“He still needs urgent surgery, and every day the surgery is delayed his heart is under strain,” the order said, citing one of his doctors.
Baby W’s parents, Cole Reeves and Samantha Savage, had insisted that the blood used in the surgery only came from from unvaccinated donors. Doctors said that using blood donated from outside the normal channels was “impractical” for the situation and that doing the operation without donating blood “was not an available option.”
With time running out and the parents still objecting, Judge Ian Gault ruled that it was “in Baby W’s best interests” for the court to keep him in temporary custody until the operation could be completed.
Baby W was placed under the guardianship of the court starting Wednesday until he recovers from surgery, but by the end of January at the latest. The surgery, which is set for this week, is estimated to take 48 hours to complete. Two doctors were appointed as Baby W’s legal representatives for the purpose of consenting to surgery, and Reeves and Savage were appointed as his representatives for “all other purposes.” Doctors said they would “take the parents’ views into account” whenever possible – as long as doing so would not jeopardize “Baby W’s best interests.”
The decision came after a tense period of several weeks full of unfounded claims, according to the order.
After Baby W had treatment at the end of October, his parents were “distressed” when they heard that he had to receive a “supplement” of blood. They applied to find an alternative in the future, as they did not want their child to receive “any blood other than blood that did not contain the Pfizer vaccine, mRNA, the spike protein or any other associated contaminants,” she said. r order. .
Reeves and Savage later told healthcare workers at Auckland’s Starship hospital that they believed spike proteins in the blood of people who had received mRNA vaccines – such as the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines – were “causing unexpected transfusion-related deaths .”
A meeting between Baby W’s parents and doctors in November was “hijacked by the parents’ support person” and spewed “her conspiracy theory,” according to the order. The person claimed that babies who had received transfusions died at Starship hospital.
Two days earlier, doctors had met with Savage to explain that they “could not spend any more time considering” their requests for Baby W to receive blood from special donors and that the parents need to come to a decision on whether to consent to the operation. Savage became “extremely distressed,” according to the order, and accused the doctors of “cornering her with no support present.”
Reeves and Savage appeared Wednesday on Infowars, the podcast hosted by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who filed for bankruptcy on Friday after he was held liable for lies he spread about the victims of the 2012 mass killing at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the Newtown, Conn.
“He is so much bigger than us. It is so much bigger than the baby. God does not want this to be done to mankind. He doesn’t want this to be done to the baby,” Reeves said a baby babbling in the background.
“We stand from a godly point of view that this is not right,” he added.
Sue Grey, a parent representative and self-proclaimed expert on medicinal cannabis and “biological harm from electromagnetic radiation,” did not respond to a request for comment. Gray is known to have spread baseless claims, especially about coronavirus vaccines. He told CNN in a statement that after “several hours” of consideration, Reeves and Savage concluded there was “no time to appeal,” adding that “the family’s priority is to enjoy peaceful time with their baby until the operation. , and to support him through the operation.”
Nikki Turner, medical director of the Immunization Advisory Center at the University of Auckland, said in an affidavit filed in the case that any components of the vaccine were unlikely to be present in donated blood and would not be harmful anyway.
Coronavirus vaccines, including those using mRNA technology, have been shown time and time again to be safe and effective tools to fight severe illness from covid-19.
