Adaline Deal, a 12-year-old Indiana girl and distant relative of Vice President JD Vance, has been refused a heart transplant because she won’t take the COVID-19 and flu shots. Born with Ebstein’s anomaly and Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome, two rare heart defects, Adaline has been treated at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital for almost a decade in hopes of a transplant. But the hospital has a policy of not accepting transplant patients who are not vaccinated, and she has been excluded from the transplant list because of this.
Family’s Religious Beliefs and Objections
In an interview with The Cincinnati Enquirer, Adaline’s mother, Janeen Deal described the hospital insisting on vaccination even after they expressed their opposition based on the religious belief of being nondenominational Christians. “I thought, wow. So, it’s not about the kid. It’s not about saving her life,” she explained. The family then refrained from vaccinating Adaline after they felt “the Holy Spirit put it on our hearts.”
GoFundMe for Heart Transplant
There has been a GoFundMe setup to help pay for Adaline’s heart transplant.By Wednesday morning, over $50,000 had been raised. The page explains Adaline’s history, from the day she was adopted from China to her struggles with severe heart problems. “We started the process a second time to adopt from China, and we saw her little face show up on the children who need to be adopted.”So, we knew it was time to bring her home,” the page says.
Adaline has come and gone from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital since. Her heart is failing, and now she needs a transplant. The family needs money for the transplant procedure.
Importance of Vaccination in Transplant Patients
Dr. Camille Kotton, Massachusetts General Hospital’s clinical director of transplant and immunocompromised host infectious diseases, explained that individuals who have severe disease, like individuals requiring transplants, are likely to become infected and die more easily, particularly from conditions like COVID-19. Their peak year for risk of infection is their first year after transplant, but they carry a lifelong risk of severe disease and transplant recipients continue to die from COVID-19,” Kotton said to The Cincinnati Enquirer.
