Sheila Annette Lewis, the Alberta woman who was denied organ transplant for refusing to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, has died. She died at the age of 58.
Recently, Lewis had been crowdsourcing funds to travel to the United States to get an organ transplant, but she died before embarking on the journey.
Her death was announced on Twitter by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) via a tweet which read:
While talking to BridgeCityNews in November 2022, Lewis said: “I’ve got a lot to live for. I have grandchildren, I have children. Like, they’re grown men, but they’re my kids.”
Lewis was diagnosed with a terminal illness and was placed on the Alberta transplant wait list in 2018. (The organ in question is redacted from court documents and subject to a publication ban.) As she awaited the transplant, she updated a number of her childhood vaccinations, as a pre-requisite for receiving an organ transplant.
She was told in 2021 she would also need the COVID-19 vaccine to receive the transplant. Given the high risks of death after a transplant and the immunosuppressed condition of transplant patients, the COVID-19 vaccine was considered important. She refused and filed a lawsuit against Alberta Health Services.
In an affidavit, she said: “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.”
Her lawyer, Alison Pejovic, told the National Post recently that Lewis “had a strong sense of what she perceived to be right and wrong, a strong moral compass, and she never stopped fighting for what she perceived to be justice.”
Pejovic said: “She’s in any unique situation where her choice to not comply with a mandate was going to result in a loss of her life and she was willing to face that for what she believed in.”
She lost her fight while trying to get the court’s order for the medical system to give her a transplant.
The Alberta Court of King’s Bench stated that if it did so, there would be “significant adverse public policy implications.
“The proposition that Treating 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.”
Lewis appealed, but the Alberta Court of Appeal ruled against her.
The court concluded: “While Ms Lewis has the right to refuse to be vaccinated against COVID-19, the Charter cannot remediate the consequences of her choice.”
Lewis escalated the matter to the Supreme Court of Canada, which declined to hear her case. In a letter written to Alberta Health Services, JCCF, a legal group that fought against many public health measures and resulting charges in court, argued that Lewis had natural immunity from a prior COVID-19 infection.
Her lawyer in Justice Centre wrote: “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.”
The case caught the attention of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who said she wanted a “second medical opinion” in the case, in an unusual move of a politician intervening in a case of individual medical treatment.
After she lost in the courts, Lewis turned her attention to generating funds to get an organ transplant in the United States. Her page on GiveSendGo, a fundraising website, reveals she had found a hospital in the U.S. that would do an organ transplant absent the COVID-19 vaccine. Her page had received $124,776 at the time of her death.
Pejovic said: “She really wanted to be around a long time to see her grandchildren grow. And so most people saw the side of Sheila that was very strong in interviews, but she also had a warm, tender heart and was a kind person and so this news is devastating for her family, especially, but also for those who are cheering for her.”
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