When teens blow off pleas to get Covid-19 vaccines, the consequences can be deadly

March 4, 2022

Kennedy Stonum, a high school junior, deflected repeated entreaties from her father to please get vaccinated against Covid-19.”I would send her articles. I would send her studies. I would send her whatever I thought might either scare her enough about Covid to get the vaccine or allay her concerns enough about the vaccine,” said Lee Stonum, 41, a public defender in Orange County, California. His mother, who lives in Cleveland, also sent emails to her granddaughter urging her to get the shots.”She was very skilled at blowing it off,” Stonum said of his only child. “It was constantly, ‘OK, I’ll think about it.’ It was never an outright ‘no.’ “

He was one of those kids who had to make every mistake himself, because he always knew best,” said Demello, 60, of Apex, North Carolina. “The more a mother’s lips move, the less the ears on their male children open.”

Both young people recently died of Covid-19 — Kennedy Stonum on February 11, Gilreath in September. The vaccines had been available to them for months before their deaths.

Tyler Gilreath, 20, resisted the constant nagging and cajoling of his mother, Tamra Demello, to get the Covid-19 vaccine.

Read more at CNN.

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