Come on CNN, get your act together

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If you are family or friend to Daniel and Davy Macias, this article is not for you. Please stop reading here and click through to the next post. There is nothing in this article that you shouldn’t already have learned from witnessing their fate.

Today brings another sad profile of a young family destroyed by a ruthless virus – misinformation. Five children under the age of 8 have been orphaned. The youngest is called “Baby Girl” because her parents didn’t live long enough to meet her or give her a name.

This is a horrific tragedy, and yet the story has all the dry repetition of the tolling of a funeral bell. CNN misreports that the young family “did everything right” to protect themselves and their children. I call bullshit.

Neither of these young parents were vaccinated. Davy was a nurse, and Daniel was a middle school math teacher. Both should have understood the science and protected themselves, her patients, his students, and their young children by getting vaccinated. His mother tells CNN the couple had “planned” to get vaccinated, but wanted to learn more about the safety of the vaccines beforehand. And then they brought their family to an indoor water park.

It takes all of about 15 minutes to research the safety of the available vaccines, and another 15 to research the statistics about hospitalization and death rates among the unvaccinated. The shot has been available to everyone over the age of 12 for months now. There is no excuse for anyone who has supposedly decided to get vaccinated if they haven’t already made an appointment, especially if you work in a health care or educational setting.

Someday I hope to stop seeing news stories about lives destroyed by vaccine hesitancy, or war heroes denied medical care for lack of an ICU bed. I hope never again to write about orphaned children being told their parents aren’t ever coming home, or nameless infants who will never meet their own mother.

But we will never see that day if we sugarcoat these avoidable tragedies. This educated, unvaccinated couple brought their young children to an indoor water park during a pandemic, and now they are both, very predictably, dead. That’s not news, it’s just science.

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