Anastacia Kelley feels certain that her best friend Lizzie would not have refused the COVID-19 vaccine if Donald Trump had gotten his shot in the public eye, rather than secretly just before leaving the White House.
“Absolutely, without a doubt,” Kelley told The Daily Beast.
“If he had come out and even taken a picture of himself getting it, he could have saved many lives.”
Kelley—who asked that her friend’s surname not be used—also blames herself for not being more insistent when she discussed the vaccine with Lizzie on the phone during the winter. They had been inseparable roommates at Marshall University in West Virginia and in the years immediately afterward. Lizzie was the kindest, most thoughtful, generous, and empathetic person Kelley knew. And she would not have imagined that political differences might affect them.
But they had now entered their forties and Lizzie was back to living in a holler in the heart of coal country, which is also Trump country. She seemed to have been swayed by conspiracy-theory nonsense. She feared the vaccine had been developed in too much haste to be trusted. She did not know what chemicals went into it.
“The exact quote was, she was not going to put that shit in her body,” Kelley recalled.
Kelley had been a special-education teacher in West Virginia for a time after college, working in a group home that Dustin Hoffman bought for one of the people who inspired Rain Man. She had since moved to another red state, Florida, but remained a progressive-minded native of Rhode Island. She tried to use logic leavened with humor to change Lizzie’s mind about the vaccine.
“I said, ‘You’ll eat a cheeseburger from McDonald’s and you have no idea what’s in it.’”
Lizzie had laughed, being as non-confrontational as always. But her view was unchanged. And though Kelley felt as close to Lizzie as ever, she knew her friend’s husband was a fervent Trump supporter.
Kelley did not push Lizzie about the vaccine.
“I should have,” Kelley later said. “That’s my regret.
“I was the one person she listened to. She might have listened to me. I just let it go with her, not thinking the worst would happen.”
On March 10, a text from Lizzie affirmed their bond.
“She said, ‘Whether we talk every day or not, you are still my person,’” Kelley recalled.
Then, on March 19, Kelley saw a Facebook posting by Lizzie’s sister.
“Her sister had posted on Facebook that she had made one mistake and because of that one mistake even though they had been careful all along, they had COVID,” Kelley would recall. “They all lived in that some holler and I knew if her sister had it, [Lizzie] it.”
Kelley called Lizzie on March 20.
“I said, ‘Do you have COVID?’” Kelley remembered. “She said, ‘Actually, I do.’”
They talked for two hours, with Kelley passing on tips she had learned from a nurse friend who worked on a COVID-19 ward. Lizzie’s son, brother-in-law, and nephew had all caught the virus, but she did not seem overly concerned.
“I was more alarmed than her,” Kelley recalled.
Lizzie’s sister was admitted to the hospital that day. The sister’s husband joined her there two days later, on March 22.
On March 26, Lizzie texted Kelley to say she was also being hospitalized.
“I can’t breathe, I feel awful. This is the worst thing I’ve ever been through,” the text read.
Lizzie was placed in isolation. She and Kelley texted back and forth through the day:
“Pray,” Lizzie wrote.
“I love you so much,” Kelley told her.
“I love you. Thank you.”
“Are you alone?”
“Alone. No one is allowed to be with me.”
“I’m right here.”
“Thank you… this stuff is no joke.”
“I know it isn’t. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s just so hard to breathe. And it makes me nervous.”
“Do you have pneumonia?”
“Yes, in both lungs.”
“How are they treating you?”
“Antibiotics and getting ready for the infusion and plasma.”
“Are they giving you steroids?”
“No, I am allergic.”
“Do they have you lying prone?”
“No, I am sitting right now.”
“That’s good.
“I am sore all over.”
On Saturday, March 27, Kelley texted Lizzie to ask her if she had her oximeter to measure her blood oxygen.
“Yes,” Lizzie said.
That was her final reply. Kelley’s subsequent texts were read, but went unanswered as Lizzie was moved to the ICU on Sunday, March 28. She was placed in a room next to her sister.
Lizzie’s condition deteriorated on March 31 to a point where her family was summoned to say goodbye. The nurses made sure that Lizzie’s sister in the next room did not see them and become alarmed.
Kelley was home in Florida when she got a Facebook message from Lizzie’s husband that left her sobbing.
“She just passed.”
Kelley had blocked the husband on Facebook for a brief time because of his Trumpian pronouncements. But she now made it her mission to help him through his grief.
“She was his whole life,” Kelley later said. “I’ll make sure her husband and her child are OK. I talk to him every day right now.”
Lizzie’s son and the nephew had recovered, as had her brother-in-law. Her sister remained in the ICU, and over the weekend the hospital called her family in to say their goodbyes. But their presence seemed to buoy her and she fought on. She was still unconscious and unaware that Lizzie had died when she, too, passed late Tuesday.
Kelley remains convinced that Lizzie would have taken the vaccine if Trump had set a public example.
“All this could have been avoided,” she said.
And she is sure that Lizzie is far from the only one Trump could have led by example to take the vaccine. A poll taken in March suggested that one in four Americans intend to refuse the vaccine
“He has a lot of blood on his hands,” she said.
She also continues to blame herself for not pushing Lizzie to set her doubts aside.
“She might have listened to me,” Kelley said.
Mostly, she misses her friend.
“I imagined us as old ladies sitting on a porch drinking spiked lemonade,” she said on Tuesday. “We were always going to get back together.”
