Clinical Treatment Decisions

"I've got a lot to live for. I have grandchildren, I have children. Like, they're grown men, but they're my kids."

"Taking this vaccine offends my conscience. I ought to have the choice about what goes into my body, and a lifesaving treatment cannot be denied to me because I chose not to take an experimental treatment for a condition -- COVID-19 -- which I do not have and which I may never have."

Sheila Annette Lewis, 58, Alberta resident

Sheila Annette Lewis in an undated photo. Photo by Family handout

"[Should the court order the medical system to allow her a transplant despite her having chosen to spurn its conditions, there would be] significant adverse public policy implications."

"The proposition that Treatment Physicians exercising clinical judgment would be subject to the Charter would result in medical chaos, with patients seeking endless judicial review of clinical treatment decisions."

Alberta Court of King's Bench

 

"While Ms. Lewis has the right to refuse to be vaccinated against COVID-19, the Charter cannot remediate the consequences of her choice."

Alberta Court of Appeal

Supreme Court of Canada declines to hear challenge to Covid-19 vaccine mandate for transplant candidates   JCCF

Denied an organ transplant when she refused to receive a COVID-19 vaccine pre-surgery, Sheila Annette Lewis has died. She had been crowdsourcing funding for the purpose of travelling to the United States for an organ transplant. The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms announced her death, and that her plan to seek a transplant where she would not be required to be inoculated beforehand was thus rendered immaterial.

Sheila Annette Lewis was diagnosed in 2018 with a terminal illness, placed on the transplant wait list for her province of Alberta. While awaiting a date assigned to her for the transplant, she undertook to update a number of childhood vaccinations, a condition that was a pre-requisite to receive an organ transplant.

She was informed in 2021 that she would require as well the COVID-19 vaccine to enable her to undergo the needed transplant procedure. The medical argument was that in recognition of high risks of death following a transplant and the immunosuppressed condition of transplant patients, the vaccine for COVID-19 was considered to be a crucial requirement.

Unconvinced by the rationality of the experienced scientific view, Sheila Annette Lewis refused the vaccine, and decided to sue Alberta Health Services. In the event, the courts refused to order the medical system to allow her the transplant under her conditions, not that of the medical community. She appealed the judgement of the Alberta Court, but then the Alberta Court of Appeal also ruled against her.

She decided to continue fighting for what she considered her rights under the Constitution and the medical allocation of scarce transplant resources, as an individual requiring the potentially life-saving procedure, and exercising her right as an individual to spurn the medical requirement of a vaccine prior to surgery. The Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear her case, however.

Despite that a libertarian legal group resisting a number of public-health measures and charges in court, had argued persuasively that their client had achieved natural immunity from a prior COVID-19 infection. "If Ms. Lewis does not get her transplant, she will not survive, and her family will lose years of time with their mother, wife, and grandmother", wrote her Justice Centre lawyer.

Once the courts had turned down her appeal, raising funds for an organ transplant in the United States consumed Ms. Lewis's attention. On GiveSendGo, a fundraising website, she wrote that she had located an American hospital that would agree to an organ transplant without the required vaccination. Her page on the site had reached $124,776 in sympathetic donations just before her death.

An Alberta woman who tried to take her fight over COVID-19 vaccine requirements for organ transplants all the way to the Supreme Court has died. (Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press)