"The victims of this now distorted concept of liberty are ones that we physicians encounter every day. The one that inspired this essay for me is an 11-year-old boy that I saw three weeks ago. He is a patient of mine in my pediatric practice who came to see me with typical respiratory symptoms that led to a diagnosis of COVID-19. While he recovered uneventfully, his father got sick the next day and died from the same illness five days later. Like the vast majority of people who die from COVID-19 now, he was unvaccinated, believing that getting vaccinated was unnecessary and part of a greater effort to undermine his personal liberty. His son is now dealing with the unimaginable grief of losing a parent at such a tender age and asking his mother if he killed his father by getting sick and causing his death. This happens every day now in our communities across our nation. These are wounds that will never heal for this generation of kids."

Jason V. Terk is a pediatrician.

He shares his story and discusses his KevinMD article, "The dimming of the shining city." (https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2021/10/the-dimming-of-the-shining-city.html)