They rejected the vaccine. Now they want you to know that they regret it.

Provo • As Mindy Greene spent another day in the COVID intensive care unit, listening to the roar that now breathed for her husband Russ, 42, she opened her phone and typed a message.

“We did not receive 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 felt like everything would be fine. “

They were not.

Her husband, the father of their four children, now hovered between life and death, tentacles of tubes spilling out of his body. The patient in the room next to her husband’s had died a few hours earlier. That day, July 13, Greene decided to add his voice to an unlikely group of people speaking out in the polarized national debate over vaccination: remorse.

“If I had had the information I have today, we would have been vaccinated,” Greene wrote. Whatever happens, she hit “send”.

Amid a resurgence in coronavirus infections and deaths, some people who once rejected the vaccine or simply waited too long are now grappling with the consequences, often in a harsh and public manner. A number of people speak from hospital beds, at funerals and in obituaries, of their regrets, the pain of enduring the virus and seeing unvaccinated family members die of breath.

“I have such incredible guilt,” Greene said one morning as she sat in the fourth-floor lobby outside the intensive care unit at Utah Valley Hospital in Provo, which overlooks the mountains where his family once hiked and quad biked. “I still blame myself. Every day.”

The recent spate of infections and hospitalizations among unvaccinated people has brought the grim realities of the COVID-19 crash home to many who believed they had averted the pandemic. But now, with anger and fatigue building up on all sides, the question is whether their stories can really change your mind.

Some people hospitalized with the virus still swear not to be vaccinated, and surveys suggest the majority of unvaccinated Americans are not moving. Doctors in COVID units say some patients still refuse to believe they are infected with anything other than the flu.

“We have people in intensive care with COVID who deny having COVID,” said Dr. Matthew Sperry, a pulmonary intensive care doctor who treated Greene’s husband. “It doesn’t matter what we say.”

Hospitalizations for COVID in Utah have increased by 35% in the past two weeks, and Sperry said intensive care units in the system at 24 hospitals where he works are 98% full.

Yet some hospitals inundated with patients in largely conservative, unvaccinated areas of the country have started recruiting COVID survivors as public health messengers of last resort. The hope is that the skeptics of old might just persuade others who rejected vaccination campaigns led by President Joe Biden, Dr Anthony Fauci and armies of local doctors and health workers.

These are “scared” stories for a pandemic that has thrived on misinformation, fear and hardened partisan divisions over whether to get vaccinated.

“People create news from their hospital beds, from the wards,” said Rebecca Weintraub, 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 have increased this summer, Russell Taylor sat in a hospital gown, an oxygen cannula draped over his face, to offer provaccine testimony in a hospital video. “I don’t see how I couldn’t get it now,” he said.

A man from Texas who underwent a double lung transplant after contracting the virus has pleaded on local television for others to be vaccinated.

And in a trembling voice, an administrator at a rural Utah hospital clinic described how she suffered from double pneumonia and sepsis after choosing not to be vaccinated. The woman, Stormy, said it took weeks to muster the courage to speak out in a video posted by her local health department. She only did so using her first name because she feared COVID deniers would say she was making it all up.

“I was absolutely afraid of the negative aspects that might come with it,” she said in an interview this week. “I was part of a problem I was trying to avoid.”

Some people who quickly adopted the vaccine now choose to talk about family members who haven’t. It was a role Kimberle Jones never wanted, but adopted after her daughter, Erica Thompson, 37, a mother from St. Louis, died on July 4, nearly three months after had what she thought was a severe asthma attack.

“I want to be a voice for her,” said Jones, who got the shot as soon as she could. “I really think my daughter would like me to say, ‘Go get the vaccine.’ “

It was advice that Thompson – like 39% of American adults – ignored.

His mother said Thompson was wary of how quickly the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines were deployed – the culmination of decades of scientific research. She also believed the government-led campaign was a conspiracy against blacks like herself, according to her mother. Vaccination rates for black and Hispanic Americans are lower than those for the white population, a gap researchers attribute to mistrust rooted in a history of medical discrimination and a lack of access and awareness.

After making $ 10 an hour in call centers, Thompson had recently found a dream job as a medical coder. She went to the hospital coughing and struggling to breathe in mid-May and was on a ventilator within days. Jones said she sang “Beat It” while her daughter was sedated and promised to be there when she woke up.

“Her last words to me were ‘Mom I can’t breathe,’” Jones said.

In Utah, Greene said her husband left the family’s vaccination decisions in his hands. She had originally planned to get the vaccine as soon as her next door neighbor, a doctor, had hers.

But she had concerns about the vaccine and found plenty of reasons to hesitate when browsing social media or chatting with anti-vaccine friends. “You have to watch this,” one wrote to him.

Clicking a few links took her into a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories touted by anti-vaccine lawyers and YouTubers, and videos in which anti-vaccine doctors and nurses decried the COVID-19 shots as “Biological weapons”.

COVID crashed into family world in late June when their two oldest sons brought the virus home from a religious camp where nine boys were infected. The virus swept through the family. Then came the day when Greene’s husband, a hunter who crossed the mountains on foot, had to be rushed to hospital when his oxygen level creaked.

Now they are measuring the time in “COVID days.” Greene wakes up dry several mornings. Her four children – aged 8 to 18 – stay home while she goes to the hospital, unable to talk to their dad about dance class or punch deep in the outfield during a match. baseball.

There are uncertain months ahead as doctors attempt to repair his damaged lungs and wean him from a ventilator. He was briefly transferred from the hospital to an acute long-term care facility last week, a hopeful moment. But doctors found a hole in his lungs and he was rushed back to the intensive care unit.

“I will always regret having listened to the misinformation being broadcast,” Greene said. “They create fear.

Even after Greene’s husband was put on a ventilator in early July, vaccine skeptics Greene knew she had sent him links to misinformation about fertility and hidden vaccine deaths. They sent him boxes of horse medication falsely touted as a COVID cure. A business associate of her husband made a case against the vaccination as he visited Greene in the intensive care lobby.

Health experts and scientific studies have shown that vaccines are extremely safe and effective and are the best weapon against new infectious variants of the coronavirus.

Before COVID, family life was anchored by their faith and community in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Now church friends and neighbors are bringing home dinners and sending updates to the congregation about Greene’s husband.

Greene begins his hospital visits with a spiritual reading and ends each night by reuniting their children – Hunter, 18; Easton, 15; Betty, 13, and Rushton, 8 – to talk about their father and the prayers he needs.

Her perspective changed when the virus ravaged her husband’s body and doctors put him on a ventilator. They moved on as she spoke with medics and nurses about unvaccinated patients flocking to hospitals and sitting outside the intensive care unit, listening to the rescue flight helicopters arrive . Greene said she made an appointment to get her children vaccinated.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.