Nurse on the Frontlines of COVID-19 Shares Her Experience
- June 27, 2020
Story at-a-glance
- Erin Olszewski, a nurse turned undercover reporter and whistleblower, reveals the horrific maltreatment of COVID-19 patients at Elmhurst Hospital Center, the public hospital in Queens, New York, that is “the epicenter of the epicenter” of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.
- Olszewski addresses a number of problems at Elmhurst, including the disproportionate mortality rate among people of color and the controversial rule surrounding Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders
- Elmhurst does not segregate COVID-positive and COVID-negative patients, thereby ensuring maximum spread of the disease among noninfected patients coming in with other health problems
- Patients who repeatedly tested negative for COVID-19 were still listed as confirmed positive and placed on mechanical ventilation, thus artificially inflating the case numbers while condemning the patient to death from lung injury
- Many of the doctors treating these patients are not trained in critical care. One of the “doctors” on the COVID floor is a dentist, and inexperienced medical students are relied upon
The heavily censored video above,
"Perspectives on the Pandemic: Episode Nine," features an interview
with retired Army Sergeant Erin Olszewski, a nurse turned private
citizen journalist who for the past few months has cared for COVID-19
patients in Florida and New York. In this must-see interview, she
shares her experiences at the two facilities.
Elmhurst Hospital Center, a public hospital in Queens, New York, has been "the epicenter of the epicenter" of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. Few areas have been as hard hit as central Queens. The question is why?
Initially, a shortage of ventilators was blamed for the exaggerated death toll. But it didn't take long before doctors recognized that mechanical ventilation did more harm than good in a majority of cases.
Olszewski addresses a number of problems at Elmhurst, including the disproportionate mortality rate among people of color, the controversial rule surrounding Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders, lax personal protective equipment (PPE) standards, and the failure to segregate COVID-positive and COVID-negative patients, thereby ensuring maximum spread of the disease among noninfected patients coming in with other health problems.
Olszewski accepted a temporary transfer from Florida to New York and spent nearly four weeks at Elmhurst. What she witnessed spurred her to become an undercover reporter and whistleblower. She secretly recorded happenings in the hospital and posted warnings on social media. The standard of care at Elmhurst is so poor, Olszewski compares it to "a third-world country hospital."
According to Olszewski, most patients who had difficulty breathing were immediately placed on mechanical ventilation. Many of these cases were likely nothing more than anxiety, she says. But why?
Financial incentives appear to be at play. Elmhurst, a public hospital, is able to charge Medicaid and Medicare a lot more for COVID-19 patients than for other diagnoses. According to Olszewski, the hospital receives $29,000 extra for a COVID-19 patient receiving ventilation, over and above other treatments.
Making matters worse, many of the doctors treating these patients are not trained in critical care. One of the "doctors" on the COVID floor is a dentist. Residents (medical students) are also relied on, "and they have no idea what they're doing," Olszewski says.
Not only are they not properly trained in how to safely ventilate, residents are also unfamiliar with the drugs being used and are making errors — none of which are being investigated simply because we're in a pandemic.
One resident instructed Olszewski to administer a dangerous drug at four times the safe speed — an error that would have killed the patient, had she followed the resident's instructions. According to Olszewski, residents are essentially using these patients for practice purposes, in many cases performing invasive procedures that are not necessary and will harm the patient.
Interestingly, while the elderly are the most at-risk for COVID-19 worldwide, a majority of COVID-19 patients in Elmhurst hospital are in their 40s and 50s — very few are over 80 — and Olszewski guesses that only about half of those being treated for COVID-19 have actually tested positive.
"They're banking on the fact that they'll get it," Olszewski says, "because they're already immunocompromised." This despite the fact that they now have enough rooms in the hospital to separate these patients.
In her undercover video, Olszewski talks about how a stroke patient ended up contracting the disease due to being placed in the same room as a COVID-positive patient. He ended up on mechanical ventilation, drastically increasing his chances of dying due to lung damage.
Improper use of PPE further facilitates the spread of the virus. Elmhurst is also not using the rapid test, which gives you your test results in 45 minutes. It's more expensive, so they're not using it. Instead, they use a test that has a four- to five-day turnaround.
In the meantime, infected and noninfected patients are being comingled, as patients suspected of having COVID-19 are admitted straight into the COVID unit.
The question is why? No answer was given, other than these orders were coming "from the top." "It's murder," Olszewski says. "It's setting these people up for failure — based on money." She's convinced that the 37-year-old man died as a direct result of being vented, and on top of it he was denied CPR.
Part of why mechanical ventilation is so dangerous is because you are given sedatives and paralytics. You're essentially asleep for the duration, which could be up to a month.
"There's no way you can recover from something like that," Olszewski says. What's worse, many patients are not even told that they're going to be sedated. In a chilling conversation, a physician states that not a single patient has been successfully extubated and released since the pandemic began.
All patients who are put on ventilation die, and that's a majority of patients at Elmhurst, regardless of their actual infection status. Is it any wonder, then, that this Queens hospital is the "epicenter of the epicenter" of the pandemic? It's not due to rampant COVID-19 though.
One of the treatment protocols used on COVID-19 patients in Florida was hydroxychloroquine and zinc. Not one patient died. When asked why she thinks hydroxychloroquine has been demonized in the media, she says, "Because it works and then people won't need vents." Meanwhile, New York Gov. Cuomo restricted the dispensing of hydroxychloroquine. In New York, the drug can only be dispensed:1
All of this is now moot, however, as the FDA revoked emergency approval of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 on June 16, 2020.2 Could it be that a course of treatment is about $100 with hydroxychloroquine while that of its popular antiviral competitor, Remdesivir, is around $4,000?
It even stopped hydroxychloroquine trials from proceeding around the world, and the World Health Organization and governments altered their COVID-19 policies based on this fraudulent paper.
Once experts blew the whistle, demanding the paper's authors provide evidence that the data were reliable, the paper was withdrawn. The New England Journal of Medicine retracted another hydroxychloroquine paper for the same reason, as the data came from the same suspect organization: Surgisphere. As reported by STAT news June 2, 2020:3
Other Surgisphere employees include a science fiction editor, a
fantasy artist and an adult content model. The company's Twitter handle
has fewer than 170 followers and up until recently, its website contact
link redirected visitors to a WordPress template for a cryptocurrency
site.7 Just how did a paper originating from this obvious sham of a company end up carrying so much weight within the WHO?
Aside from hydroxychloroquine and zinc, which needs to be administered in the early stages of the disease, Olszewski talks about how she inquired about the use of high-dose vitamin C, which Asian studies have shown to be effective in cases of severe COVID-19.
A secret tape recording reveals the mindset of an Elmhurst physician, who roundly dismisses any and all treatments aside from ventilation as useless, since he expects 90% of his patients to die anyway. It's a chilling conversation.
There is much to learn from this pandemic. One take-home is that top-down pandemic treatment directives are ill advised. The WHO and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have turned out to be less than reliable and trustworthy in this regard, and the decisions by some political heads of state have been disastrous.
Why have governors not relied on the input of medical professionals who are actually working with patients and reporting excellent results? Why have so many doctors and scientists been suppressed and censored rather than listened to? Why are inexpensive and readily available remedies that are proving effective being dismissed and ridiculed?
The ineptitude and callousness demonstrated by top level leadership during this pandemic has been staggering, and future pandemic planning clearly needs to rely less on big pharma pushers like Bill Gates and WHO, and more on local critical care teams.
Unfortunately, we're now on a speeding train toward totalitarianism ushered in under the guise of a pandemic response, and the question is, can we stop it? I believe we must try. If we don't, things will only get worse from here.
Elmhurst Hospital Center, a public hospital in Queens, New York, has been "the epicenter of the epicenter" of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. Few areas have been as hard hit as central Queens. The question is why?
Initially, a shortage of ventilators was blamed for the exaggerated death toll. But it didn't take long before doctors recognized that mechanical ventilation did more harm than good in a majority of cases.
Olszewski addresses a number of problems at Elmhurst, including the disproportionate mortality rate among people of color, the controversial rule surrounding Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders, lax personal protective equipment (PPE) standards, and the failure to segregate COVID-positive and COVID-negative patients, thereby ensuring maximum spread of the disease among noninfected patients coming in with other health problems.
Olszewski accepted a temporary transfer from Florida to New York and spent nearly four weeks at Elmhurst. What she witnessed spurred her to become an undercover reporter and whistleblower. She secretly recorded happenings in the hospital and posted warnings on social media. The standard of care at Elmhurst is so poor, Olszewski compares it to "a third-world country hospital."
COVID-Negative Patients Placed on Ventilation
The first topic Olszewski approaches is Elmhurst's case numbers. Patients who repeatedly tested negative for COVID-19 were still listed as confirmed positive and placed on mechanical ventilation, thus artificially inflating the numbers while more or less condemning the patient to death from lung injury.According to Olszewski, most patients who had difficulty breathing were immediately placed on mechanical ventilation. Many of these cases were likely nothing more than anxiety, she says. But why?
Financial incentives appear to be at play. Elmhurst, a public hospital, is able to charge Medicaid and Medicare a lot more for COVID-19 patients than for other diagnoses. According to Olszewski, the hospital receives $29,000 extra for a COVID-19 patient receiving ventilation, over and above other treatments.
Making matters worse, many of the doctors treating these patients are not trained in critical care. One of the "doctors" on the COVID floor is a dentist. Residents (medical students) are also relied on, "and they have no idea what they're doing," Olszewski says.
Not only are they not properly trained in how to safely ventilate, residents are also unfamiliar with the drugs being used and are making errors — none of which are being investigated simply because we're in a pandemic.
One resident instructed Olszewski to administer a dangerous drug at four times the safe speed — an error that would have killed the patient, had she followed the resident's instructions. According to Olszewski, residents are essentially using these patients for practice purposes, in many cases performing invasive procedures that are not necessary and will harm the patient.
Interestingly, while the elderly are the most at-risk for COVID-19 worldwide, a majority of COVID-19 patients in Elmhurst hospital are in their 40s and 50s — very few are over 80 — and Olszewski guesses that only about half of those being treated for COVID-19 have actually tested positive.
Advertisement
Elmhurst Purposely Allows COVID-19 Transmission
What's worse, Elmhurst is mixing these patients together, meaning patients who have actually tested positive for COVID-19 are interspersed among patients with negative test results."They're banking on the fact that they'll get it," Olszewski says, "because they're already immunocompromised." This despite the fact that they now have enough rooms in the hospital to separate these patients.
In her undercover video, Olszewski talks about how a stroke patient ended up contracting the disease due to being placed in the same room as a COVID-positive patient. He ended up on mechanical ventilation, drastically increasing his chances of dying due to lung damage.
Improper use of PPE further facilitates the spread of the virus. Elmhurst is also not using the rapid test, which gives you your test results in 45 minutes. It's more expensive, so they're not using it. Instead, they use a test that has a four- to five-day turnaround.
In the meantime, infected and noninfected patients are being comingled, as patients suspected of having COVID-19 are admitted straight into the COVID unit.
Elmhurst Patients Are Denied CPR
She also discusses and plays recordings of arguments between nurses and a cardiac fellow (a fellow is a medical student who is one year away from practicing without direct supervision) in which the nurses are told to not resuscitate a 37-year-old patient in respiratory distress (who did not have COVID-19 yet was treated for it), even though he did not have a DNR order in place.The question is why? No answer was given, other than these orders were coming "from the top." "It's murder," Olszewski says. "It's setting these people up for failure — based on money." She's convinced that the 37-year-old man died as a direct result of being vented, and on top of it he was denied CPR.
Part of why mechanical ventilation is so dangerous is because you are given sedatives and paralytics. You're essentially asleep for the duration, which could be up to a month.
"There's no way you can recover from something like that," Olszewski says. What's worse, many patients are not even told that they're going to be sedated. In a chilling conversation, a physician states that not a single patient has been successfully extubated and released since the pandemic began.
All patients who are put on ventilation die, and that's a majority of patients at Elmhurst, regardless of their actual infection status. Is it any wonder, then, that this Queens hospital is the "epicenter of the epicenter" of the pandemic? It's not due to rampant COVID-19 though.
Stark Contrast — Private Hospital in Florida
Olszewski's experience in a private hospital in her home state of Florida is in stark contrast to that of Elmhurst. In Florida, they would treat each patient as needed, rather than driving them toward ventilation as quickly as possible. They also did not treat uninfected patients as if they had COVID-19.One of the treatment protocols used on COVID-19 patients in Florida was hydroxychloroquine and zinc. Not one patient died. When asked why she thinks hydroxychloroquine has been demonized in the media, she says, "Because it works and then people won't need vents." Meanwhile, New York Gov. Cuomo restricted the dispensing of hydroxychloroquine. In New York, the drug can only be dispensed:1
•
When written as prescribed for a U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved indication; or
Cuomo has prohibited the use of hydroxychloroquine for experimental
prophylactic use, which is what President Trump was using it for. Cuomo
"wants to be right," Olszewski says. "They got all these
[ventilators]; they want to use them." Cuomo has also granted New York
hospitals immunity from malpractice lawsuits during the pandemic.
◦ As part of a state approved clinical trial related to COVID-19 for a patient who has tested positive for COVID-19
◦ As part of a state approved clinical trial related to COVID-19 for a patient who has tested positive for COVID-19. (Positive COVID-19 test result must be documented as part of the prescription.)
◦ As part of a state approved clinical trial related to COVID-19 for a patient who has tested positive for COVID-19. (Positive COVID-19 test result must be documented as part of the prescription.)
All of this is now moot, however, as the FDA revoked emergency approval of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 on June 16, 2020.2 Could it be that a course of treatment is about $100 with hydroxychloroquine while that of its popular antiviral competitor, Remdesivir, is around $4,000?
The Hydroxychloroquine Cover-Up Blows Up
The video includes statements from doctors who vouch for the safety and effectiveness of the hydroxychloroquine regimen against COVID-19, and discusses the fraudulent study in the Lancet, used by detractors to drive the narrative that hydroxychloroquine doesn't work and can be dangerous.It even stopped hydroxychloroquine trials from proceeding around the world, and the World Health Organization and governments altered their COVID-19 policies based on this fraudulent paper.
Once experts blew the whistle, demanding the paper's authors provide evidence that the data were reliable, the paper was withdrawn. The New England Journal of Medicine retracted another hydroxychloroquine paper for the same reason, as the data came from the same suspect organization: Surgisphere. As reported by STAT news June 2, 2020:3
"'This is not for the faint of heart,' said Harlan Krumholz, director of the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation at Yale New Haven Hospital. 'This is not just a matter of dial-a-study when you get access to data.
Well-done studies are based on understanding the provenance of the data and making sure what you are doing is reasonable. There is good science to be done with big databases, but there are also major mistakes to be made. The question is: What happened here?'
Both studies in question used data from Surgisphere, a little-known company based in Chicago that claimed in the Lancet study to have data from 671 hospitals on six continents.
The Lancet paper4 found that the malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, which had been explored as potential therapies for Covid-19, did not correspond with improved outcomes for patients, and were also associated with higher mortality.
The paper5 in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that blood pressure medications were not associated with worse outcomes in patients with Covid-19. The studies share some of the same authors, including Sapan Desai, who runs Surgisphere."
Surgisphere Fraud Runs Deep
Since then, investigations into Surgisphere and its chief executive Desai has revealed the deception runs far deeper than those two studies. According to The Guardian:6"Further inquiries by the Guardian into Surgisphere and its founder and chief executive, Dr. Sapan Desai, have confirmed that:
- Major institutions including Stanford University, which were described as research partners on the Surgisphere website, said they were not aware of any formal relationship with the company.
- A study that formed the basis of Desai's Ph.D. may contain doctored images, according to expert claims, and the global medical publishing company Elsevier is conducting a review of his papers published in its journals.
- Claims made by Desai about his qualifications gained since his medical degree have been called into doubt, including his claims to hold two Ph.D.'s, a master's, and affiliations with major universities and colleges. Some of these affiliations have now been removed from his website and online profiles."
Government Should Not Dictate Medical Treatment
Olszewski brings up an important point, which is that government should never have gotten involved in issuing COVID-19 treatment directives. The treatment should be personalized to the patient, based on the symptoms they're presenting, and politicians should have no say in what treatment is chosen. "It's none of their business," she says.Aside from hydroxychloroquine and zinc, which needs to be administered in the early stages of the disease, Olszewski talks about how she inquired about the use of high-dose vitamin C, which Asian studies have shown to be effective in cases of severe COVID-19.
A secret tape recording reveals the mindset of an Elmhurst physician, who roundly dismisses any and all treatments aside from ventilation as useless, since he expects 90% of his patients to die anyway. It's a chilling conversation.
There is much to learn from this pandemic. One take-home is that top-down pandemic treatment directives are ill advised. The WHO and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have turned out to be less than reliable and trustworthy in this regard, and the decisions by some political heads of state have been disastrous.
Why have governors not relied on the input of medical professionals who are actually working with patients and reporting excellent results? Why have so many doctors and scientists been suppressed and censored rather than listened to? Why are inexpensive and readily available remedies that are proving effective being dismissed and ridiculed?
The ineptitude and callousness demonstrated by top level leadership during this pandemic has been staggering, and future pandemic planning clearly needs to rely less on big pharma pushers like Bill Gates and WHO, and more on local critical care teams.
Unfortunately, we're now on a speeding train toward totalitarianism ushered in under the guise of a pandemic response, and the question is, can we stop it? I believe we must try. If we don't, things will only get worse from here.
+ Sources and References
No comments:
Post a Comment