Unvaccinated Couple Desperate for Kids To Get COVID Shots After Ending Up in ICU
A Texas couple who didn't believe in the COVID-19 vaccine are now desperate for their children to get their shots after ending up in the intensive care unit, their family has said.
Lydia and Lawrence Rodriguez were admitted to a Texas hospital after they both contracted coronavirus in July. The couple, from La Marque, now want relatives to ensure their children get the vaccine as they continue to fight for their lives on ventilators.
"My 42 yo cousin didn't believe in the vaccine," Lydia Rodriguez's cousin Dottie Land Jones wrote in a recent Facebook post.
"Now she and her husband are in the ICU on vents fighting for their lives with this delta variant while their 4 children are at home. One of the last things she said before being intubated was to make sure her kids get vaccinated."
Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.
Jones added: "The vaccine works and this delta variant is brutal. You don't want to end up like them I promise."
In an interview with KTRK, Jones said doctors have told the family that the couple "are very, very, very, very sick" and "if they do survive, it's going to be a long, long road."
Jones said she is "tired of the anti-vax rhetoric that is causing so many, like my cousin and her family, to not get vaccinated." She hopes her family's experience serves as a cautionary tale to others.
She has set up a GoFundMe page to help raise funds to cover the cost of mounting bills and provide for her cousin's children.
"Family and friends are trying to care for their four children at home but the financial burden of household bills and mounting medical bills has become overwhelming," she wrote on the page. "They are a loving family that have worked hard to build a life for their children. All of that is in jeopardy now since neither can work."
Jones has been contacted for additional comment.
It comes after a leaked internal report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicated that people who are vaccinated are three times less likely to catch COVID-19 and 10 times less likely to die from it than those who are unvaccinated.
The report also provided details about the transmissibility of the Delta variant, which is fueling a surge in coronavirus infections around the country, and said it spreads as easily as chickenpox.
"There are about 90 million Americans who are eligible to get the shot but haven't gotten it yet," President Joe Biden said last week as he announced new measures to encourage the unvaccinated to get shots.
"Nearly all of the cases, hospitalizations, and deaths due to COVID-19 today are from unvaccinated people."
