When a vaccine-denier comes to Jesus

(It's often far too late)

The most recent official account is thatt 631,440 people have died of COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Anthony Fauci said that though COVID deaths are preventable, 100,000 more could die by December.

That would be as if the city of Memphis disappeared — or if we lost Baltimore and a few of her suburbs.

We might be numb to the numbers; at this point, we don’t often hear about the individuals who die of the virus, though we still hear stories of the COVID-deniers who die, like this guy, this one, Florida’s Mr. Anti-Vax, and oh, hey, this one, too. For that last one, a friend wrote bemoaning that his friend shouldn’t be reduced to a punch line.

I’m not sure who reduced a man’s death to a punch line, but if I can draw your attention to that first link, it’s heartbreaking. The New London Day story is about Mark Gendron, 52, a retired state trooper from Salem, Conn. He and his wife were not vaccinated. From the linked story:

They had been waiting: for more research, for full FDA approval, for something to assuage their fears about a vaccine they believed had exacerbated Mark's mother's dementia and gave her shingles.

And then COVID came to their house. When Gendron’s symptoms got bad, Christina, his wife of three years, drove him to Backus Hospital in Norwich, Conn. They teated and released him when his symptoms seemed to lessen, but at home he got worse. Christina drove him back, but couldn’t go inside with him because of COVID protocols. She described what happened next:

Over the next several days, after he had been put on the antiviral drug Remdesivir and higher and higher levels of oxygen, scans of his lungs went from mostly clear to "probably three-fourths filled with COVID nastiness.”

The story ends with Gendron fighting for his life. A second story reveals that he died last Tuesday.

There is no punch line to be had from this or any COVID death story. In fact, these days, COVID deaths are even sadder to me than they were at the beginning of this pandemic. At the beginning, we were mostly flying blind. Now, we know what we need to do and this is the predictable result when we don’t. Blessings on the mourning.