EDMONTON, Alberta (LifeSiteNews) –– Lawyers for a Canadian woman who has been denied a life-saving organ transplant because she has not received the COVID shots announced they have sent a “demand letter” to health officials, commanding they accept her natural immunity to the virus “as an alternative to COVID-19 vaccination.”
On Tuesday, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) announced in a press release that Alberta Health Services (AHS) and an Alberta hospital should accept their client, Sheila Annette Lewis’s, natural immunity to COVID-19 by this Friday, or further legal action may be taken.
The demand letter sent to AHS, and an unnamed Alberta hospital (due to a publication ban), says that Lewis’s natural immunity to COVID-19 as an alternative to the jabs should be accepted, as she has proof she has natural immunity via a self-funded medical report.
“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,” said her lawyer Allison Pejovic in the press release.
“There is no principled medical or scientific reason to continue to deny Ms. Lewis a life-saving organ transplant.”
Pejovic stated that Lewis is “protected from COVID-19 as she has had it twice,” and thus, compelling her to receive an experimental vaccine in order to receive an organ is unnecessary.
“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,” she added.
The JCCF noted that on March 29 Lewis gave her doctors in the Alberta Transplant Program a “privately funded medical report (‘Kinexus Report’) establishing that Ms. Lewis has strong natural immunity to COVID-19 and had overcome previous COVID infections.”
Lewis obtained the privately funded report after having asked her doctors to perform a COVID antibody test over a year ago, which they refused to do.
On April 3, one of Lewis’s transplant physicians told her, as said by the JCCF, that despite the test results showing her natural immunity to COVID, 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.”
The doctor also said Lewis would need a COVID “booster” as well, despite the Kinexus Report saying nothing about this.
Lewis, who is dying of a terminal illness known as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, has been on a waiting list for an organ transplant since 2020, and for a time was placed on a high-priority waiting list, or “Status 2” as it is known.
In March 2021, Lewis was told that she would no longer be on the wait list for organ transplantation unless she submitted to the COVID shots, and was placed to “Status 0,” or zero priority for transplant.
Pejovic noted in the demand letter that Lewis’s family is considering suing the doctors in a “future wrongful death lawsuit” if she passes away “due to medical malpractice including failure to reinstate her to Status 2 – which is almost certainly a death sentence.”
“If your clients do not reverse course and reinstate her to Status 2 by April 21, 2023, Ms. Lewis is considering initiating further legal proceedings.”
Lewis with the help of the JCCF, took the AHS, the hospital, and six transplant program doctors to court over being placed to “Status 0,” challenging the constitutionality of vaccine mandates for transplant candidates, which were in place for over a year.
In her legal affidavit, Lewis said that getting the “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,” Lewis observed.
Last summer, an Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench judge ruled that one’s constitutional rights do not apply to persons seeking organ transplants, which was a blow for Lewis.
Lewis and her legal team then filed a case in the Alberta Court of Appeal, which last year ruled against her, as they stated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Alberta Bill of Rights do not apply to her case.
In January 2023, Lewis filed a court application to the Supreme Court of Canada, which asked the court to hear her case.
As noted by the JCCF, Lewis has asked the Supreme Court of Canada to clarify “provincial health care providers’ obligations under the Charter to patients within their provincial health care programs, the role of the Charter and provincial bills of rights legislation in the health care sphere, and whether the Charter protects dying Canadians’ rights to life without a condition of taking an experimental drug that has caused injury and death.”
Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith, despite saying on her first day on the job the unvaccinated were the most “discriminated against” group seen in her lifetime, said in January she will not get involved in the case, saying the opinion of doctors in Lewis’s case is what should prevail.
Natural immunity to COVID has been well established, and even last August the US Centre for Disease Control announced this fact.
Also, as noted by the JCCF, a February 2023 study from The Lancet establishes that natural immunity cuts 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.”