A solicitor who refused to have a Covid vaccine died with the virus days after posting a Facebook video saying it was “nothing to be afraid of”.
Leslie Lawrenson, 58, said people should “trust your immune system” and that he would rather develop “antibodies in my blood” than have the jab.
He also argued in his final post on June 24 that there was no need for lockdowns and that coronavirus was “like the flu”.
The Cambridge graduate was found dead in bed at home in Bournemouth, Dorset, on July 2.
His partner, Amanda Mitchell, 56, who was admitted to hospital the same day and spent a week on a Covid ward, told the BBC: “Les made a terrible mistake and he’s paid the ultimate price.”
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He had decided against the jab after reading material on social media. “It was a daily thing that he said to us: ‘You don’t need to have it, you’ll be fine, just be careful’,” she added.
“He said to me, ‘It’s a gene thing, an experimental thing. You’re putting something in your body that hasn’t been thoroughly tested.’
“Les was highly educated, so if he told me something, I tended to believe it. I feel incredibly foolish. Les died unnecessarily.”
His daughter Carla Hodges, 35, said: “He was so brainwashed by the stuff that he was seeing on YouTube and social media. He said: ‘A lot of people will die more from having the vaccine than getting Covid.’”
Lawrenson said in a first video on the night of June 23 that he had a temperature and a headache. “I am very rarely ill,” he said. “I had an ordinary flu in my 30s which laid me up for a long time — that’s the worst I’ve ever felt. This isn’t too bad. If this is Covid and it gets worse than this, I will gladly take it, get the antibodies in my blood and natural immunity. I hope I have got it because I would rather have the antibodies in my blood than take the jabs.”
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He said he was determined not to go to hospital because he didn’t want to “impose myself on NHS resources”.
The following day he made another video, saying he felt “pretty dreadful” after being racked by pain and a fever overnight. “I still say I’m glad I got Covid-19 — yeah, I am. Would I want to go through it? No, but neither would I want to contract the flu.
“It’s not something that we want, but these are things we have to suffer, it’s part of living. You have to trust your immune system and if the alternative is we live in fear, we create a bogeyman out of something that, hopefully, I’m showing isn’t anything to be afraid of for 99.9 per cent of us.
“We have got to deal with that and we have got to make the government aware that is how we feel. The idea that we have to be afraid of this Covid-19 — we have got to get over it, because the government is taking advantage of the fear. There is absolutely no reason to be locked down. Covid-19 is nothing different.”