by James A. Bacon
You would never know it from meeting him over Zoom that Shamgar Connors is living under a veritable death sentence. He requires kidney dialysis 12 hours per day. His doctors tell him that the average life expectancy for his particular kidney disease is about five years…. and he started dialysis a year-and-a-half ago. He has been on the kidney-transplant list for about three years now, but the University of Virginia Health system has put him on “inactive” status on the grounds that he refuses to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
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.
“I showed up and said, ‘here I am, what do I do?’” Connors recalls. They didn’t know what to expect of a guy named Shamgar. It’s a name from the Bible. Look it up.” (Shamgar snags a one-line mention in Judges 3:31 for striking down six hundred Philistines with an oxgoad.) Someone handed him a math book, and before he knew it, he was teaching pre-Algebra. “It was wild.” He soon transitioned to teaching computer science to middle schoolers, and took on duties as a basketball and soccer coach as well.
He moved from the Eastern Shore to Stafford County, where he married his wife Lauren in 2016, and found a job teaching in Woodbridge, Prince William County.
Around 2014 Connors had reached a pinnacle of fitness when he started having medical issues. His doctors told him he had protein in his urine, a sign of malfunctioning kidneys. He blew off their warnings until one day his legs swelled up so badly he had to go to the hospital. The diagnosis: FSGS, or focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, a disease that scars the tubules of the kidney. He might have gotten it from strep throat as a kid. Genetics might have played a role. No one knows for sure. At first he tried to control the disease through diet and blood pressure meds. That didn’t work, though, so he had no choice but to undergo dialysis.
At age 42, Connors still lifts weights, and he has a body-builder’s physique. But he says the dialysis wears him down — it takes 12 hours every day, and the machine makes him feel like it is sucking his insides out. Muscle cramps are a recurring side effect. He tires easily. “It’s not fun.”
As part of his treatment, he visits the University of Virginia hospital in Charlottesville every year to confer with the transplant doctors. Because of COVID restrictions, the last session took place in October over the phone. That’s when he was told that if he didn’t get the vaccination, he would be placed on inactive status on the transplant list. UVa Health explained that getting the transplant would make him immuno-comprised and more vulnerable to COVID.
He asked why he needed the vaccine. He’d been infected COVID recently and gotten over it.
That’s a story in itself. Connors became very sick. His oxygen level as measured by the oximeter fell to the 80’s. He had a fever, he vomited, and he couldn’t sleep. The sickness lingered, the physician-prescribed treatments didn’t work, and he wasn’t getting better. His wife is a nurse, and at her suggestion, he took some ivermectin, used primarily as an anti-parasite medication, before some doctors began prescribing it as a treatment for COVID-19. Ivermectin has been deployed widely in India, with apparent success, but the Centers for Disease Control warn against its use on the grounds that its efficacy has never been proven in a randomized, double-blind clinical trial. The use of ivermectin has been rejected by the healthcare establishment and ridiculed in popular culture as a horse medicine.
But Connors tried it, and it worked — immediately. “I was better in 24 hours.” When he wife got sick from COVID, she tried it, too. And she quickly got better. Given his personal experience, Connors has no question whatsoever about ivermectin’s efficacy. As a consequence, he is less than impressed by the medical establishment and its media mouthpieces.
But ivermectin is a side issue. The point is that he acquired natural immunity from his infection. He argues that his immunity is as good as the immunity conferred by a vaccine. Now the same people who told him ivermectin is worthless say he must get vaccinated. He doesn’t get it. Why can’t the medical criteria for a transplant be the level of antibodies in his system, he asks, rather than “an experimental drug that I don’t need?”
Part II will explore the medical issues surrounding COVID vaccinations and transplants.
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