“He should have given me the damn vaccine”: the shocking last message of a COVID-19 patient before he died

Micheal Freedy was not against vaccination, his fiancée said, but like many Americans he had not yet been vaccinated against the coronavirus. As Jessica DuPreez explains, this 39-year-old father just wanted to wait and find out more about how people reacted to vaccines. “All we did was wait a year,” said to The Washington Post on Sunday.

But everything changed. This weekend – the DuPreez duel has been going on for days and her voice cracks – the Las Vegas mother of five gave interview after interview to spread the same message: “Get the vaccine.” It revealed that Freedy came to the same conclusion in a last text message while battling COVID-19 in an intensive care unit ward in July.

“He should have given me the damn vaccine”, he wrote to DuPreez, according to a photo he shared with The Post.

Freedy, listed on her phone as “My Heart,” died Thursday, leaving behind her young children, including a 17-month-old.

“My children no longer have a father because we doubt”he said on CNN as a child cried in the background. “Huebiese preferred a bad reaction to the vaccine to having to bury my husband. I would do it without hesitation ”.

The highly communicable delta variant of the coronavirus has given new urgency to vaccination efforts in the US, with some hospitals overflowing with new ones and health officials warning that “the war has changed.” Multi-million dollar lotteries, door-to-door disclosure, and pleas from doctors have failed to convince millions of Americans, prompting governments and employers to increasingly resort to mandates for their workers. Slightly less than half the country is fully vaccinated, and 45% of the population is inoculated in Nevada, the home state of Freedy and DuPreez.

Despite new evidence that those immunized can still spread the virus, authorities say the vaccines remain highly effective, especially in preventing death and serious illness. The vast majority of COVID-19 patients who die or are hospitalized are not vaccinated.

Some are adamant: a Washington Post-ABC News poll revealed in early June that 29% of Americans were not planning to get vaccinated, up several percentage points from a few months earlier. But there are many like Freedy: undecided, concerned about side effects, who say they want to wait a little longer. With the increase in coronavirus cases, authorities are struggling to persuade them.

Added to this message are people like DuPreez, who changed his mind over a heartbreaking loss. In fact, she says that she and her oldest son were vaccinated after Freedy fell ill.

She assures that she and her fiancé – the father of her two youngest children – never despised science, they just wanted to be cautious. They wore masks, he said, and sanitized their hands and traveled to collect their shopping orders. And when they went to San Diego with the children in mid-July, the threat of the pandemic seemed to be fading fast. Thousands of people had recently flocked to the Las Vegas area to attend a Garth Brooks concert and an Ultimate Fighting Championship event.

But Freedy ended up in the ER with horrible sunburns from her trip to the beach. He couldn’t eat or sleep and had chills, but the doctor sent him home. He returned to the emergency room when the symptoms persisted, there he learned that there was more than just sun poisoning: he tested positive for the coronavirus. Freedy returned home with instructions to drink water and isolate himself.

Then one day, around 3 am, Freedy woke up DuPreez “in a panic,” according to the woman. It was hard for him to breathe. When he tried to stand up, he fell. I knew something was very wrong. The couple rushed to another emergency room, where staff members discovered that he had low oxygen in his blood and were surprised that he was even able to speak.

Freedy received oxygen and then a machine to strain his lungs.

She tried to be positive.

“Keep in mind that you can come home in a few days, do whatever they tell you,” she texted Freedy after he sent her messages concerned about “the long-term effects” of what it was happening to her body.

Then, last Monday, came a flood of more serious messages: “911 911 911.”

Freedy was going to the ICU, immediately.

DuPreez began to cry as he recounted his last phone call.

“I told him to please fight so he can come home to us. He said yes, that he had promised, that he was trying, but that it was difficult. “

The end was brutal. “It was just like what you see on television,” he said, shouting “Emergency, code red!” and people running with shovels and asking for scalpels, pulse checks, desperate chest compressions. “And when you’re a bystander, you can’t try to sneak out the door. You just have to stay in the back of the room and out of the way. “

Freedy’s face turned purple, she said. And then it was gone.

The Clark County Coroner’s Office did not immediately respond to questions about Freedy’s death Sunday.

For DuPreez, going public about her grief has brought her support, but also insults, underscoring the country’s bitter division over the pandemic and how to combat it.

He has stopped answering the phone. He has made his Facebook page private and has done the same with Freedy’s Twitter account, as the comments insulting the fat people have reached the deceased’s phone. For every nice message, he said, there are three or four unpleasant ones.

“If your fiancé was stupid enough not to get vaccinated while working in a casino, it’s his fault,” read a message he shared with The Post. “You have put yourself in this situation,” said another.

Others accuse her of playing “scare propaganda” around the coronavirus and instigating the “mainstream media,” she said.

“There are people who have even told me that everything is a lie … that Mike is still alive, that we are just an invented family, that my son who cried on the news is an actor.”

As DuPreez gets on with life’s tasks between interviews, she marvels at the resilience of her children, ages 17, 10, 7, 6, and 17 months.

“They stop and cry, they get mad and say they miss it, and then they go back to playing,” he said. “They just get lost in their games. I have never been so thankful for an iPad in my life. Because if I could lose myself in a game like that, it would probably be a lot easier. “

(c) 2021, The Washington Post

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