what goes into her physique and that she is entitled to her beliefs about vaccines.

“I don’t settle for nonetheless, that her beliefs and want to guard her bodily integrity entitle her to influence the rights of different sufferers or the integrity of the [transplant program] typically,” the choose mentioned. “Nobody has a proper to obtain [organ] transplants and nobody is pressured to bear transplantation surgical procedure.” 

Belzil additionally discovered that if Lewis’ utility had been profitable, it could have vital damaging public coverage implications, be unfair to different sufferers and disrupt the transplant program. 

“The proposition that treating physicians exercising scientific judgment can be topic to the Constitution would lead to medical chaos with sufferers looking for limitless judicial evaluate of scientific therapy choices,” Belzil mentioned.