How Pious Ethicists Rationalize Mandated COVID-19 Vaccination on Organ Transplant Candidates

No Consideration of Vaccine Safety, Efficacy, or Impact on Transplant Outcomes

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

We have heard numerous stories of patients desperate for organ transplantation being pitted with mandated COVID-19 vaccination, which could end their life with an immediate complication versus denial of the organ transplant they have worked so hard to receive and so desperately need.  The transplant physician community has assumed the COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective and without question in every case, no matter how tenuous, the risks are outweighed by the benefits.   Not in a single manuscript published on the topic have the transplant physicians recognized >15,000 deaths after COVID-19 vaccination in VAERS, most within 96 hours, and >1000 peer-reviewed manuscripts on COVID-19 vaccine injuries, disabilities, and deaths.   Transplant physicians appear to be willfully blind to the FDA warnings on myocarditis, neurological injury, thrombosis, and blood disorders all of which are particularly deadly and complicated in patients pre- or post-transplant.  Dr. Marc Kuczewski, PhD, from the Neiswanger Institute of Bioethics at Loyola University in Chicago should have sought better expert input on the COVID-19 vaccine literature when he published this “ethical” statement on mandatory COVID-19 vaccination in transplant candidates.[i]

I wonder what Dr. Kuczewski and his coauthors thought when Dr. Alsunaid and coworkers from Montefiore in New York, published this report on three freshly vaccinated lung transplant recipients who developed acute antibody mediated rejection of their transplanted lung(s) resulting in hypoxemic respiratory failure?[ii] 

Each transplant rejection episode is a step closer to death.  So the questions on the table are:  1) how long will COVID-19 vaccination remain in organ transplant programs?  2) will ISHLT - International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation analyze the loss of life BEFORE and AFTER transplantation attributable to COVID-19 vaccination? 3)  will transplant directors ever reverse course and admit vaccination was a mistake?  4) will doctors and pious ethicists who gave no consideration to safety, efficacy, transplant outcomes ever apologize to the community of transplant patients? For an area of medicine caring for the frailest group of patients and utmost concern over post-surgery outcomes, historians will record how the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic clouded minds and blinded doctors to the reality of failed vaccines, expected Spike protein damage, and immunologic rejection after transplantation.  Clear clinical acumen could have seen these events months if not years ahead of time.  Investigational COVID-19 vaccination should have no role transplant medicine.  We can all watch how transplant doctors and ethicists crawl out of their dark hole and face tough questions in the future.

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[i] Kuczewski M, Wasson K, Hutchison PJ, Dilling DF. Putting ethics and clinical decision making before politics: requiring COVID-19 immunization for Solid Organ Transplantation (SOT) Candidates and their Support Team. J Heart Lung Transplant. 2022 Jan;41(1):17-19. doi: 10.1016/j.healun.2021.10.001. Epub 2021 Oct 22. PMID: 34799246; PMCID: PMC8530775.

[ii] S. Alsunaid, V. Caputo, K. Stryker, J. Diouf, M. Abbasi, J. Borgi, S. Forest, A. Mansour, COVID-19 Vaccine Triggered Rejection in Lung Transplant Recipients: A Case Series, The Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation, Volume 41, Issue 4, Supplement, 2022, Page S533, ISSN 1053-2498, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healun.2022.01.1352.