Father Of 5 Texts 'I Should Have Gotten The Damn Vaccine' Before Dying Of COVID

Michael Freedy tested positive after a short family vacation

A Nevada man and father-of-five passed away from COVID recently, telling his fiancé, “I should have gotten the damn vaccine,” in a text before he died.

Jessica DuPreez said her fiance, Michael Freedy, wanted to wait until the vaccine had been available for a year before he went in to receive it. Unfortunately, he ended up contracting the virus after a short family vacation and, after fighting in an ICU for days, died from complications of the virus. “He was only 39; our babies now don’t have a dad,” Jessica DuPreez told Las Vegas station KVVU. “You can’t say, ‘I’m young, and it won’t affect me.’ Because it will.”

DuPreez said the couple planned to get it but wanted to wait to see possible side effects first. “We wanted to wait just one year from the release to see what effects people had, but there was never any intention to not get it,” DuPreez said.

After their vacation to San Diego with their five kids, ages 1 to 17, DuPreez said Freedy felt sick, assuming it was from a bad sunburn he got on the trip. He was admitted to an ER, where he tested positive for COVID-19.

DuPreez wrote on a GoFundMe page that, after trying to fight the virus at home, things got worse and they went back to the ER where Freedy was found to have pneumonia in both of his lungs. Fast forward several days of extensive care and DuPreez was told by doctors that he had to be intubated and sedated.

“I cried and told him to please fight, he said he was,” she said of their final phone call. “He told me he loves me and I told him I love him so much and to please please please fight and come home to me. That’s the last time I’ve been able to hear his voice or communicate with him. I went to the ICU that night to see him, after getting one of the worst phone call updates ever. The nurse told me to contact next of kin and to take all of his belongings home with me.”

Freedy died shortly after. “The love of my life, my rock, my everything. The father to my babies, is no longer with us,” DuPreez wrote. “I don’t know what to do.”

Since Freedy’s death, DuPreez says she’s gotten vaccinated, as has her oldest child. She is now telling everyone she knows to drop what they are doing and go get vaccinated. More than 610,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the U.S. since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention.

“Everybody can have a bad reaction to any vaccine throughout history but I would take a bad reaction to the vaccine over having to bury my husband,” she told CNN.