St. Louis Cardinals’ Tyler O’Neill weighed vaccine benefits for himself, future family
When faced with the decision whether to receive a vaccine for COVID-19, Tyler O’Neill and Stephanie Beck found themselves in the same situation as millions of others. They were uncertain, unconvinced and searching for answers, and so they decided to wait.
O’Neill, 26, is the St. Louis Cardinals outfielder who just recorded his first 20-home run season and is the defending National League Gold Glove recipient in left field. Beck, 25, is his fiancée and the future mother of his children.
They are now both fully vaccinated against COVID-19, having received Moderna’s two injection course over the last four weeks.
“Everyone’s going to be concerned with putting something into the body,” O’Neill said Saturday in the dugout at Kansas City’s Kauffman Stadium. “I think as a healthy individual, you should be very conscious of that.”
“One of the most important things that we were committed to was continuing to research and understand because information is changing so quickly,” Beck explained Monday. “One of the things that we committed to when we initially said, ‘you know what, we’re not ready yet,’ was continuing to stay up to date on the new information.”
The team was offered the one shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine in late March after arriving in Cincinnati from spring training in Florida. Shortly thereafter, the club announced it had reached Major League Baseball’s 85% threshold, which triggered relaxed restrictions on the road and in team facilities.
Cardinals manager Mike Shildt described uncertainty, at the time, whether his team would reach that mark. It would have taken less than 10 holdouts among the club’s Tier One traveling party to fall short, and though it was unknown at the time, O’Neill was one of those holdouts.
“We had two real main concerns in terms of the actual vaccine,” Beck explained. “The one concern was, of course, allergies. Because as everybody’s become aware, this year, Tyler does have some severe allergies. That was put to rest pretty quickly.”
O’Neill has a peanut allergy that caused him to miss time in San Francisco and Chicago earlier this season after consuming a mislabeled salad. That incident required him, for the first time, to be injected with the EpiPen he keeps on his person at all times.
The Cardinals medical staff, led by Coordinator of Major League Medical Services Dr. Brian Mahaffey, ran down the ingredients list of the vaccine with the couple, providing assurances O’Neill would not be at risk.
The second concern was harder to wrangle, in part because it’s nearly impossible to pin down.
“My beautiful fiancée and I want to have kids eventually,” O’Neill said.
“We’re engaged,” Beck said, “and we have our sights set on the future. And we would like to have a family. And so that was, I guess ... you know, it was more so the uncertainty of it.”
That uncertainty is an unfortunate side effect of an insidious misinformation campaign which has spread on social media and seeped into the popular consciousness. None of the approved COVID-19 vaccines have been shown to pose any risk to fertility, and, yet, among young and healthy people like Beck and O’Neill, the fear they could be risking a future child was paralyzing even if it wasn’t based in truth.
“There wasn’t a lot of information on whether it did or didn’t or could affect fertility,” Beck said. “And that was a very big deal to us.”
Doctor offers helpful hand
It was Dr. Mahaffey, again, who walked the two through the science and the truth, and who helped them to understand that receiving a vaccination was far and away the action which best protected their futures.
“The team was amazing,” Beck said. “They were so patient with us. They understood.”
“(Dr. Mahaffey) took time out of his Sunday evening one of the weekends to meet with us on the phone and answer questions that we had.”
“There’s been a lot of question marks wiped off the table in regards to the fertility aspect,” O’Neill said, describing how Dr. Mahaffey explained doctors are now commonly recommending vaccination to pregnant women.
There were logistical considerations in play as well. Beck and O’Neill are Canadian and live in British Columbia in the offseason; while unvaccinated, they were subject to a 14-day quarantine when crossing into Canada.
‘We’re definitely not outgoing people’
The Canadian government also recently announced a vaccine requirement for all commercial air passengers in Canada, set to begin this fall.
Home was a safe haven for the two as COVID raged in the winter, with British Columbia being subject to much stricter mitigation policies than Illinois, Missouri, or especially Florida, where they described being “a little shell shocked” upon arriving for spring training.
“We’re definitely not outgoing people,” O’Neill said, explaining staying in and apart from others minimized their risk of contracting and especially spreading COVID.
Beck described carefully selecting locations of grocery stores and times at which she would go in order to keep crowd exposure as low as possible.
Still, a better tool was available to them.
When teammate Adam Wainwright’s wife, Jenny, contracted COVID-19 in late April, a scary incident presented as both a sad event and an object lesson. Wainwright was placed on the injured list to step away from the team and care for his family, and his wife was admitted to the hospital.
“Obviously, that being so close to us is tough to see,” O’Neill said. “It’s a good example to get protected and get vaxxed up.”
Risk vs. reward of vaccination
Beck described a conversation with Dr. Mahaffey in which he explained, “the impact that COVID can have on you outweighs the risk of receiving the vaccine. And, you know, that’s partially because you don’t know how COVID is going to interact with your body.
“The vaccine is more of a controlled environment for it to respond in. And so when he said that, Tyler and I were both like, okay, that resonates really strongly,” Beck said.
Beck said she felt “100%” different and more comfortable in her daily life even after receiving only the first of her two injections.
“We were driving away from getting our first shot,” she recalled, “and we both said, ‘You know what? We made the right decision,’ because of the peace that we had.”
The standard line for professional athletes who have refused the vaccine has become some version of a desire to seek out more research, with the implication and assumption often being that somewhere between politics and misinformation will lie an excuse to avoid the vaccine.
Thrilled with decision
Tyler O’Neill and Stephanie Beck were hesitant. They talked to doctors. They did their research. They made a family decision with each other’s support.
They got vaccinated, and they’re thrilled with their choice.
“We never had a reason to say why we didn’t have it,” O’Neill acknowledged. “People would ask us, and they’d be like, ‘no, what’s the reason for not having it?’
“I feel a lot safer having the vaccine,” he declared. “I feel safe going out in public. Not that I didn’t before, but there’s honestly no worry for me with the vaccine now.”
