Ronald McDonald House tries to backpedal on evicting 4-year-old leukemia patient

The British Columbia & Yukon arm of Ronald McDonald House is facing backlash after a viral video circulated online. Drea Humphrey is urging the charity to Let Them Stay.

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Ronald McDonald House BC & Yukon (RMHBC) is evicting sick children and their families that rely on the organization's housing support to be able to access life-saving treatments more easily.

Why, you ask? Because they are unvaccinated for COVID-19.

The dehumanizing policy sparked a frenzy of outrage immediately after Austin Furgason, the father of a four-year-old boy with leukemia, uploaded a heart-wrenching video Tuesday, where he questioned an RMHBC manager about the reasoning behind throwing their unvaccinated family out. 

“This was a family and a home to us,” Furgason told me when I met with his family for our interview.

The policy to evict people in need due to their choice not take an experimental vaccine with zero long-term studies was approved by the charity's 14 member board of directors and goes into effect on January 17.

It requires “everyone five years or older who are working, staying, or visiting” RMHBC’s facilities in their Vancouver house location, as well as their “Family Room” in Surrey Memorial Hospital, to show proof of being “fully vaccinated (2 doses)” in order to enter their facilities.

Tenants such as the Furgasons were given until the end of the month to pack up and leave. 

The policy seems both cruel and unjustified, considering Pfizer, a substantial donor to RMH and whom RMH labels as a “friend” on their website, had their very own CEO, Albert Bourla, recently admitted that when it comes to the dominant and significantly more mild Omicron variant, two shots provide “little, if any, protection” for the person injected with them.

“This seems to be a trending thing across the country, where they are just putting their hands around the throat of every unvaccinated person and squeezing until they obey,” Furgason says in this full report. And I think he’s absolutely right.

That’s why we at Rebel News have created a petition to allow everyone who is disturbed by RMHBC’s policy to sign and to call on RMC to make their house a safe haven for all sick kids and families, regardless of their vaccination status.

Since the backlash began after the now-viral Facebook video of the Furgason’s struggle aired, RMH appears to be backpedalling from what was written in their black and white policy.

According to a Vancouver City News article, which was recently amended to exclude and revise some of its prior statements regarding the Furgason's situation, RMH is now claiming that “families will not be forced out onto the streets if they are not vaccinated by the end of the month.”

The charity claims “its family services team and social workers will work to find alternate housing for families who refuse to get everyone over the age of five vaccinated by the deadline.”

RMH’s watered-down afterthought to their shocking policy doesn’t seem to be diffusing the outrage the charity is attracting internationally on social media. Support for the Furgasons has been remarkable during this time, as their original GoFundMe page for when four-year-old Jack was first diagnosed with cancer has grown exponentially in the past 24 hours.

If Canadians condone sick kids with leukemia who have come to love living at Ronald McDonald House during the worse days of their lives to be tossed aside — what will come next for the unvaccinated?

They say evil prevails when good men do nothing, so let's do something about this.

Go to LetThemStay.ca and sign our petition to call on RMH to reverse this disgraceful policy, and then accept our prompt that guides you to email Cathy Loblaw, the CEO of Ronald McDonald House, to be certain she knows you are counting on her to make sure that happens.

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  • By Drea Humphrey

PETITION: Let Them Stay

18,780 signatures
Goal: 30,000 Signatures

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  • By Drea Humphrey

Send an email to the Ronald McDonald House Charities Canada

Fill out the form on this page to send an email directly to Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC) Canadian CEO, Cathy Loblaw, the executive director, Kate Horton, as well as RMHC's national and B.C. bureaus.

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