Stephen Harmon was admitted to hospital last month after contracting Covid-19 and pneumonia. Photos / Stephen Harmon, Instagram
Stephen Harmon was admitted to hospital last month after contracting Covid-19 and pneumonia. Photos / Stephen Harmon, Instagram
Just a few weeks ago, vocal Hillsong Church member Stephen Harmon took to social media and did what he was widely known for — taking aim at Covid vaccines.
He riffed around with some ideas and paid homage to Jay-Z with a tweet that read: "If you have an email problem, I feel bad for you, my son. I've had 99 problems, but VAX isn't one!"
Flash forward to this week and the 34-year-old is dead.
After fighting against the effects of Covid-19 for a month, he died at the Corona Regional Medical Center in Los Angeles amid a new wave of cases in the United States.
His death was announced by Hillsong founder Brian Houston, who said he had just heard the "devastating news that our beloved friend, Stephen Harmon has passed away from Covid. Heartbreaking."
Harmon was admitted to hospital last month after contracting Covid-19 and pneumonia.
In his final days, his social media posts took a dramatic turn from his earlier tweets.
Harmon's death comes amid a resurgence of Covid cases in the United States. Photo / Stephen Harmon, Instagram
He shared pictures of himself wired up to the medical equipment keeping him alive and wrote harrowing details of his fight to stay alive.
"Please pray y'all, they really want to intubate me and put me on a ventilator," he said on Sunday.
"Even the slightest movements and my heart rate skyrockets and oxygen dependency increases. And please, I'm not asking for anyone's opinion on intubation, I'll make my own choice, I'm asking for prayer."
He told how he was suffering from a skyrocketing heart rate, panic attacks, and was at risk of losing consciousness and being intubated.
"If you don't have faith that God can heal me over your stupid ventilator then keep the Hell out of my ICU room, there's no room in here for fear or lack of faith," he wrote.
In his final Tweet on Wednesday, Harmon tweeted that he had decided to go under intubation.
"I've fought this thing as hard as I can but unfortunately it's reached a point of critical choice and as much as I hate having to do this I'd rather it be willingness than forced emergency procedure."
Before falling ill, Harmon had been a vocal opponent of the Covid vaccines, and joked that he would never get the jab.
His death comes amid a rise in cases across the US fuelled by the spread of the highly infectious Delta variant.
On Thursday the US registered more than 50,000 cases, centred in low-vaccination regions.
Crucially, however, the rise in cases has been largely decoupled from hospitalisations and deaths.
With 80 per cent of US seniors fully vaccinated, average daily deaths remain in the 200s — much lower than the more than 3500 deaths per day seen in the worst wave over the northern hemisphere winter.
More than 97 per cent of hospitalisations are among the unvaccinated, CDC director Rochelle Walensky said last week, while 99.5 per cent of people dying were unvaccinated, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said last weekend.
