After months of waiting for a COVID-19 immunization and suffering from the disease, U.S. Air Force veteran Diane Drewes was on her dying breath in an Ohio hospice when the phone rang. It was a health professional who called to make her first appointment for the vaccine.
Drewes’ daughter Laura Brown was shocked at the timing of the January call, but did not respond in anger or explain that her 75-year-old mother was on the verge of death. It just wouldn’t make any sense, he says.
“But my sister and I were angry that she was late,” said Brown, “it seemed like a final insult.”
Since the vaccines’ launch in mid-December, more than 247,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the United States. Authorities had warned it would take months to get enough vaccinations to achieve herd immunity. With the initial lack of vaccines and the spread of the virus, the sad reality was that some people would contract the virus and die before they could be vaccinated.
Polls show that a significant percentage of the U.S. population is suspicious of the vaccine, so it’s impossible to say exactly how many of those who die would want to be immunized. But Brown says his mother loved him – desperately.
Other families have similarly painful stories of loved ones becoming infected after taking care of themselves for months and then dying before being vaccinated.
Charlotte Crawford, who has worked in the microbiology lab at Parkland Hospital in Dallas for 40 years, was fully immunized in January after receiving both doses of Moderna vaccine because of her job. But she had to endure the torment of seeing her husband and two adult children receive COVID-19 and die before she could get vaccinated.
Henry Royce Crawford, 65, had an appointment to get vaccinated when he fell ill, his widow said. His sons, Roycie Crawford, 33; and Natalia Crawford, 38; they also waited for the vaccine, but had not received it when they got sick and died.
“All I know is that I had three funerals in three weeks,” said Crawford of Forney, Texas.