Cleveland Clinic Bans Severely Ill Ohio Man From Kidney Transplant Because The Donor Isn’t Vaccinated

The Cleveland Clinic, a world-renowned surgery center and provider of modern medical miracles, announced Friday that it will require both transplant donors and recipients to have received a Covid-19 vaccination.

Michael Ganim is a 52-year-old man from Cleveland dying from kidney failure. He has been a Cleveland Clinic patient for years and on the organ donor transplant list since last October. Ganim’s polycystic kidney disease almost killed him in March 2020, and he and his family have ridden the emotional rollercoaster waiting for test results and donor matches ever since, all the while praying that a suitable kidney would be found in time.

On June 23, 2021, those prayers were answered. Sue George responded to a Ganim family social media post pleading for help. Testing ensued, and by early August the clinic’s transplant team confirmed George’s kidney was a viable match. On October 4, the Ganims and Georges met with doctors for a routine pre-op meeting and the clinic scheduled the transplant surgery for October 13.

But on Friday, October 8, after a year of looking for a matching donor and just five days before the life-saving transplant, the surgery was scuttled by Cleveland Clinic administrative policymakers and their new “safety protocol.”

Ganim has received a Covid-19 injection, but it turns out George hasn’t. The transplant team has known this for months. As George told ABC’s News 5, “It was never an issue, and not one doctor out of those doctors we’ve met with mentioned that it was an issue except for the pulmonary doctor who just tried to persuade me to get the shot and that was about a month ago.”

According to the Ganims, the clinic’s transplant team has been sympathetic and even apologetic, but the doctors’ hands are tied by clinic rules.

Denial of Care Makes for Dangerous Territory

Unfortunately, Ganim’s dire situation offers a dim prognosis of America’s future health care. The Cleveland Clinic is a leading medical center with a global reach and world-class reputation. University Hospitals of Cleveland, another large Ohio hospital system, has just announced a similar protocol. UCHealth in Denver, Colorado, is requiring transplant recipients have the Covid vaccine too, suggesting that similar requirements may soon be common.

There is a severe organ shortage and the clinic’s new policy will only make it worse. To be sure, organ donor rolls are a complicated business. Doctors must make gut-wrenching life-and-death decisions every day, and matching viable organ donors with suited recipients is an unenviable kind of medical triage. Hospital transplant policies already impose post-operation conditions on organ recipients in a well-intended effort to ensure that the limited number of healthy organs don’t go to patients who have unhealthy or excessively risky lifestyles.

The Cleveland Clinic appears prepared to condemn some of their patients to death over an experimental vaccine with a short track record. Its decision to forge ahead despite organ shortages smells of rank political kowtowing rather than care and treatment in their patients’ best interests. The new policy contravenes recent guidance from the American Medical Association advising doctors that “A patient’s vaccination status in and of itself is not sufficient reason, ethically, to turn that individual away.”

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