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“I was born free. I will die free,” said Chad Carswell, who is hospitalized in North Carolina.
A hospital refused to give him a kidney transplant because he declined to be injected with the coronavirus vaccination.
“I’m not changing my mind,” he continued. “I’ve had conversations with my family and everybody that’s close to me.”
Carswell is a double amputee who has had previous heart surgeries. He needs a kidney transplant because his kidneys are operating at 4%.
He currently receives dialysis three times a week.
The hospital that refuses to give the kidney transplant has been identified as Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
They are enforcing a requirement that patients must be “fully vaccinated.”
“They know where I stand,” Carswell said about his family, adding “and it’ll not be a situation that occurs that I will choose to change my mind on this topic.”
Carswell is looking at other hospitals for help.
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His friends and local businesses in the Burke County area have raised funds for the surgery, and more than 100 people have offered one of their own kidneys to the man…
“He said, ‘The last thing we need to talk about is your vaccination status,'” Carswell recalled, referring to a hospital conversation. “And that’s when I politely told him there was nothing really to talk about it, it wasn’t up for debate [and] that I wasn’t getting it. Then, he told me, ‘You know you’ll die if you don’t get it.’ And I said, ‘I’m willing to die.’”
Carswell said he’s had the coronavirus twice before and believes getting the vaccine should be a personal choice, not a requirement.
“Without [a transplant], there’s no telling how much longer I’ll still be here. I have to have a kidney to prolong my life,” he said.
Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Hospital said its policy follows health standards implemented across the U.S. and was put into practice to protect its patients.
— Advertisement — “The reason it is recommended is to provide protection for the patient. Transplant patients are at high risk for severe illness if they don’t have preexisting immunity prior to being transplanted,” the hospital said in a statement, according to WCSO.
There are numerous cases around the country where unvaccinated patients are unable to receive the necessary health care services.
An unvaccinated 31-year-old father of two in Boston, DJ Ferguson, was denied a heart transplant surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts.
“He got led down a path where they had to stop doing procedures where they said he was qualified nonetheless for the heart transplant,” the patient’s father, David Ferguson, said. “But he had to get the vaccine in order to get that transplant.
“He’s deteriorated so much so quickly that they had to resort to open-heart surgery and doing the LVAD [left ventricular assist device] mechanical pump. So now my boy has a pump, he’s in recovery. He went through seven hours of surgery.”
