In March, Stella Creasy, the Labour MP for Walthamstow, received a leaflet from Public Health England that read: “ has not yet been assessed in pregnancy, so it has been advised that until more information is available, those who are pregnant should not have this vaccine.” She was pregnant at the time, with her second child.īecause Creasy felt uneasy about the rationale for excluding pregnant women from the vaccine programme, she raised her concerns repeatedly at the weekly video-call sessions with the then minister for vaccine deployment, Nadhim Zahawi, to which all MPs were invited.
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When the Covid vaccine programme began in the UK on 8 December 2020, pregnant women were told not to get vaccinated, as Samantha would discover a few months later. Photograph: Stephen Latimer/Courtesy of Josh Willis Samantha and Josh on their wedding day, with (left to right) Shea, Lilyanna and Holly. “I thought we had another 50 years or so, to watch the wee ones grow up.” “I wish I had done a lot more for her,” sighs Josh. She loved watching trashy TV, such as Keeping Up With the Kardashians, and making extravagant Halloween costumes for the kids she loved decorating people’s Christmas trees and sliding her freezing cold feet in between Josh’s feet in bed. Samantha was the sort of person who would get out of bed at 2am to drive a friend home if they couldn’t find a taxi. “She got attached to the service users,” says Mary. It was exhausting but rewarding work 11-hour shifts were commonplace. The same year, Samantha began working as an at-home carer. “When we got married, I told her: I’ll never get married again,” says Josh. “He was the love of her life.” They married in March 2019. The couple met in a Derry bar on Samantha’s birthday in 2012. “It was just one of those things I wasn’t supposed to ask her about,” says Josh. She had her first two children young: Shea, her son, when she was 17, and Holly, her eldest daughter, when she was 20. Samantha left school at 16 to work as a hairdresser, then at a dry cleaner’s. “She went out nice and came in mucky as anything.” In childhood, she was “more or less a tomboy”, says her mother, Mary Davidson, 54, who lives in Derry and is a support worker for people with learning disabilities. S amantha was born in 1986, the oldest of five children. “It didn’t even cross our minds that we would get sick,” says Josh. Their positive Covid tests, while a mild inconvenience, were nothing to be unduly concerned about. Samantha was due to give birth in less than a month.
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They had been careful they had come so far. By the time of the positive tests, whenever they needed a change of scenery, they would pick up a Chinese takeaway and eat it in the car. “We thought we’d be safe in the house,” says Josh, who worked from home. The couple were careful to limit their contact with the outside world, given Samantha was unvaccinated and pregnant. “We decided she would get it after her pregnancy.” “We thought: people are off school, she’s on maternity leave, it’s pretty safe now,” says Josh. Later, when the guidance changed to advocate vaccination in pregnant women, Samantha was nearer her due date. It read: “The vaccines have not yet been tested in pregnancy, so until more information is available, those who are pregnant should not routinely have this vaccine.” He found the flyer among her things recently. “They gave her a flyer telling her there wasn’t enough research on the Covid vaccine in pregnant women,” says Josh. Samantha was unvaccinated – she had received advice against getting jabbed at an antenatal appointment. She was only 35 and in good health, with no underlying conditions.
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It never crossed either of their minds that Samantha would fall seriously ill with Covid. “We thought we’d sit in the garden and cook and get the house organised.” “We were looking forward to a week in the house,” says Josh. Samantha rang around her family and friends, cancelling the baby shower.īoth Samantha and Josh were homebirds – the sort of people who loved nothing better than watching Netflix and snuggling on the sofa – so the prospect of an enforced self-isolation didn’t seem so bad.
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They had taken a test the day before, after coming into contact with someone who was positive. Then the texts started to come through, first to Samantha and then to her husband, Josh, a 36-year-old civil servant: they had Covid. The weather was beautiful, so Samantha stood out in the sun, ironing clothes and getting everything organised for the baby. On 1 August, the care worker and mother of three from Derry was eight months pregnant with her third daughter. She even bought a cheese board, despite the fact that, because she was pregnant, she couldn’t eat half of it. No fuss she didn’t want other people to be put out. I t was typical of Samantha Willis that she bought the food for her baby shower herself.