A 12-year-old Indiana girl who is related to Vice President JD Vance has been barred from a spot on a heart transplant list because she’s not been vaccinated against COVID-19 and the flu, according to her parents.
Adaline Deal, a distant relative of the VP by marriage through his half-siblings, was born with two rare heart conditions that her family knew would one day require a transplant, her mother Janeen Deal told The Cincinnati Enquirer.
Adaline — who was adopted from China when she was 4 — was treated at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital for nearly 10 years, and her parents hoped she would get the transplant there.
But the hospital requires transplant patients to be vaccinated, and declined to make an exemption even when told it goes against the family’s religious beliefs as nondenominational Christians, the parents said.
“I thought, wow. So, it’s not about the kid. It’s not about saving her life,” Janeen Deal told the newspaper of the hospital’s decision to deny her daughter.
The mom, who believes vaccines are unsafe, said she and her husband decided not to vaccinate Adaline against COVID-19 or the flu after “the Holy Spirit put it on our hearts.”
Vaccinations against preventable diseases are recommended for transplant recipients because those patients are much more vulnerable to infections.
For patients with severe illnesses like Adaline, who has Ebstein’s anomaly and Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome, there is a higher risk of death if infected with COVID compared to other patients, according to Dr. Camille Kotton, the clinical director of transplant and immunocompromised host infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital.
“The first year after transplant is when they’re at highest risk for infection, but they do have a lifelong risk of severe disease and transplant patients are still dying because of COVID-19,” Kotton said.
Janeen, however, said she was confident her family, including their 11 other children, would not have any problems with COVID-19 after the transplant.
“We’ll take it as we can if it happens,” Janeen said. “But I know I cannot put this (vaccine) in her body knowing what we know and how we feel about it.”
A Cincinnati Children’s spokesperson declined to confirm that Adaline had been kept off the transplant list, but told the Enquirer that the hospital’s clinical decisions are “guided by science research and best practices” and that the hospital follows guidelines from the National Institutes of Health.
“We tailor care plans to each patient in collaboration with their family to ensure the safest, most effective treatment,” spokesperson Bo McMillan said.
Adaline’s parents now hope to take her to a different transplant center that won’t require her to be vaccinated, with a GoFundMe for the transplant raising more than $50,000 as of Wednesday morning.
