An unvaccinated man who was hospitalised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, after he contracted Covid-19 and developed severe pneumonia said he still won’t get the vaccine.
“Before you got sick, if you would have had a chance to get the vaccine and prevent this, would you have taken the vaccine?” CBS News’ David Begnaud asked Scott Roe on his hospital bed at Our Lady of the Lake Medical Center in an interview this week.
“No,” Roe, a Republican, responded.
“So, you’d have gone through this?” asked Begnaud.
“I’d have gone through this. Yes, sir. Don’t shove it down my throat. That’s what local, state, federal administration is trying to do,” Roe replied.
“What are they shoving, the science?” asked Begnaud.
“No, they’re shoving the fact that it’s their agenda. Their agenda is to get you vaccinated,” Roe said, claiming there were “too many issues” with the shots. Millions of Americans have received the shots, which have proven remarkably effective at preventing infection and severe illness.
Watch the interview here:
In the same segment, pharmaceutical researcher Paula Johnson expressed regret at putting off getting the vaccine.
She ended up in hospital.
“I honest to God thought I walked my last day on this earth. I could not breathe. I just, all of a sudden, my lungs just didn’t work,” Johnson told Begnaud.
“I have no comorbidities, nothing, never had a lung problem. Don’t smoke, nothing,” Johnson explained. “And it took my lungs and just … I don’t even know how to explain it. It’s like trying to breathe in and hitting a wall in like a second.”
Her warning came as the highly transmissible delta variant continues to spread across the country. It echoes those delivered this week by other unvaccinated people (who now make up 99.5% of American deaths from COVID-19) who were hospitalized with the disease and are now urging others to take the shot.
William Hughes, from Arkansas, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Thursday that he wished he’d had the jab.
“I mean, the vaccine may not have kept me from getting COVID, but it may have decreased greatly the pain and suffering I had to go through to get to the point where I am now,” he said.
Watch the video here:
Donald McAvoy, an unvaccinated 33-year-old gym manager from Jacksonville, Florida, said he was initially “skeptical” about the shot.
“I was like, ‘Eh don’t get it, I don’t need it. I’m healthy. I’m young. I’m good. I’m OK,’” McAvoy told Action News Jax. “If there’s one thing I could say to the public and everyone out there is get vaccinated now.”