There are plenty of heartbreaking—and often exasperating—stories about unvaccinated Americans dying of COVID-19. While these are timely cautionary tales for the unvaxxed, too often, these folks are hurting not just themselves but their communities and loved ones as well. The misery they leave in their wake—the grieving family members they abandon, the beleaguered health care workers they retraumatize, and the sickness they spread among their neighbors—is often monumental.

But while the “freedom” to get sick and die through your own negligence is fairly well enshrined in our culture (the person who adopts an unhealthy diet and dies prematurely is pretty much only hurting himself, after all), when it comes to a communicable disease, those putative freedoms go out the window.

The novel coronavirus could have been all but wiped out in our country by now if more people had done the sensible and, well, Christian thing and gotten vaccinated as soon as they were able. Because they didn’t, at least not in sufficient numbers, the delta variant is burning through our country like a brush fire—leaving hospital systems overstretched and overwhelmed—and it isn’t only COVID patients who are suffering and dying.

CBS This Morning correspondent David Begnaud recently reported on one patient—an Afghanistan war veteran—whose death can be directly tied to the foolish decisions of his fellow Texans—the majority of whom are still not fully vaccinated—as well as the pro-virus policies of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. It’s a tragic story about an awful, lonely death that could have easily been avoided if not for the growing cohort of horse-paste eaters in our midst.

From CBS News:

Transcript:

MICHELLE PUGET: “He loved his country, he served two deployments over in Afghanistan, came home with a Purple Heart, and it was a gallstone that took him out.”

VOICEOVER: “Last Saturday, Wilkinson’s mother, Michelle Puget, rushed him to Bellevue Medical Center, just three doors down from their home, but for Wilkinson, help was still too far away.”

DR. HASAN KAKLI: “I do labs on him, I get labs, and the labs come back, and I’m at the computer, and I have one of those ‘oh, crap’ moments.”

VOICEOVER: “ER doctor Hasan Kakli treated Wilkinson, and he discovered that he had gallstone pancreatitis, something the Belleville Hospital was not equipped to treat.”

KAKLI: “If that stone doesn’t spontaneously come out and doesn’t resolve itself, that fluid just builds up, backs up into the liver, backs up into the pancreas, and starts to shut down those organs. His bloodwork even showed that his kidneys were shutting down.”

BEGNAUD: “This went from life-threatening to …”

KAKLI: “He’s dying.”

BEGNAUD: “In front of you.”

KAKLI: “Yes.”

VOICEOVER: “Wilkinson needed a higher level of care, but with hospitals across Texas and much of the South overwhelmed with COVID patients, there was no place for him.”

KAKLI: “We’re making phone calls. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry.’ Places had the specialists to do the procedure, but because of how sick he was, they didn’t have an ICU bed to put him in. So then I’m at my computer and I’m just, like, I’m scratching my head, and I get this thought in my head, I’m like, ‘Well, what if I put this on Facebook or something, maybe somebody can help out?’ One doctor messages me, ‘Hey, I’m in Missouri. Last time I checked we have ICU beds. We can do this. Call. Call this number.’ The next guy messages me. He’s a GI specialist. He goes, ‘I’m in Austin. I can do this procedure. Get him over to me.’ I said, ‘Okay, great, let’s go.’ He texts me back five minutes later, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t get administrative approval to accept him. We’re full.’”

VOICEOVER: “For nearly seven hours, Wilkinson waited in this bed.”

KAKLI: “I had that thought in my head, it’s like, I need to get his mother here. I told her, I said, ‘If he doesn’t get this procedure done, he is going to die.’ I also had to have the discussion with him and I said, ‘If your heart stops in front of me right here, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to do everything we can to resuscitate you or try to get your heart back?’ And I said, ‘If that were to happen, Dan, if I were to get you back, we’re still in that position we’re in right now.’”

BEGNAUD: “What did he say?”

KAKLI: “He said, ‘I want to talk to my mom about that.’ [Cries]”

VOICEOVER: “Finally, a bed opened up at the VA hospital in Houston. It was a helicopter ride away.”

KAKLI: “He goes, ‘Oh, man, I promised myself after Afghanistan that I would never be in a helicopter again.’ He goes, ‘Oh, well, I guess.’”

VOICEOVER: “This is video of Daniel being airlifted to Houston, but it was too late.”

PUGET: “They weren’t able to do the procedure on him because it had been too long and they told me that they had seen air pockets in his intestines, which means that they were already starting to die off. They told me they had to make a decision, and I knew how Daniel felt. He didn’t want to be that way, so we were all in agreement that we had to let him go.”

VOICEOVER: “Roughly 24 hours after he walked into the emergency room, Daniel Wilkinson died at the age of 46.”

KAKLI: “I’ve never lost a patient from this diagnosis. Never. Because we know what needs to be done and we know how to treat it, and we get them to where we need to go. I’m scared that the next patient that I see is someone that I can’t get to where they need to get to. We are playing musical chairs with 100 people and 10 chairs. When the music stops, what happens? People from all over the world come to Houston to get medical care, and right now Houston can’t take care of patients from the next town over. That’s the reality.”

BEGNAUD: “Dr. Kakli says if we weren’t in this crisis it would have taken him 30 minutes to get Daniel out the door. It took seven hours.”

It’s one thing to kill yourself through vaccine and mask refusal. Of course, it’s not recommended, but it’s clearly not the same as negligently killing another human being. Yet somewhere along the line, a significant percentage of our fellow Americans decided it wasn’t enough to drink yourself to death—you needed to drive drunk, too, lest your “freedoms” be snatched away from you in the dead of night.

Dan Wilkinson’s death is a direct result of that bastardization and boneheaded misinterpretation of our sacred freedoms. Hopefully, people will start to understand that the freedoms they hold so dear should include the right to pursue not just liberty and happiness but also life.

It’s not just about one person and their freedoms, after all. It’s about all of us. That’s what these people have never understood.

I wonder if they ever will. 

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