In vaccine resisters, strain of regret
From hospital beds and obits, some now share raw remorse
PROVO, Utah — As Mindy Greene spent another day in the COVID-19 intensive care unit, listening to the whirring machines that now breathed for her 42-year-old husband, Russ, she opened her phone and tapped out a message.
“We did not get the vaccine,” she wrote on Facebook. “I read all kinds of things about the vaccine and it scared me. So I made the decision and prayed about it and got the impression that we would be OK.”
They were not.
Her husband, the father to their four children, was now hovering between life and death, tentacles of tubes spilling from his body. The patient in the room next to her husband’s had died hours earlier. That day, July 13, Greene decided to add her voice to an unlikely group of people speaking out in the polarized national debate over vaccination: the remorseful.
“If I had the information I have today we would have gotten vaccinated,” Greene wrote. Come what may, she hit “send.”
Amid a resurgence of coronavirus infections and deaths, some people who once rejected the vaccine or simply waited too long are now grappling with the consequences, often in raw, public ways.
A number are speaking from hospital beds, at funerals and in obituaries about their regrets, about the pain of enduring the virus and watching unvaccinated family members die gasping for breath.
“I have such incredible guilt,” Greene said one morning as she sat in the fourth-floor lobby outside the ICU at Utah Valley Hospital in Provo. “I blame myself still. Every day.”
The surge of infections and hospitalizations among unvaccinated people has brought the grim realities of COVID-19 home for many who thought they had skirted the pandemic. But now, with anger and fatigue piled up on all sides, the question is whether their stories can change any minds.
Some people hospitalized with the virus still vow not to get vaccinated, and surveys suggest that the majority of unvaccinated
Americans are not budging. Doctors in COVID-19 units say some patients refuse to believe they are infected with anything beyond the flu.
“We have people in the ICU with COVID who are denying they have COVID,” said Dr. Matthew Sperry, a pulmonary critical care physician who has been treating Greene’s husband. “It doesn’t matter what we say.”
COVID-19 hospitalizations in Utah have risen 35% over the past two weeks, and Sperry said ICUs across the 24-hospital system where he works are 98% full.
Still, some hospitals swamped with patients in largely conservative, unvaccinated swaths of
the nation have begun to recruit COVID-19 survivors as public health messengers of last resort. The hope is that onetime skeptics might persuade others who dismissed vaccination campaigns led by President Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and armies of local doctors and health workers.
Theirs are “scared straight” stories for a pandemic that has thrived on misinformation, fear and hardened partisan divisions over vaccinations.
“People are creating news from their hospital beds, from the wards,” said Rebecca Weintraub, an assistant professor of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School. “It’s the accessibility of the message: ‘I didn’t protect my own family. Let me help you protect yours.’ ”
In Springfield, Missouri, where coronavirus cases spiked this summer, Russell Taylor sat in a hospital gown, an oxygen cannula draped across his face, to offer a provaccine testimonial in a hospital video. “I don’t see how I could not get it now,” he said.
A Texas man who underwent a double-lung transplant after contracting the virus made a plea on local television for others to get vaccinated.
Some people who were quick to embrace the vaccine are now choosing to speak out about family members who did not.
It was a role Kimberle Jones never wanted, but one she embraced after her daughter, Erica Thompson, 37, a mother from St. Louis, died July 4, nearly three months after she had what she thought was a bad asthma attack.
“I want to be a voice for her,” said Jones, who got vaccinated as soon as she was able to. “I really think my daughter would want me to say, ‘Go get vaccinated.’ ”
It was advice Thompson — like 39% of American adults — did not heed.
Her mother said Thompson had been leery of how quickly the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines had rolled out — the culmination of decades of scientific research. She also believed the government-run campaign was a plot against Black people like her, according to her mother.
Vaccination rates for Black and Hispanic Americans lag behind the white population, a gap that researchers attribute to distrust rooted in a history of medical discrimination and a lack of access and outreach.
Thompson went to the hospital coughing and struggling to breathe in mid-May and was on a ventilator within days.
“Her last words to me were ‘Mama, I can’t breathe,’ ” Jones said.
In Utah, Greene said her husband had left the family’s vaccination decisions in her hands. She initially planned to get the shot as soon as her nextdoor neighbor, a physician, got his.
But she had concerns about the vaccine, and found plenty of reasons to hesitate when she scrolled through social media or talked with anti-vaccine friends.
Clicking on a few links took her down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories touted by anti-vaccine attorneys and YouTubers, and videos in which anti-vaccine doctors and nurses decried the COVID-19 shots as “bioweapons.”
COVID-19 crashed into the family’s world in late June when their two oldest sons brought the virus home from a church camp where nine boys got infected. Then came the day that Greene’s husband, a hunter who hiked across mountains, had to be rushed to the hospital when his oxygen levels cratered.
There are uncertain months ahead as doctors try to repair his damaged lungs and wean him off a ventilator. He was briefly transferred from the hospital to a longterm acute care center last week, a hopeful moment. But doctors found a hole in his lungs, and he was rushed back into the ICU.
Greene says her views shifted as the virus ravaged her husband’s body and doctors put him on a ventilator. They shifted as she talked with doctors and nurses about the unvaccinated patients pouring into hospitals.
Greene said she had made an appointment to get her children vaccinated.