‘My husband was killed by an illness he didn’t believe was real’ – Joe McCarron’s widow after his death from Covid

As Joe McCarron lay dying of Covid-19 at Letterkenny University Hospital, his wife Una rested her head on his chest and listened to his sinking heart until it finally stopped.
The disease had destroyed the 67-year-old beyond recognition: both hemispheres of the brain were badly injured, he was blind, deaf and unable to move.
“Joe was starting to lose color so I lay across his chest on the bed. My sister, who was with me, said, “Una, it’s all over, he’s gone,” but I could hear his heart still beating.
“I could hear him breathing and then when I heard the beeping of the machine I knew his heart had stopped – and that was it. I called him and asked him to take care of me.”
Mr McCarron, from Dungloe in Co Donegal, was killed by an illness he didn’t believe was real.
days before his death last September He made international headlines when he was discharged from hospital, encouraged by members of an anti-vax movement linked to controversial former UCD professor Dolores Cahill.
Una has not yet spoken about the circumstances that led to her husband’s death. Still haunted by the events of last September, she told the Sunday independent: “When I go to bed at night, everything comes back to me; the hospital, his departure, the wake, the funeral.
“I think Joe was brainwashed into thinking Covid wasn’t real because I saw a side of him I had never seen before – and that’s hard to take. Joe thought Covid was a hoax, that it was another way for the government to make money. I didn’t agree with him, but I didn’t tell him. I didn’t want to cause a riot, but I knew he was wrong.”
The late Joe McCarron with his wife Una
Joe McCarron’s anti-Covid stance began when he joined the Common Law Movement in Donegal – a group that initially wanted to help people struggling with financial institutions but later grew to believe dangerous Covid conspiracy theories and to share.
“One day we were shopping in Letterkenny and the person in the store wouldn’t serve him – he didn’t have a mask and we had to come out.
“I said, ‘Joe, it would be people like you who would get this Covid,’ but he said, ‘There is no Covid’.”
Joe had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and, according to his wife, was “an easy target who should have been vaccinated.”
But he was blinded by the noise and believed everything he was told, including by Cahill – the once respected immunologist who even now continues to spread Covid untruths regularly dismissed by her former colleagues and other experts.
“Dolores was speaking in Donegal and Joe came home and said, ‘You’d like to hear Dolores talk about the vaccine.’ A friend of mine was at the same meeting and said to me, “After listening to Dolores, I’m definitely not getting a vaccine”.
“Looking back now, I’m angry. Joe would have been a well read man. I can’t understand how he could have gotten himself into something like that or set his mind to it.”
Joe would soon learn how real it was when he tested positive for the disease. “It was a miracle he even took a test, but he did. When the results came through he said, ‘Una, I have Covid’.”
The next day he felt better and Una went to work and asked her husband to call her “anytime” before she left. But no call came. She called him on her break – and “he was a completely different man”.
An ambulance was dispatched and around 9 p.m. Una called Letterkenny University Hospital and was told that her husband was a “very ill man”.
It was at this point that Cahill intervened after one of Joe’s friends contacted his wife and told her he would ask the anti-vaccination opponent to call her.
“Dolores called me around 2pm on Sunday. She said: “You have to get him from the hospital, they will kill him. You have to get him out’. I asked her who would take care of Joe and she said, ‘Don’t worry about it, we’ll take care of it. There will be enough people to take care of him – as long as you get him out of the hospital.”
“She said he just needed a high dose of vitamin A – and that was all he needed. I called Joe and said, ‘Dolores Cahill and Antonio are working hard to get you out of the hospital’.”
Text messages sent to Joe’s phone by Antonio Mureddu, the Italian anti-vaccination activist, describe the exchange between the two.
In a message, Mureddu wrote: “We are near you on the ground. You say you have Covid-19. Nonsense.” Another reads: “We’re putting pressure on them. It takes time, but we won’t go.”
And he didn’t, later visiting Joe’s room and encouraging him to leave.
A video of the September 14 incident went viral and shows Mureddu yelling at him to go home.
A staff member tells Joe he has the right to choose what he wants to do, but adds: “You can hardly breathe there now. We want you to stay and help yourself.”
“No, Joe, they’re going to fucking kill you, Joe,” says Mureddu.
“Antonio struggled to get in and that’s the scary part – the part I can’t get out of my head,” Una said. “He goes in. Joe has the oxygen mask on and Antonio looks at the monitor and throws the mask off his face and says ‘You don’t need that’.
“I said, ‘Antonio – what about the oxygen?’ He said, ‘The oxygen will be there tonight’. Then he pulled out the drip.”
Another friend of Joe’s was waiting outside to take them both home 40 minutes away.
By then, “Una kept wondering, ‘where’s the oxygen, how is Joe going to breathe?’ Some of the boys stopped at a health food store for vitamins and they were brought inside.”
She says Joe also received ivermectin from his friends, with instructions on how to take the pills.
The next day his health deteriorated and this time even he knew it and said to his wife, “I can’t do this”.
It was 9 a.m. when she reached a doctor who spoke to him on the phone. “I heard the doctor say, ‘Joe, if you don’t go to the hospital, you’ll be dead by night.’ I think Joe was scared. I think that was the first moment he realized how serious it was. He gasped. Within two hours his chest and nose had turned blue in front of me.”
When the ambulance came, Una told the paramedic that she would follow them to the hospital, but he told her he didn’t think her husband would survive the trip.
“When we got there, a specialist said she had never seen a brain like this – the virus attacked it.”
There was nothing more they could do. “They turned off the life support machine and the chaplain came in and gave him the last rites.” When Joe finally stopped breathing, a distraught Una – with her head on her husband’s chest – asked him to watch over her for the time to come should.
“I said to him, ‘Joe, I can’t go on without you. I need you to guide me And I think he is.”
She has not heard from Mureddu since her husband’s death. He was arrested last month, questioned at the hospital about the incident and released without charge.
Sources say he is unlikely to be charged as Joe McCarron was a “willing participant”.
Cahill hasn’t called back since then and hasn’t returned any calls from Sunday independent last week.
A message posted on Mureddu’s social media account The Italian Job on September 14 last year praised Cahill’s involvement in the events at Letterkenny Hospital and said she “did a fantastic job working tirelessly with the.” team”.
When Cahill was first contacted by that newspaper days before Mr McCarron’s death, she denied the incident had anything to do with her. “I didn’t have any… it had nothing to do with me. If you write that, that’s wrong. You really should talk to the patient and the patient’s family and the people of Donegal and whoever is behind The Italian Job – and if you write something else then of course [the Sunday Independent] must be held accountable.”
But Una believes Cahill must provide answers. “Dolores Cahill has a lot of questions to answer about the drugs she suggested to him, she told me what to tell the hospital, she told me he needs to be removed from the hospital, she told me that Joe is taken care of.”
Una suffered a brain injury a few years ago and her husband was her primary caregiver.
She is now feeling “sad and lonely” that only she and her fox terrier dog Roxy are at home. “Just for her now I have someone to greet me when I go home.”
She thinks if her husband had been vaccinated things would have been different.
“I have a strong belief that if Joe had gotten the jab, he would still be here. But anti-vaccination robbed me of my husband, my caregiver, my best friend.”
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/my-husband-was-killed-by-a-disease-he-didnt-believe-was-real-joe-mccarrons-widow-on-his-death-from-covid-41491378.html ‘My husband was killed by an illness he didn’t believe was real’ – Joe McCarron’s widow after his death from Covid