My Family Thought I Was Crazy

“Why do you have to be so difficult? Why can’t you just be like everyone else?”

In the fall of 2021, my daughter Sophie was a rising freshman at San Diego State University. The summer leading up to her emotional departure was a nail-biter for me: I checked the school’s website daily to see if they were going to implement vaccine mandates.

It was California. She was going to university. Of course they were going to implement vaccine mandates.

I had been vocally anti-COVID vax from the beginning, much to my family’s embarrassment and ire. “Literally everyone we know is vaccinated and they’re fine,” my daughters would say. “Why do you have to be so difficult? Why can’t you just be like everyone else?

Me (to myself): “Do you even know me?”

“If the girls want to get vaccinated, we should let them,” my husband announced casually one day, a statement that may have resulted in a week of furious silence and a crack in one of our doors.

When SDSU dropped the vaccine hammer, I scrambled to get Sophie a medical exemption. After weeks of jumping through a parade of flaming hoops for the school’s health department, I’m pretty sure I just wore them down. “Fine, we’ll take your money,” is what they didn’t say.

Out-of-state tuition isn’t cheap.

The university did not make it easy for the supposedly less-than-one percent of their students who were unvaccinated. Sophie had to test twice weekly (she knew not to put that poison stick up her nose and would blow into a tissue and swab the snot), which involved tracking down a test, trudging home with it to swab, and then finding a “convenient” drop-off place. (They were never convenient.)

The school was supposed to process her results within a day but often they didn’t, which deemed Sophie “not cleared to be on campus.” More than a handful of times she was called out — by name, in class — and told to leave. Once this happened when she was in the middle of taking a test. She may as well have been forced to walk around campus wearing a scarlet A (not adulterer but for the far worse antivaxxer) over her SDSU tank top.

Only unvaccinated students were made to endure the rigorous, ridiculous testing protocols. My constant emails to the school health department with updated research about testing and transmission went frustratingly unanswered.

As luck would have it, Sophie contracted COVID not the first month of living on campus, or even the first week, but the first day. She had never been sick in her life, and COVID hit her hard. She was weak and scared and of course, embarrassed about being unvaccinated. Most of all, she was terrified that she would be moved into one of the “quarantine dorms” everyone was already talking about. As if being away from home for the first time in her life and feeling like death wasn’t hard enough.  

I was on my way back to Texas when she got her test results, but my husband, Joe, happened to be in California on business and was only a few hours north of Sophie. He turned around immediately, scooped her up, and the two of them checked into a hotel just off campus.

It took Joe less than 24 hours to develop symptoms of his own. He was knocked flat, too.

When Sophie left for school, I’d sent her with the whole COVID kit — ivermectin, a Z-Pack, and all the recommended vitamins. I had made her a chart of what to take and when to take it, but anxiety was getting the best of her.

“Mom, what if I die because you were wrong about not getting the vaccine?” she sobbed into the phone one night. My heart couldn’t have hurt any more if she’d plunged a dagger into it.

Believe me, I had already thought the exact same thing. Oh, what a field day the “friends” and family and former colleagues and perfect strangers who’d been raking me over the coals for my pandemic position would have had with that. The fact that there were people in my life, people I once cared about and who cared about Sophie, who would have felt some sort of smug satisfaction at the fact that my daughter was ill will infuriate me until the day I die. If I let it, it could break my heart.

After “surviving” COVID, Sophie (finally!) became deeply interested in how and why I was so adamantly against this vaccine. She said she wanted to be able to defend her unvaccinated status with more than a mere, “because my mom is crazy.” And of course, once you even dip so much as a little toe into that ocean, it’s nearly impossible to turn back.

Joe took a bit longer to convince. At one point, in the midst of yet another crushingly frustrating argument, I gave him an ultimatum. “I will not discuss this with you again, ever, until you watch or read three things supporting my side. I’ll read or watch any three things you care to send me.” I wish I could remember which three things I shared — I had thousands bookmarked and saved by that point and I do recall toiling over the choice as if my girls’ lives depended on it, because they did — but whichever they were, that trio did the trick. “Wow,” was basically his response.

Wow, indeed.

In the time since, both have become my champions and cheerleaders. Joe will share my (oh-so-controversial) substacks on Facebook, knowing full well he has family, friends, and followers who will be infuriated by them. Sophie read parts of The War on Ivermectin when I was writing it and began broaching the topic of early treatment and vaccine injury with friends. When the book came out, she brought a copy to her restaurant job each day and left it in front of her on the counter, a dialogue-starter few expected of a young, beautiful, bubbly co-ed. She sold a lot of books.

“This isn’t just a book, Mom,” she told me one day. “It’s going to be a history book.” I like to think she’s right.

If anyone tries to debate her but can’t bring a solid argument (spoiler: they never can), she tells them, “Go watch this 12-minute documentary and then we can talk.” (The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree and all.) She’s converted a lot of skeptics.  

Last month, Sophie accompanied me to the FLCCC conference in Phoenix. She was more excited to meet Dr. Kory than she would have been if we’d scored backstage passes to meet Zach Bryan, Cody Johnson, and Tyler Childers at the same time. She eagerly attended each presentation and panel discussion, perched on the edge of her seat and taking copious notes. She leapt at the chance to tell her story, which may have been the proudest moment of this mama’s life — up there with her pronouncement after the conference that she’d love nothing more than to work for the FLCCC one day.

I know countless people who think like I do and whose kids, friends, co-workers, and family still think they’re wacky, science-denying conspiracy theorists. I pray they won’t give up. It took a while for me — and some tears and maybe a screaming match or two and one cracked door — but if my family can come around, anyone’s can.