A video by Jason Arena who makes Tiktoks chronicling his wife Marilyn’s cancer treatment has gone viral after he criticizes unvaccinated people for overcrowding hospitals and taking away space from vaccinated patients with chronic illness.
In the video, Arena shared that Marilyn, who has Stage 4 breast cancer, spent two days in hospital with abdominal swelling. Although Arena said that she should have stayed one or two more days, doctors had to let her out early before they could remove any fluid, as there was no room left in the hospital due to the influx of unvaccinated COVID-19 patients.
“If you don’t trust the medical field to prevent you from getting it, why do you trust them to cure you from it?” he said in the video, taking aim at people who refuse to get vaccinated and deny the reality of the pandemic.
“People like my wife who actually need medical f***ing help for a chronic f***ing disease get kicked out of the hospital because your dumbass is too stupid to go and get a f***ing vaccine shot,” he continued, suggesting that 99% of the patients with COVID-19 in the hospital were unvaccinated. According to data from the New York Times, 0.5% of North Carolina patients needing hospital treatment for Covid-19 are fully vaccinated.
Since being posted in August, the video has already garnered over 5 million views on the social media platform. Two weeks after the video was posted, Marilyn passed away—one month after she was discharged from the hospital. She had made the decision to discontinue chemotherapy in April, according to the GoFundMe page Arena’s launched to help pay for her medical expenses.
“Nobody deserves to have the life experience that my wife had. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody,” Arena told CNN.
“People’s ability to heal from their disease is being diminished, and it’s not right. People are losing their lives, not just from Covid, collateral damage from Covid. How many people’s disease got worse because they couldn’t get treatment?”
