Unvaccinated? Time to Make an End-of-Life Plan

A good idea for anyone, advanced directives are especially important if you’re willing to risk a potentially fatal illness

- SHOSHANA UNGERLEIDER AND JESSE O SHEA

LIFE EXPECTANCY IN THE UNITED States fell by one-and-a-half years in 2020, the largest annual decline in life expectancy since World War II. Now, one-and-a-half years into the COVID-19 pandemic, with over 728,000 American lives lost, we have an abundance of safe, accessible COVID-19 vaccines, and the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine received full approval beyond emergency use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in August. Now, eligibility for boosters and children is expanding. Summer 2021 was supposed to be a return to normalcy, a “hot vax” summer of connection and prosperity. Instead, we saw a fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and the return of Center for Disease Control mask mandates, largely due to the over 90 million Americans who are eligible but remain unvaccinated, in the setting of the highly infectious Delta variant.

As medical professionals, we’ve seen the cost of refusing the vaccine firsthand: Care for serious illness caused by SARS-COV-2 is invasive and traumatizing at best, both for you and for your family. Worldwide, for adults, there is a 30 to 40 percent chance of dying from COVID-19 if you require intensive care. In addition, risk of mortality can be much higher for older adults (nearly 85 percent) and close to 50 percent in younger adults if you require intubation with mechanical ventilation.

If you chose not to get the vaccine, it’s time for you to let your doctors know what ending well looks like for you.