Unpacking the latest deeply deceptive anti-vaxx story. Tl;dr - these parents should be referred to child protective services.

Any child who is under 18 years of age lacks the mental capacity to make life-and-death decisions. That's the same argument conservatives love to deploy about transgender care, after all, and that issue doesn't even involve the weightiness of life-and-death. File that away as you read the rest of this. For their latest trick, anti-vaxxers are pushing the story of Yulia Hicks, a 14-year-old with a terminal illness, claiming she's on her way to becoming a martyr for allegedly being denied a transplant after refusing the COVID vaccine. *Another reminder: Medical decision-making is extremely complex. Given the unreliability and anti-vaxx skew of the only sources who are sharing this story, I doubt all the relevant context about the medical details of her case have been included. Namely, she may have been denied a transplant for a combination of non-politically charged reasons, like incompatibility, in which case this story is being virally shared by anti-vaxxers for no reason at all. Anyway. Assuming the refusal of a COVID vaccine actually did factor into treatment decisions here, remember: *she* doesn't have the capacity to make such a choice, independent of undue parental influence. She's simply not old enough. THIS ORPHAN WAS RESCUED FROM UKRAINE, BUT SADLY, SHE MAY BE THE NEXT CASUALTY OF A VERY AMERICAN PROBLEM: COVID DISINFORMATION.