A Boston father is being denied a spot on a hospital’s heart transplant list for refusing to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
The patient’s family, 31-year-old DJ Ferguson, says he was at the top of the list to receive the transplant at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital until he was deemed no longer eligible because of a policy requiring patients to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
“It’s kind of against his basic principles; he doesn’t believe in it. It’s a policy they are enforcing, and so, because he won’t get the shot, they took him off the list of a heart transplant,” Ferguson’s father told CBS Boston.
PROPOSED SOUTH CAROLINA LAW WOULD MAKE IT ILLEGAL TO REQUEST A PERSON’S VACCINE STATUS
Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a bed-teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, told the Washington Examiner its “Mass General Brigham healthcare system requires several CDC-recommended vaccines, including the COVID-19 vaccine,” as well as lifestyle behaviors due to patients’ immune system becoming “drastically suppressed.” The hospital said patients who do not get these vaccines “are not active on the waitlist” and that it does not have a “first on the list” regarding organ transplants.
“When an organ does become available, it must be carefully matched among a regional and national pool of candidates based on many factors, including blood type, height, weight, medical factors, distance to the recipient and organ size,” the hospital’s statement added.
A GoFundMe page created for the Ferguson family says he has been hospitalized since Nov. 26, 2021. A photo of Ferguson, his wife, Heather Dawson, and their two sons is shown in the fundraiser, which states he and his wife are both self-employed and that neither of them has worked since Ferguson’s hospitalization.
“At this point DJ is unable to leave the hospital until he gets the heart surgery he needs,” a Facebook post from Dawson on Dec. 19, 2021 read. “Without the surgery his lungs and heart will continue to fill up with blood and fluid (on top of everything else that’s going on).”
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As of Tuesday, the GoFundMe page has raised $32,645 for the Fergusons.
