As the old saying goes, "This is how it starts."

A woman in Colorado is being denied critical care from a hospital because she has not been injected with the COVID-19 vaccine:

A Colorado woman with stage 5 renal failure was months away from getting a new kidney. Now, she and her donor are looking for another hospital after learning UCHealth's new policy.

According to UCHealth, the majority of transplant recipients and living donors are now required to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Neither woman has received their shots...

"For transplant patients who contract COVID-19, the mortality rate ranges from about 20% to more than 30%. This shows the extreme risk that COVID-19 poses to transplant recipients after their surgeries"

Wow. So this woman has a willing donor, both are fine with taking the risks associated with transplant surgeries, and neither is being coerced in any way to undergo this procedure... yet the hospital has apparently decided that they are not allowed to do their own risk assessments regarding SARS-Cov-2.

The donor herself put it best:

"Here I am, willing to be a direct donor to her. It does not affect any other patient on the transplant list... How can I sit here and allow them to murder my friend when I've got a perfectly good kidney and can save her life?"

How, indeed. How did we get here?

And even worse: Where are we headed? What comes next?