A hospital in Michigan is requiring a teenager to be vaccinated before she receives a life-saving kidney transplant. It’s typically the policy of most hospitals to require people needing transplants to receive the proper vaccinations but thanks to this teen’s bone-headed mother this is turning into a thorny and completely unnecessary issue.

The teen’s adoptive mother, Jenna Campau, of Fennville, Michigan, is suing Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital for requiring her to be vaccinated before the operation, The Detroit News reports. Her adoptive parents maintain that the hospital’s requirements violate their religious beliefs. This is sadly ridiculous because at least one health expert says the transplant puts her at greater risk of death from infectious disease.

Campau adopted 17-year-old Alisa Campau from Ukraine in 2021, according to the complaint filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan. Alisa has only one kidney and is suffering from chronic kidney disease and other medical issues. She currently receives dialysis at DeVos (DeVos is the deceased mother-in-law of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos) Hospital in Grand Rapids.

How this so-called “mother” can do this is beyond me. I really don’t get religious folks who risk their children’s lives because of such foolish religious beliefs. If this poor girl doesn’t receive the transplant she may die. This is a level of selfish absurdity that I have trouble dealing with.

Doctors at the hospital have noted that this girl needs a transplant, per the lawsuit, but in order for this to go forward, she must meet pre-transplant requirements that include receiving vaccines for COVID-19, influenza, and human papillomavirus.

What this literally means is she’s at risk of serious infection and possible death if she doesn’t receive the vaccines and also at risk of death if she doesn’t receive the kidney transplant.

All because of her stupid mother.

But Campau and her husband claim the hospital’s requirements violate their civil rights protections “because they hold religious objections to ‘any vaccine or medical product that is produced or researched using aborted fetal cells and also genetic modifications or therapies that involve combing (sic) human and cells or DNA,” per the lawsuit, The Detroit News reports.

Hospitals commonly require transplant patients to be vaccinated because these patients face the possibility of becoming very sick or dying from infectious diseases after surgery. That’s according to Leonard Fleck, a bioethicist who’s also a professor at Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine.

“Patients have the right to take risks with regard to making judgments about their own healthcare,” Fleck says. “But some kinds of risks are too likely and too serious for a physician to cooperate with the patient in allowing them to take that risk.”

And when it comes to the three available COVID-19 vaccines don’t contain any fetal cells, according to a pamphlet issued by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

While developing the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, researchers used cell cultures derived from fetal cells that came from elective abortions in the 1970s and 1980s to test the vaccines. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was produced using these cultures, the state health department said. The Independent notes that neither the Pfizer nor Moderna vaccines contain fetal cells. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine does contain a “fetal cell line” from fetuses aborted in past decades, however.

The medical community has begun to widely recommend COVID-19 vaccinations for potential and current organ transplant patients.

Earlier this year, the American Society of Transplant Surgeons, the American Society of Transplantation, and the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation issued a joint statement recommending the life-saving vaccines for patients and emphasized that it’s important for other members of the household to receive the vaccine.

“We strongly recommend that all eligible children and adult transplant candidates and recipients be vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine that is approved or authorized in their jurisdiction,” the societies wrote. “Whenever possible, vaccination should occur prior to transplantation (ideally with completion of vaccine series a minimum of two weeks prior to transplant).”

But despite all this, Campau prefers to cite The Old Testament’s Book of Leviticus and says the family is against vaccines that contain products from “unclean” animals.

Campau has requested that a judge declare the hospital’s refusal to provide the teen with a transplant unlawful, and she’s being helped along by a Connecticut nonprofit group called We The Patriots USA, which has said it is paying for the lawsuit.

Now here comes the really dumb part: In a press conference Monday, Campau says she’s worried Alisa will turn 18 and be removed from the pediatric transplant list before the case is resolved. She also claims DeVos staff threatened to call child welfare about the family’s refusal to vaccinate the girl.

I say “go for it, hospital staff.” Because this is also dumb for another reason. Transplant patients must take medications to keep their bodies from rejecting a foreign organ, Fleck said. These medications weaken a patient’s immune system, making them very vulnerable to severe illness and death from infectious diseases like COVID-19.

“That means the organ is lost and the person is lost,” he said. “For that reason, the expectation will be fully vaccinated, certainly against something as common as COVID is right now.”

Here’s one more comment from Fleck that I’m going to add:

“From the point of view of healthcare justice, a surgeon, a physician would want kidneys to go to individuals who have good prospects for seven-to-ten year survival. A patient who is refusing the COVID vaccine would have a substantially reduced likelihood of surviving seven-to-ten years, especially if we see COVID as something that’s not going to end in the next week or two, month or two. It looks like it’s going to be with us for a long time.”

What Campau is doing is criminal. Pure and simple. I fully believe religious exemptions for something this crucial, this life-saving, should be outlawed.