‘I don’t like it, Mommy.’ Utah mom urges COVID vaccines as 3-year-old fights virus

Yvonne Francis says the last words of her 3-year-old son before he was sedated and put on a ventilator for COVID-19 are “burned in my memory.”

“I sorry, Mommy,” Justin Lee Francis said, she told The Salt Lake Tribune. “Mommy hugs, I scared. I don’t like it, Mommy!”

Justin tested positive for COVID-19 two days after being brought to the hospital after choking on an apple and having an asthma attack, his mom told KSL. She said his doctors don’t know if he caught the virus while in the hospital.

Her son has begun to recover, although he’s still on a ventilator, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. Yvonne Francis urged others to get vaccinated and protect themselves against COVID-19.

“Justin didn’t have any choice in getting sick or not,” she told the publication. “He’s part of the population that needed other people to get vaccinated to protect him.”

“He couldn’t get the vaccine yet, and there was nothing else that we could have done to protect him,” Francis told KSL, noting the rest of her family was fully vaccinated.

Some doctors say the omicron variant of the coronavirus appears to hit young children harder than other versions of the virus.

Tiffanie Porter of Washington City, Utah, told the St. George News that she never expected her 3-year-old daughter to fall so ill with COVID-19.

“I’m holding the most precious thing in my entire life, and she’s in so much pain and I literally can do nothing about it,” Porter told the publication.

More than 383 million cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed worldwide with more than 5.6 million deaths as of Wednesday, Feb. 2, according to Johns Hopkins University. The United States has had more than 75 million confirmed cases with more than 892,000 deaths.

This story was originally published February 2, 2022 at 12:32 PM with the headline "‘I don’t like it, Mommy.’ Utah mom urges COVID vaccines as 3-year-old fights virus."