Alberta transplant program maintains refusal of transplant to terminally ill unvaccinated woman despite proof of natural immunity

EDMONTON, ALBERTA: The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms announces that the counsel for Sheila Annette Lewis, an unvaccinated transplant candidate with a dire terminal illness, has sent a demand letter to AHS, an Alberta hospital, and her transplant physicians, demanding that they accept her now established (and widely-accepted) natural immunity to Covid-19 as an alternative to Covid-19 vaccination and reinstate her to the high-priority transplant waitlist by April 21, 2023.

On March 29, Ms. Lewis provided her doctors in the Alberta Transplant Program with a privately funded medical report (“Kinexus Report”) establishing that Ms. Lewis has strong natural immunity to Covid-19 and had overcome previous Covid infections.

On April 3, one of the transplant physicians informed her that despite these test results which show she has natural immunity to Covid-19, nothing had changed in regards to healthcare policies pertaining to Covid-19 vaccination requirements and she would still need to receive the Covid-19 vaccines before they would agree to give her an organ transplant. He told her that the Kinexus Report concluded that even with natural immunity, she would need a booster dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. However, the report does not say anything about Ms. Lewis needing a booster dose of the Covid-19 vaccine to maintain immunity to Covid-19.

Ms. Lewis is dying of a terminal illness. She had earlier taken Alberta Health Services (“AHS”), an Alberta hospital, and six transplant program physicians to court over their refusal to proceed with a life-saving organ transplant solely because she has not taken the Covid-19 vaccine. She has been challenging the constitutionality of Covid-19 vaccine requirements for transplant candidates put in place by AHS, an Alberta Hospital, and six transplant doctors, for more than a year. She was unsuccessful at both the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench and the Alberta Court of Appeal in 2022, with both levels of court finding that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the “Charter”) and the Alberta Bill of Rights do not apply to the Covid-19 vaccine policies developed by AHS, the Alberta hospital where she would receive her transplant, and her transplant doctors. She has filed an application with the Supreme Court of Canada, asking them to hear her appeal. Canada’s highest court has not yet decided whether it will do so.

This case is under a publication ban. Due to a court order, the Justice Centre cannot reveal the names of the doctors, the hospital, the city where the transplant program is located, or the name of the organ that Ms. Lewis needs for life-saving surgery.

Ms. Lewis asked her physicians nearly a year ago to test her blood for Covid-19 antibodies to see if she was naturally immune, and they refused to do so. Recently, however, with private funding, Ms. Lewis did have her blood analyzed at Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation as part of her enrollment in Kinexus’ clinical study entitled “Identification of SARS-CoV-2 Viral Protein Epitopes for Antibodies from Recovered COVID-19 Patients, Healthy and Vaccinated Individuals”. This study has received Independent Review Board approval. To date, Kinexus has monitored over 4000 COVID-19 patients and healthy, unvaccinated controls with its SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests. The study’s preliminary results were published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Clinical Investigation Insight.

The Kinexus report found that Ms. Lewis’s blood sample (1) “clearly supports the presence of SARS-CoV-2 immunoreactivity”, (2) shows that she was likely infected with SARS-CoV-2 around mid-September 2021, (3) shows that she was infected with SARS-CoV-2 again more recently and has extremely high levels of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2.

The clinical study found that for the majority of participants with natural immunity, SARS-CoV-2 antibody levels are sustained for at least two years after initial infection.

In August 2022, the US Centre for Disease Control announced that while Covid-19 vaccines have reduced mortality and hospitalizations due to Covid-19 in the US, so has natural immunity to Covid-19. A February 2023 study from The Lancet demonstrates that natural immunity cut the risk of hospitalization and death from a Covid reinfection by 88% for at least 10 months, and the immunity generated from an infection was found to be “at least as high, if not higher” than that provided by two doses of an mRNA vaccine.

“The transplant program team, AHS, and the hospital ought to accept Ms. Lewis’s natural immunity to Covid-19 as an alternative to Covid-19 vaccination and reinstate her to the high priority transplant list immediately,” states Allison Pejovic, legal counsel for Ms. Lewis. “There is no principled medical or scientific reason to continue to deny Ms. Lewis a life-saving organ transplant,” Ms. Pejovic continued, “She is protected from Covid-19 as she has had it twice. The refusal to accept Ms. Lewis’s natural immunity as an alternative to Covid-19 vaccination and give her life-saving surgery is indefensible and a disgrace.”