Covid patient goes from ‘invincible’ to hospital-bed vaccine advocate

An unvaccinated Virginia man who’s been hospitalized with Covid-19 is using social media to urge others to go out and get the shot.

Travis Campbell, 43, has been in the hospital for more than a week with complications from the virus, which also infected his wife and two of their children.

“We just thought we were invincible and we weren’t going to get it,” said his wife, Kellie Campbell. “And we’ve just been so busy, and we just moved, and we prolonged getting the vaccine.”

Kellie Campbell said her husband tested positive on July 22 and got progressively worse. Eventually, he was hospitalized. She worries that he will be placed on a ventilator to help his breathing.

“I mean, he couldn’t catch his breath … had fever, just lethargic, he ached, just one thing after another,” she said. “He started in a regular room, and then he went to a Covid ICU room, and now he’s in the pulmonary ICU.”

Despite his condition, Travis Campbell is adamant about making videos to share on Facebook encouraging others to get vaccinated now, his wife said.

“I’m testifying to all my bulletproof friends that’s holding out, it’s time to protect your family, it’s not worth getting long term lung damage or death please go get the vaccine,” Travis Campbell wrote in a July 25 Facebook post.

Kellie Campbell said her husband is “all about other people” and doesn’t want others to have to deal with what he’s going through.

“He just doesn’t want anyone to have to endure the pain that he has, and if a vaccine will help them, that’s what they need to do,” she said.

In a video posted from his hospital bed Tuesday night, Travis Campbell asked followers to consider whether they’d rather plan their own funerals and goodbyes or get vaccinated.

“I hope to God that all my friends and family would not say, ‘Somebody hand me a piece of paper and a pen.’ That’s a sobering thought, of which I have done,” he said.

As her family and doctors take her husband’s condition day by day, Kellie Campbell said her advice to others is to go out and get vaccinated immediately.

“If you have to take time off work, if you have to miss out on something, you need to go get the vaccine, because we didn’t, and look where we are now,” she said. “I mean, that should be your top priority. Especially not just for you, but your family members.”