Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

No vax? Delisted for transplant.

No COVID Vax, No Transplant: Unfair or Good Medicine?

 

Organs are scarce. Give them to people willing to comply with the rules and who have the best chance of thriving. In order to get on the list, there are plenty of other requirements. My dad had a kidney transplant about 25 years ago. In addition to being physically able to withstand the surgery, he had to show he was able to pay for his meds (through insurance or out of pocket) for a period of time, agree to a pretty rigorous follow up appointment schedule, and get an annual flu shot. He was happy to agree to pretty much anything. After his transplant, he got his life back and was grateful every day for his new kidney. This fuckwad can take his “I was born free” and fuck off.

 

Thank U, Next

 

I don't think a harvested organ should go to waste simply because the only readily available recipient is a moron refusenik. Outside of that extremely unlikely event, however, the willfully unvaccinated have made their bed(s).

 

And some folks don’t believe we are a few years away from Civil War II.

 

Pretty sure that the 'will you get vaccinated' discussion comes early in the process.

 

The Ottawa police have to stop being Canada nice and start putting a boot up these folks’ asses.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/05/canada-ottawa-trucker-vaccine-mandate-protest/

 

That's the way I read it. But it also sounds like an individual's candidacy for an organ of a given type (tissue type, blood type, whatever) is similarly known early on. So it seems possible, even if very unlikely, that an organ could go to waste because only a refusenik is at hand.

Now one might argue, "We can't trust this individual to properly 'care' for this gift he's received." Which is altogether true, but ... isn't this individual potentially pissing this gift away preferable to no one getting it at all? And how is this individual's track record to this point more telling than, e.g., an alcoholic who might be getting a new liver?

As an aside ... the ethics of organ donation are a mess.

 

I thought top priority went to "Who's sickest?", not "Who's healthiest so this ultra-scarce organ won't go to waste?"

 

A very, very close friend (my youngest's godmother) died while "on the list" for a liver (she'd had some odd hepatitis as a child that she got over ... and then in her 30s they realized she hadn't). Maybe things have changed since then (this was 20-odd years ago), and maybe it's different for livers, but where you were in the queue depended on how sick you were. And to actually have a reasonable chance of getting one, you had to be pretty much standing at death's door. Don't hold me to these numbers, but it was something along the lines of you being so sick that your median survival time was, say, six months, and the median wait for a liver of the proper type was, say, a year.

Things, of course, likely have changed. My sister has had multiple cornea transplants, and while for her earlier ones she had to be "at the ready" for when a cornea came available, for her later ones it was simply a matter of making an appointment (because the anti-rejection medication had advanced so far). Still, I doubt the risk of the scenario I've laid out is non-existent.

 

For liver transplants you have to be on death’s door - it’s still that way. For kidneys, not so much. Someone I know lucked into a kidney much sooner than expected. One that he was a good match for became available. The first person on the list was sick, which ruled them out. The next person on the list was out of town and couldn’t get back in time. The person I know was third and since he was healthy and could get to the hospital within the hour, he got the kidney.

 

American Exceptionalism.

“If everyone had gotten vaccinated and boosted as vaccines became available 300,000 Americans would likely still be with us,” Ashish K. Jha, Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, tweeted Saturday as he warned the death toll could hit 1 million by April.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/02/05/covid-biden-vaccines-900000-deaths/