Unvaccinated couple die of Covid hours apart

‘I would prefer a vaccine over a ventilator every day. Too many families have already experienced the pain that we’re feeling,’ nephew says

A married couple of more than 20 years both died of Covid-19 only hours apart (Daniels family / Fox 5 Atlanta)

A married couple of more than 20 years both died of Covid-19 only hours apart.

Martin and Trina Daniel, 53 and 49 years old, respectively, are survived by their two teenage children, 18-year-old Miles and 15-year-old Marina, both of whom were also infected with Covid-19.

Both parents were unvaccinated, ABC News reported. Their nephew Cornelius Daniel told the outlet that they first met at Savannah State University in the 1990s before Mr Daniel attended graduate school at Tuskegee University in Alabama.

They raised their kids in Savannah, Georgia. Cornelius Daniel told the outlet that Trina Daniel was a stay-at-home mother while Martin worked as a chemist.

“He loved being a chemist,” he told ABC. “One of the reasons I went to Tuskegee was because he went there.”

Niece Quintella Daniel said she went to Savannah State because of her uncle. “He was just a very motivational person,” she said.

Quintella, a nurse, said going to New York City as the pandemic began was “a life-changing experience”.

“You may have a lot of people, ten or 20 people, waiting for one to die to get on a ventilator,” she said. “I thank God every day that about 35 tests I took there ... I never had COVID.”

The family said the parents and their children, none of whom had been vaccinated, were infected with Covid-19 in June.

Cornelius said the parents’ vaccine hesitancy stemmed partly from the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which followed the progress of syphilis in hundreds of Black men, who weren’t told they had the disease, between the 1930s and 1970s.

“He went to Tuskegee, so a part of our hesitancy is because we know what happened with the US syphilis study, so a lot of our hesitancy came from us not wanting to be an experiment to see if it would work or wouldn’t,” niece Melanie Daniel told Fox 5 Atlanta.

Cornelius told ABC that Martin Daniel had “a stubborn attitude toward vaccines in general”.

“He trusted the vaccines that had been around for a while,” such as the vaccine against polio, but believed the process developing the Covid-19 vaccines had been too fast, Cornelius said.

“The speed is a reflection of years of work that went before,” Dr Anthony Fauci told The Associated Press in December last year. “That’s what the public has to understand.”

Decades of prior scientific studies showing the safety of vaccines led to the rapid development of the Covid-19 shots as well as an investment of $18bn from the federal government.

Martin and Trina Daniel was set to be vaccinated in the middle of July, a week after they passed away, their nephew told ABC.

Martin died at their home on 6 July and Trina Daniel died later that same night after being hospitalized.

The couple’s teenage children, Miles and Marina, went to a hospital on 7 July for treatment and were released later that same day. They then had to spend two weeks in quarantine while dealing with the loss of their parents.

“The only bullets we have right now in our gun are the vaccines,” Cornelius told ABC News. “So I would prefer a vaccine over a ventilator every day. Too many families have already experienced the pain that we’re feeling.”