The Michael Knowles Show - Unvaccinated Child Denied Organ Transplant | FULL INTERVIEW Chrissy and Lee Hicks

Episode Date: December 27, 2022

Chrissy and Lee Hicks claim they were shocked to find out The Duke University children’s hospital was denying their young girl a kidney transplant because she has not received a COVID vaccine. Now they join The Michael Knowles Show to tell their story. Check out DailyWire+ here: https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe-plus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I really, really want to get to Lee and Chrissy Hicks, parents of Yulia Hicks, this 14-year-old girl who needs the kidney transplant. Lee and Chrissy are both Army veterans. They are parents to 11 children, eight biological children, and three adopted children. You want to talk family goals? This is like the family, this is the family that I suspect we all aspire to. Okay, they live in North Carolina, they homeschool their kids, they're doing everything right. They are so grounded here.

And all they are asking is that the medical establishment give their daughter basic treatment. And this medical center, this Duke University Children's Hospital, is behaving in a way that is simply evil. I don't know how else. It's just evil to say, yeah, oh, you like that kidney? Oh, you like your daughter? You want your daughter to live? Okay, take the shot. take the shot that we lied to you about for two years. Take the shot that has killed people,

that has killed a lot of people, actually. Okay. And that's not a conspiracy theory that's well attested to at this point. Even the medical establishment will admit it in some moments of candor. Okay. And take take the shot that has, I think, been shown to complicate things such as organ donation. Take it because we tell you to. And if you don't do what we tell you. And if you don't do what we tell you to do. We're going to take your kid from you. Lee, Chrissy, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for having us. So awful. What you're going through, obviously, you've got my sympathy, and I'm sure it's sympathy from everybody out there. Before we figure out how to fix it, what exactly has Duke been telling you? Well, we've been seen by the Duke doctors for her dialysis

for the last two years. Once the COVID vaccine became, I guess, approved for children, I think that was in March last year, they started saying, like, do you want to give her the shot? Do you want to give her the shot? We kept pushing back and saying, no, we're not going to do the shot. And they would say, well, you're not going to get a transplant without it. And I just kept telling him, well, we'll cross that bridge when we get there. Let's just focus on doing dialysis with her. She fought COVID in January of 2022, 24 hours.

It was a very mild case, no problems. And she got over it right away. So we've always been pushing back against the shot. Of course, what is the argument here to get it? Because I remember when the shot first came out, the Fauci's of the world were insisting that everybody get it and then everyone get the second one and everyone get the third one because it was so effective that you had to get like five of them. But then even medical doctors, even people from the big medical establishment institutions, came out and admitted actually COVID doesn't pose this huge risk to younger people.

actually some of the vaccines seem to pose a greater risk, specifically to younger people than COVID does. This is why the use of the vaccine has been banned places all over the world for people under the age of 30, for teenagers. So how do they even look at you with a straight face and say your 14-year-old girl who faces statistically zero risk from COVID? She has to take the shot or we won't give her a kidney. They don't give an explanation at all. They just tell us that's where the CDC's recommendation changed in October, and that's when they said, okay, now you're going to have to get the shot. They say it's not a requirement or a requirement, but it is,

because they say it's just highly recommended, but you can't get the kidney without getting the vaccination. And so it is a requirement. They're just playing semantics with words. And up until October, they were doing kidney transplants without the vaccine. We know that for a fact. We have one of the guys reached out to us and told us he received a kidney without the vaccine in October. So it was up until October, this past October, they were doing that.

And now a sudden they changed their tone and make it a requirement. And then they don't give us an explanation. They said, you don't get the kidney if you don't get the vaccination. That's an amazing trick of language. They say it's a recommendation, but it's actually a requirement because the medical centers say, will we are going to force you to follow all the CDC recommendations. So the CDC gets to get away with saying, no, no, no, we're not requiring it. But in practice, this is required for everybody. So what is your opposition to your daughter getting the vaccine? Is it medical? Is it religious?

Is it political? Is it all of the above? I was going to say, can it be all the above? So we've always requested medical, I mean, religious exemptions for all the vaccines that have aborted fetal cell lines. We've done it with all of our children. This is no different. However, there's just so much evidence mounting about the dangers of this vaccine. I mean, you really have to be blind or turning a blind eye if you don't see how much is happening with this vaccine. On top of that, we've done a lot of research on our own and found here of your articles that are showing that there is a higher risk of rejection with solid organ transplant if they've been vaccinated. So I guess I would have to say all the above. Of course, of course. Makes perfect sense.

but as we were just discussing earlier today, there is now a major attack on religious liberty coming from the Congress and coming from the White House. I mean, this bill that they just signed the Respect for Marriage Act effectively prohibits Christian, Jewish, Muslim, ordinary agnostic people from refusing to participate in a so-called gay marriage in public life. I mean, it's, though the headline seems to be this is about marriage. It's ultimately really about suppressing religion. And that's true in many ways of the COVID vaccine. There are very strong bioethical, religious, moral arguments for not taking this vaccine. And in most areas of public life, you look at the military exemptions, you look at government exemptions, they try to do it even

with private sector exemptions, the powers that be say, too bad, I don't care. Take your religion and stuff it. So is this just a Duke problem, or is this any medical center you could go to? Well, oh, so there are other children hospitals in North Carolina that require the same thing for kidney transplant. You cannot get to kidney transplant without the vaccination, which makes no sense to me. But there are places in Texas and Florida that will do it without. So it's being done in this country without. It's not like we're putting her life in danger by not following the doctors that know how to do transplants. That's not what we're getting at.

But there are other places that are doing it. In fact, Duke was doing it. Just three months ago, they were giving transplants to unvaccinated patients. and now suddenly we are being excluded from that. And we have been fighting this mandate other ways too. So we had to fight the mandate for our kids to go to college without getting a shot. This isn't the first time we've had to fight the mandates. Right, right.

Of course. No, we did it at the Daily Wire. We ended up suing the federal government. We were the first company to bring this lawsuit that, mercifully, that one, we won. Some of the other lawsuits about the military exemptions and all the rest, that those did not work out. But the one that we were on, we won.

And we did it because we said, well, what are we going to do? If the government does come down and say, you as a business have to mandate this for your employees, we would have to go along with it or close up shop. There was no other option because the fees could end up being hundreds of thousands of dollars per day. So they could bankrupt the business within two weeks. It's true. It's medical tyranny. It's all of it.

It's all that's tyranny. That's right. If we don't have the freedom to choose what we've decided as injected into our body, then we've lost our freedoms altogether. You've got the option in Florida. You've got the option in Texas. Is that ultimately what you're going to have to do? I mean, I can't imagine it's exactly cheap, especially if you've got 11 kids.

I can't imagine it's cheap to go, you know, post up a home in Texas for however long this process will take. So we're waiting to be accepted. You actually have to apply to these transplant centers. So we're hoping to hear something really soon because we're. We have a lot of donors that have reached out, or potential donors, that want to be tested to see if they can be Ulias match. But we can't send them to a medical center. Duke is cut off our potential donors as well. So we have to get a medical center set up so that they can go there and be tested for Yulia.

Yes, it will be very expensive for us to have split ops. That's why we had a friend set up at Givesendgo for us. So that's givesendgo.com backslash kidney for Yulia. People have been so generous to us. So many people have reached out to us. And also, I just want to say, too, that when we got the microphone, I don't know why we got the microphone, because there's a lot of people in the same situation. But we want to use our microphone to help other people. And so many families have reached out to us already. We've been able to connect them, let them know which medical centers they need to reach out to to try to get their loved ones, transplants as well. So that's givson.com slash kidney for Y-U-L-Y-U-L-A. So people can go there to help out. We also have a website, Yuliagrace.com, and that's where people can contact us if they want to be a potential donor or if there's other medical centers that we're not aware of yet.

We are hoping this one in Florida works out, but we're still have to wait and see. Well, that's good. Obviously, people can go donate and pray. Also, praying is always a good thing to do. Ultimately, yes. So that's how you can help in that situation. There's something else that I'm. want to do, though, which is I want to punish Duke for what they're doing. I think actually it's not enough just to help the people who have clearly been victimized here. But you need to make sure that this is not permitted to continue into the future. We were talking earlier on the show about retribution. And I think Duke deserves some serious justice for their crimes here. Okay. And so

from a political standpoint, how do we stop medical centers from doing this? So we have retained a lawyer Mike Yoder, he is working that right now, punitive damages to Duke. And so we're, as I'm going right now, that's what we're trying to do right now to help to hold Duke accountable for this, you know, travesty in my mind. But people can call Duke if they want to as well and let their opinions be known. But we just ask that there's no foul language used or any death threats. We want to keep this civil. But for Duke to understand that we're not alone, there's other people in this country that also agree with what we're doing. Right. That is an important point. You've got to make sure that when you engage in these political actions, you don't give

the leftists the opportunity to paint you as a terrorist or all the way that they ordinarily talk about us. Though conservatives don't really need to be told this. I think conservatives generally know this, but it's always good to repeat because I remember not that long ago here in Nashville, we discovered that Vanderbilt Children's Hospital was performing transgender procedures on little kids. And this is Tennessee. Okay, we're talking about a pretty red state here. And we discovered this, and we found it people just didn't really know about it. And so we gathered a lot of information. My colleague Matt Walsh has made the transgender issue something of a hobby horse of his and had a big movie come out about it. So he just published a Twitter thread with the research that the Daily Wire had compiled.

And the moment we shed a light on this, like within days, the Vanderbilt University just caved because they didn't want. And I just suspect if people in North Carolina, taxpayers, donors even to Duke, medical politicians who have a lot to say about the conduct here, if they just knew that this was happening, I cannot imagine how it would be tolerated for much longer. I agree. I agree with you. We have had a couple of legislators to reach out to us, but we have heard. heard no more from them. So I don't know. I hope that something does happen that we're out as well. How is your daughter doing through all of this? She's doing amazing. I've said on other interviews, too. She's the most amazing little girl. She's been through so much in her life. We're her third family

in America. I mean, she's been through so much, but she just pushes through with a smile on her face. She's always happy, always wanting to help, so involved with all the other kids in the family. I mean, she really just just an amazing person. You mentioned that you were the third family. How did you come to adopt her? Well, that's a long story. So the first family, I met them in Ukraine in 2018. We adopted our first daughter from Ukraine.

And there was another family that adopted here in North Carolina. That didn't work out. They sent her to Arizona to another family to potentially adopt her. didn't work out so they were on a plane back to north kermina the family here that originally adopted her was not able to go pick them up at the airport so we did because i knew who they were were her and a brother and so we picked them up at the airport and we thought we were going to be keeping them for a weekend just to kind of figure out what we're going to you know who's going to adopt and what we're going to do the next steps and we ended up being the family that they

ended up going to so we're grateful for that i have i have total family some of envy right now. I got married. We got started a little bit later. I hope to catch up. I think as just a matter of biology, I'm not quite sure we could get up to eight biological children, though you've adopted as well. Now, your family size is unusual by today's stand. By historical standards, it's not, but by modern liberal society standards, it certainly is. What has impelled you to have such a large family? God. Simply answer to God. No, it was never our plan to have a big family. But my husband was military and we traveled around the world. And our oldest son kept praying for a brother and they just kept coming. So there we go. Three girls. The four girls and

seven boys. We wouldn't have it any other way though. Like our life is crazy and chaotic and amazing and beautiful. That that is amazing. And you mentioned your military service. So thank you, thank you for your service. It even drives home the point further than it already was. In political stories. Sometimes the details are kind of complicated, and these are nuanced issues and questions. And sometimes it's just pretty clear who the good guys are and the bad guys are. I mean, if you took this story to a Hollywood producer and you said, hey, I got this story about a family, military veterans, you know, big loving family, adopted children, a poor little girl who needs a kidney transplant, and then a bunch of doctors who, out of a vindictive, spiteful

tyranny, are demanding that she inject herself with a dangerous drug or they won't give her her kidney. And that's going to be the movie. You know what the Hollywood producer would say? The producer would say, come on, it's a little too on the nose. Come on, let's make it a little more realistic here, okay? But this is what's really happening to you. This episode is brought to you by Nespresso. Life moves quickly and taking care of yourself shouldn't feel like another chore. With the new Nespresso Virtual Up machine, morning routines become rituals. Whether organizing, getting the household moving, or preparing for the day, your coffee shouldn't ask for more. With Virtual Up, just press brew and your morning begins. Rich aroma, old flavor, zero effort.

Press to explore every coffee, a new world. New Virtual Up, shop now at nespresso.com. It is. Absolutely. This is really happening to. have other families. We jump with Julia all the time that she should write her autobiography. So maybe she'll actually get that out of this. She's a ferocious reader and she does write books. You mentioned other families who are in a similar position. Had any of them reached out to you as a result of the publicity?

Yes, there's one little boy who's only two years old in South Carolina and they will not give him a transplant either without the vaccine, which is unconscionable to me. He's two years old. I've been talking to that grandfather a lot. We were trying to get him to another medical institute, and he's trying to fight the tyranny down there in South Carolina as well. I didn't even know the vaccine was approved for two-year-olds, much less that they would mandate it.

I know. Right. It's horrific. I think the CDC is now recommending down to six months old for this vaccine. Six. Which is unconstitutional. Yeah, that's inconscionable to me. I can't believe that.

What's amazing about it, too. I mean, you say that, obviously, you're a religious family. God is at the center of so much that has happened in your family. But humility is the beginning of wisdom. A fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And you would just think that after two years of the experts in the lab coats being proven wrong and in some cases being proven to have lied about and to have been negligent about, this virus and this vaccine repeatedly time and time again on the safety, on the efficacy, on the way that the technology would even work, on what the virus is, on where the virus came from, on how to stop getting the virus, on just every single thing about it. They might have just a little bit of humility and loosen their grip and their demands just a little bit,

but it seems that it's only gone in the opposite direction. It seems that they've only clamped down even further. Yeah, I really feel like it's a power struggle at this point. Like, they want their way, and we're not going to do it. So then they're going to withhold what we need. Have you raised significant amount of money yet to be able to afford going to Texas or Florida? Yes, we really have. People have been wage very much.

I mean, we're overwhelmed by the generosity of perfect strangers. And the words of encouragement that have come. to us. It's been amazing. There have been some nasty comments, but I would say it's 10 to 1 in support of us. Of course. I can't even imagine who the nasty comments are from. Maybe it's just Dr. Fauci with his pseudonymous accounts or something. A lot of times they don't give their real email. It's just like a made-up email and there's a lot of foul language. But we just delete it and move on. Of course. Of course. That's all that one can really do. I mean, I just think from the beginning, especially of this whole COVID operation, there has been this concerted effort.

not only to force people to comply with their absurd demands, but to discourage people. But to say you can never beat us. We've got all of the power. We've got all of the cards. That's so much about what you will comply, I think, ultimately came down to, is that there were people who didn't have religious objections to the vaccine who just knew because they had good guts and common sense that there was probably something a little bit weird about this experimental drug that was concocted in five minutes and didn't undergo any long.

long-term trials. But because they, you know, they just didn't want to, they couldn't lose their job. Some people, they just couldn't lose their job, or they couldn't say no, or they were in the military, or they can't, for whatever reason, they just went, because they fell into discouragement, you have not been discouraged. It's all the Lord. Like, we really just are leading on God, and he's carrying us through this. We joke that we never know what our life is going to be from day to day, and it kind of just blew up in the last week. But we really feel like we are doing what is right, in good and we'll just keep clinging to that. Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. You, I'm pleased to see you have not been discouraged,

and your story is a great encouragement to a lot of other people because everyone's been up against some pressure during the COVID regime. Very few people have been up against the kind of pressure that you were up against and you've stood firm and people have come out to help and people are standing with you. So please head on over if you were so inclined. It's end of year. This is when people start, you know, writing checks anyway before New Year's Eve. So head on over to give, send, go, slash. So it's givsendgo.com backslash kidney for Yulia. Kidney for Yulia.

Lee, Chrissy, thank you both for coming on the show. We'll keep you in our prayers. Thank you. And hope to see a happy outcome sooner rather than later. Thank you so much. And thanks for telling our story. Of course. I'm Michael Nulls.

This is the Michael Nulls show. We'll see you next time.