No Jab, No Life: Senator Helps Unvaccinated Patient Search for Heart Transplant

A health-care worker prepares a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at a UHN COVID-19 vaccine clinic in Toronto on Jan. 7, 2021. (The Canadian Press/Nathan Denette)

A senator is calling for donors to help an unvaccinated Melbourne mother receive a heart transplant from overseas after she was denied one locally due to her COVID-19 vaccination status.

Vicki Derderian is a mother of two from Melbourne, Australia, and has suffered a heart condition over the past eight years.

She currently lives with the support of a bi-ventricular assist device (BI-VAD) which is inserted into both sides of the heart and pumps blood through the body.

Derderian was always looking to have a heart transplant and was granted an exemption in 2021 from requiring to get a COVID-19 vaccination.

Known side effects of the COVID-19 vaccines can impact the heart’s health and include such conditions as myocarditis and pericarditis.

Yet transplant specialists at The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne have refused to list Derderian on the organ recipient list unless she receives the COVID-19 vaccine.

“‘No jab, no transplant’ actually means ‘no jab, no life’ in Vicki’s case,” said Victorian Senator Ralph Babet in a statement to The Epoch Times.

Senator Babet has written to the federal Health Minister Mark Butler and spoken about Derderian in the Senate.

“I’m going to do everything in my power to help Vicky get a chance to save her life,” he said.

Derderian and her husband, John, are now fundraising to try to generate enough funds to fly overseas and source a transplant.

The Epoch Times has contacted The Alfred Hospital for comment.

The issue of unvaccinated patients struggling to access organ transplants is one lingering side-effect of vaccine mandates across much of the world during the pandemic.

As of late 2022, the Australian state of Queensland maintained a ban on unvaccinated patients from kidney, lung, or heart transplants.

“A recipient is highly immunosuppressed post-transplant, which is why it’s incredibly important for the person to be vaccinated prior to transplant. Queensland Health prioritises safety before, during, and after a transplant,” a spokesperson told The Epoch Times on Nov. 23, 2022.

A Problem of Medical Equity

However, physician Lainie Friedman Ross at the University of Chicago has argued against bans on unvaccinated patients, saying it impacts on the principle of equity in medicine.

“The debate to penalise or exclude waitlist patients whose choices we disagree with is not new in the transplant world,” she wrote in an article in the National Library of Medicine, noting similar debates around alcoholics receiving liver transplants.

Some of the arguments put forward against unvaccinated patients include “non-adherence,” the idea that an un-jabbed person is just as likely not to follow strict regimens that come with receiving an organ.

Another concern is that an organ may go to “waste” if it goes to an individual that is not immunised and that unvaccinated people pose a risk to other patients and providers.

“Before we threaten unvaccinated candidates with delisting, we must acknowledge that only 73 percent of healthcare workers were vaccinated by Sept. 2021 [in the U.S.], even though we were given first dibs [on vaccines],” Ross said.

“Many health professionals do not get annual flu shots, exposing our patients to risks. Making COVID-19 vaccine refusal an absolute exclusion for waitlisting is too severe.”

Regarding concerns around wasting organs, Ross said many infected with COVID-19 actually recovered.

“An early meta-analysis of global case series found that a ‘higher admission rate was noted, but [the] overall outcome was similar to the general population,” she said, noting that even if unvaccinated candidates had a greater risk of mortality, it was not different to other non-ideal candidates like seniors.

Ross also said not taking the jab was not proof of non-adherence because most transplant programs did “not mandate vaccines for other vaccine-preventable diseases.”