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--:-- Host - Georgia Howe: This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. When you visit the doctor, you probably hand over your insurance, your ID, and contact details. It's just one of the many places that has your personal info. And if any of them accidentally expose it, you could be at risk for identity theft. LifeLock monitors millions of data points a second. If you become a victim, they'll fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash podcast. Terms apply.
--:-- Host - Georgia Howe: According to her family, a teenage girl is being denied a kidney transplant because she's not vaccinated. Duke is not treating us with any respect at all. We get the vaccine or we don't get a kidney. We speak to the girl's parents about how the family is reacting and what's next for the 14-year-old. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Tuesday, December 13th, and this is Morning Wire. The Biden administration is diverting air marshals to the southern border. Why is the administration taking that action and what are the potential risks? And we speak to a former ambassador of the Organization of American States who warns that communist China is gaining a dangerous advantage in Latin America. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.
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--:-- Host - Georgia Howe: According to one family, Duke University's Children's Hospital is denying a 14-year-old girl a kidney transplant because she has not received a COVID vaccine. The hospital says the vaccine is a requirement to be a candidate. Joining us to discuss is Daily Wire investigative reporter Maraid Alordi.
--:-- Maraid Alordi: Hey, Georgia. So Yulia Hicks is 14 years old and has a genetic kidney disorder that requires a kidney transplant. But according to her family, Duke Children's Hospital in Durham, North Carolina, is refusing to put her on the kidney wait list because she's not vaccinated against COVID. The family says this was not made clear to them until the 11th hour. They claim they were under the impression that the vaccine was recommended, but only later learned that it was required.
--:-- Maraid Alordi: Now, why does the hospital say that she needs to have this vaccine to be on the list? Well, according to a recorded phone conversation, the hospital says the vaccine requirement is related to a CDC recommendation. I reached out to the hospital for further comment and did not hear back. But other medical personnel I've consulted with say that hospitals generally want to maximize the chances of success for the transplant. This often means implementing rigorous requirements to ensure the patient stays healthy during the process. This shot is one of many criteria in Yulia's case. Transplant patients undergo immunosuppression treatments prior to and during the surgery, so they are at higher risk for infections.
--:-- Maraid Alordi: And what was Yulia's parents' reason for opposing the shot? Well, they have a few reasons. They say Yulia has already had COVID, so she has natural immunity. They're also concerned about the drug's side effects, especially due to Yulia's compromised health. And they have a religious objection to vaccines that use fetal cell lines during the research or manufacturing processes.
--:-- Maraid Alordi: The doctors at Duke say that the rules are not flexible. Here's part of a recorded phone call between Yulia's parents and the hospital. I can require you to do anything. I can recommend these things. But if you don't follow our recommendations, then Yulia can't be a transplant candidate here. Based on our criteria number five, which is persistent non-adherence with medication, dialysis treatment, or medical recommendations. And also based on number 10, which would be medical risk factors that make transplant surgery unsafe. And being unvaccinated to the CDC-recommended vaccinations based on her age is part of that.
--:-- Chrissy Hicks: Being strong-armed by the medical community, denying us a life-saving treatment has been extremely stressful for our family. Basically, in the last week since we found out, it's upended our lives and turned it upside down. Right now, I'm looking for a different hospital that would be willing to perform the transplant without the vaccine. Our greatest need right now is to find a medical center that will perform the transplant without Yulia having the vaccination. We have some leads. So many people have reached out to us and we're so grateful for that. We just are in the process now of trying to reach out to these centers and finding out which one will take Yulia.
--:-- Chrissy Hicks: So overall, an extremely difficult situation. Another interesting wrinkle is that Yulia is adopted from Ukraine. She stayed with two families before she was adopted by the Hicks family. So she's had a tough path. Fortunately, the family's fundraiser has exploded since the media picked up Yulia's story, and her parents say they are blown away by everyone's generosity so far.
--:-- Maraid Alordi: All right. Well, best of luck to Yulia and her family. Mairead, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Host - Georgia Howe: That was Daily Wire investigative reporter Maraid Elordi. Coming up, the GOP calls out the Biden administration for sending air marshals to the southern border. If you're running a business and the only way to get in touch with you is via phone call, you may be losing customers. Podium helps your small business stay ahead of the curve with modern messaging that makes it easy for your customers to connect with your business. From healthcare providers to plumbers, over 100,000 businesses are texting with customers through Podium. See how Podium can grow your business and watch a demo at Podium.com slash wire. That's Podium.com slash wire. Podium, let's grow.
--:-- Host - Georgia Howe: Congressional Republicans are calling out the Biden administration for its recent plan to send air marshals to the southern border. The Daily Mail obtained a letter from GOP Rep. Mike Carey to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas asking a list of questions about the proposed policy that would send some of the nation's 3,000 air marshals to the southern border, leaving far fewer flights with armed protection. Here to talk about it is columnist David Marcus.
--:-- David Marcus: Morning. The deployment really just speaks to how overwhelmed our border security agencies are today. They already needed more manpower. And now as Title 42 is no longer being applied, that was a COVID-related measure that helped stem the tide a bit. The problem's poised to get much worse.
--:-- David Marcus: What Republicans are upset about also is that at an extremely busy travel time, the number of air marshals actually doing the job they signed up for could be as low as an eighth of normal staffing. And it's not just Republicans. As the Washington Examiner reported, air marshals themselves are threatening to just not go to the border and get fired. So this is a messy situation.
--:-- David Marcus: Do we know what these air marshals would be tasked with doing down at the border? Or is this just a case of trying to get warm bodies on the scene? That's one of Representative Carey's questions, as well as how much this whole operation is going to cost, of course. There aren't federal agents, so I imagine they wouldn't be running the chow line. But yes, Carey and I guess the marshals would like to know specifically what they'd be there to do.
--:-- David Marcus: And it speaks to larger concerns that the Biden administration is simply trying to hold the border together with spit and tape. There's no clear plan. And he recently said he wasn't visiting the border because there are more important things. Right. That comment sparked a lot of backlash.
--:-- David Marcus: This also comes at a time when newly independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema and Republican Tom Tillis have floated a kind of trial balloon for a more comprehensive reform of immigration. Does this kind of mess actually strengthen their hand? It's hard to say. Conservatives in particular have a lot of concerns about the amount of amnesty in this proposed plan and, frankly, about actually achieving the kind of border security that it promises.
--:-- David Marcus: Maybe you can broadly say that having a framework helps to define the boundaries of discussion or compromise. But so far, this plan isn't achieving that. There are a lot more Republicans today, as opposed to 10 years ago, who basically say that they aren't even talking about amnesties or pathways to citizenship until after security is attained at the border.
--:-- David Marcus: So on the other side of this, of course, is air travel safety. Should Americans be concerned about there being so many fewer air marshals on planes? Presumably they exist for a reason, right? And again, this is what Republicans are asking. For two years, we've seen reports of upticks in violence on planes, flight attendants in harm's way, fights breaking out. And those are things air marshals can deal with, completely aside from their more basic purpose of protecting against potential terror attack.
--:-- David Marcus: Now, finally, with Republicans about to take over the House again and gain significant investigatory abilities, many have targeted Mayorkas, who's in charge of both the border agents and the air marshals, for potential impeachment. Could this add to their case? Yes. There's probably nobody on Biden's cabinet who the GOP knives are sharper for than Mayorkas, in part because of the crisis on the border, but also his handling of the fake story about agents whipping migrants, where he really threw his own guys under the bus.
--:-- David Marcus: So I do think that if Republicans want to start impeaching people, Mayorkas is very, very likely at the top of that list. Yeah, they're certainly not pulling any punches when it comes to how they speak about him publicly.
--:-- Host - Georgia Howe: That was Daily Wire contributor David Marcus. The expanding role of communist China in Latin America has some experts sounding the alarm over the threat that poses to American interests in the region. Joining us to discuss is Carlos Trujillo, a former ambassador to the Organization of American States.
--:-- Carlos Trujillo: The worst changes you've seen is the recent announcement of the easing of sanctions against the communist regime in Venezuela and also the border policy. When the United States turns us back on democracy and human rights and eases sanctions against one of the most brutal totalitarian dictatorships in the hemisphere, it weakens democracy and human rights everywhere.
--:-- Carlos Trujillo: I think at times they're very naive thinking that they're going to out-negotiate or they're going to outsmart Nicolas Maduro and the thugs who are running Venezuela. And at the end of the day, the message we're sending to the rest of the region, especially with strong democratic actors, is that there's no consequences for poor behavior.
--:-- Carlos Trujillo: We're going to spend more time trying to focus on cutting a deal with a totalitarian regime in order to extract energy for our production even though we can produce it here in the United States than defending democracy and human rights across the region. Another failed policy has really been the border policy. If you look at the Remain in Mexico policy, the third country safe agreements that were signed historically into the Trump administration led to negative migration in the last months of the Trump presidency.
--:-- Carlos Trujillo: What we see now at the border is at least 200,000 apprehensions every single month, month over month, and the chaos that that causes across the entire Central American and across really the region. When you have migrants traversing, when you have transnational criminal groups who are receiving a significant amount of pay, when you have guns and drugs and other items and contraband being moved across our border, that disrupts our security, but the security and the tranquility in the entire region.
--:-- Carlos Trujillo: Now, one of the issues that you've sounded the alarm on recently is how China is becoming more and more of a dominant political actor in Latin America. How does this all fit together? The current administration has really gone back towards a policy of appeasement in the region, a much more relaxed approach to the region, which has created an even bigger opportunity for China to come and be aggressive in debt-loading a lot of these countries, extracting natural resources, and peddling influence and power.
--:-- Carlos Trujillo: And one of the biggest tools we used under the Trump administration to combat that was a direct finance corporation. Direct finance corporation would provide concessionary interest rates to developing countries and allow American businesses to compete across the region, also risk insurance. And it was predicated on if the deal made sense for the American taxpayer, if it was a fair deal, if it was a safe deal, if it advanced our interests, we would obviously support American companies in their competition across the region.
--:-- Carlos Trujillo: Unfortunately, the Biden administration has politicized the direct finance corporation. Now the new mantra there is much more driven on whether it has a social equity inclusion element or a climate element, rather than just if it makes economic sense for the host country as well as for the United States taxpayer and the private business who's risking their capital.
--:-- Carlos Trujillo: All right, so that opens the door for China. Well, it's a direct competition. It's a direct competition. When we would compete with DFC, China would bring their alternative. Our products were better. They were American-made. Countries in the hemisphere want to do business with American businesses. They prefer American businesses over Chinese businesses. But we still have to compete. When we handicap ourselves because of social policies or climate policies, we're no longer competing. And these countries, their critical infrastructure, their hospitals, their emergency management, it still needs to be developed.
--:-- Carlos Trujillo: So when we remove ourselves from the competition because of our own policies, the only other competitor in town is China. Well, Carlos, thank you so much for joining us.
--:-- Host - Georgia Howe: That was Carlos Trujillo, a former ambassador to the Organization of the American States. Another story we're tracking this week. In a developing story, Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced former CEO of now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, has been arrested in the Bahamas. The move comes after the U.S. shared a sealed indictment with the country's government. SBF is expected to be extradited to the U.S. That's all the time we've got this morning. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back later this afternoon with more news you need to know.
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