The life and tragic death of John Eyers - a fitness fanatic who refused the vaccine [View all]

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She can’t remember how the argument about the Covid vaccine started. “John started saying really crazy things that didn’t make sense,” she says. “About how people were only getting the vaccine for free McDonald’s, and there was formaldehyde in it.” The rest of the family remonstrated with him, pulling out their phones to factcheck what he was saying. But John was unmoving. “He kept saying: ‘I won’t be a guinea pig.’”

From January onwards, John struggled with his mental health. Covid restrictions weighed heavily on him. He hated not being able to go to the gym, hated not being able to go climbing, hated not seeing his friends. He lived alone, having broken up with a girlfriend at Christmas, and was lonely. He confided in his sister. “I was really worried about him,” Jenny says. “He was in a bad place. I had to call him every day to make sure he was OK.” Their grandmother died in March. When Jenny saw him at the funeral, she was horrified. “He’d lost so much weight,” she says.

Jonathan thinks this is, in part, what drove his friend’s Covid scepticism. “He was frustrated at the way he couldn’t go and do normal things,” he says. “He didn’t want another lockdown, or to be in a situation where he wasn’t able to go and see people.” John felt that Covid was real, but that it had been dramatically overstated by the authorities. Nobody he knew in Southport had contracted Covid. If he got the virus, he would be fine. “It got to the point where he refused to wear a mask at all,” says Jenny.

Doctors put John on dialysis to clear out the toxins, but by this point many of his organs were failing and he had unsurvivably low oxygen levels. He expended an inconceivably huge metabolic effort to stay alive. “Although it looks like someone is just lying there asleep, the amount of work they’re doing is really impressive,” says Lawton. He compares it to walking a marathon for every day the patient is hospitalised. Eventually, John exhausted his physiological reserve. His body was oxygen-deprived and wrung out. His heart stopped beating and he died. Before he died, John told the doctor treating him how much he regretted not getting the vaccine. “The doctor said that he was beating himself up so much before they put him on the ventilator,” Jenny says. “He was saying: ‘Why didn’t I get vaccinated? Why didn’t I do it? Why didn’t I listen?’”

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/nov/30/life-tragic-death-john-eyers-fitness-fanatic-who-refused-covid-vaccine

A long read, but well worth it.