Shamgar Connors, a 42-year-old middle school teacher from Stafford, has waited for a kidney for three long years.
Suffering with stage five Chronic Kidney Disease, Connors has to endure 12 hours of dialysis every day.
However, because he refuses to get vaccinated against COVID-19, the University of Virginia hospital system has removed Connors from the transplant list.
Despite his inevitably fatal predicament, Connors told his doctor that he’d “rather die of kidney failure than get the vaccine.”
The 42-year-old has two children and a wife, a nurse, who’s also an anti-vaxxer.
Bacon’s Rebellion’s James A. Bacon, who recently interviewed the gregarious Connors, has more:
The lengthy dialysis treatments, Connors says, make him tired. If that’s true, one wonders what he was like before they began. During our chat, the former 8th-grade teacher came across as passionate, energetic and physically vigorous. He has gained national notoriety for his stand, conducting numerous media interviews and generating hundreds of social media responses as he rallies support for his cause. Strangers have showered him with love and support; one offered him her own kidney. Others say they hope he dies.
He has found his sense of purpose, and he shrugs off the ill wishers. “I’m going to stay as stable as I can and fight this,” he says. “I don’t want a solution just for me. God has put this cause on my shoulders. I’m going to fight for all the other people. There are people sicker than me who are desperate. … I’ll go out like a super-nova.”
Connors’ case raises profound scientific and ethical issues. Kidney transplants are hard on patients’ immunological systems, which makes them more vulnerable to infections, including COVID. Because donor kidneys are scarce, hospitals don’t want to give them to patients with lower odds of survival. UVa Health insists that transplant patients get vaccinated. Connors, who sloughed off a case of COVID over Thanksgiving, says he has acquired natural immunities. UVa says those immunities aren’t good enough.
Born in New York into a family of nine children, he moved around a lot, to Florida and Hawaii but mostly in New York. As a kid, he says, he was “a big nerd.” He had an aptitude for mathematics in high school, and earned undergraduate degrees in math and computer science at SUNY-Potsdam and an M.A. in information technology at Clarkson University. He’d never thought of teaching as a career, but when some friends moved to Accomack County, Va., near Chincoteague, he tagged along. Despite his lack of educational qualifications, he applied to be a math teacher. It turned out that Accomack was desperate for math teachers, and he landed the job at Arcadia Middle School.
Without a new kidney, Connors’ life expectancy is less than five years.