Exclusive: ‘They Just Ran Roughshod Over My Parents’
In an interview with The Defender, Charlene Delfico described what happened to her parents when in December 2021, they both came down with COVID-19 and had to be hospitalized.
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New Jersey native Charlene Delfico, a pharmacy technician for over 30 years, still tears up when she recounts her parents’ story.
Two days after Christmas 2021, Delfico, 57, found her 76-year-old mother, Inez, collapsed on the floor, glassy-eyed and unresponsive. Her 85-year-old stepfather, Otto Moring, a vigorous man who still hunted and fished, was “dehydrated and a little bit out of it.”
Delfico called an ambulance to rush her parents to Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden, New Jersey, with severe symptoms of COVID-19.
That Christmas week, COVID-19 deaths had reached nearly 5.4 million worldwide. The New York Times reported that “Omicron Overshadows Christmas.”
Delfico said she knew that many elderly COVID-19 patients had died painful deaths on ventilators in New York City hospital intensive care units.
But Delfico, who worked at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, was confident in American medicine and hopeful her parents would be home soon.
Instead, eight days later, on Jan. 4, Otto was dead. Delfico said she is outraged that her stepfather, who had severe kidney disease, was given remdesivir, a failed Big Pharma drug that Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, pushed as the government’s hospital antiviral for COVID-19.
The drug was shown to be toxic to kidneys in human and animal studies and clinical experience, according to Dr. Pierre Kory and other COVID-19 experts.
In an interview with The Defender, Delfico shared her parents’ story, including how her father died and how she saved her mother’s life by getting her out of the hospital. Delfico also described how this harrowing experience led her to advocate on behalf of other victims of COVID-19 hospital protocols.
Delfico shared extensive documentation with The Defender, including her mother’s hospital records, to corroborate her story.
A spokesman for Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital didn’t return a call from The Defender asking for comment on Delfico’s allegations.
‘How could this happen in America?’
Delfico said her parents were robust for their ages as they entered the hospital.
“My stepdad loved to hunt with his nephew and fished for meals for my mother to prepare,” she said. “They loved to go to the beach or the boardwalk. My mom loved being in the house. She would do some gardening. They always did something to keep themselves busy.”
She said it was impossible for her to believe the word on the street and in alternative news sites that U.S. hospitals had become dangerous and her parents would come to harm there.
“I know my folks didn’t want to go into the hospital, but you think to yourself, ‘How could this happen in America? In a hospital?’ I prayed and thought the doctors and nurses would come to my parents’ rescue, but they did the complete opposite.”
“It’s still shocking,” Delfico said. “Never in my life would I think that my dad would get murdered and my mom tortured.”
Soon after arriving at the hospital, the family’s ordeal began. Delfico was not allowed into the emergency room with her parents.
“I wasn’t allowed to know what was going on with them,” she said. Phone calls to the nurse’s station went unanswered. When she protested, “The security guard corralled me and pushed me outside.”
Returning home, her phone calls to the hospital also went unanswered for “hours and hours” — until a doctor called and said they wanted to put Otto on a ventilator.
Delfico resisted, but the doctor made it clear that a ventilator would give his lungs a rest and was his best chance at surviving. Otherwise, his heart could give out. “So, we decided to put him on the ventilator,” she said.
Initially, Delfico was told her stepfather was doing well, with a 20% reliance on the ventilator. But hope was short-lived. A few days later, a male nurse called and said her dad was now 100% reliant on the ventilator.
As Delfico tried to process the distressing news, the nurse “started lecturing me and telling me that my folks wouldn’t be in this situation if they had gotten vaccinated,” she said. “Did you live with them? Did you get COVID? Did you get vaccinated?” Delfico recalled the nurse asking.
“Basically he was saying that my folks deserved what they were getting because they weren’t vaccinated,” she said. When Delfico complained to a doctor at the hospital, she was told, “I think you misunderstood. He was probably trying to educate.”
‘I never got to see him’
The next evening, Delfico received a phone call with the news that her father’s heart had stopped. For seven torturous minutes, a doctor and nurse kept her on the phone reporting Otto’s heart had stopped, then restarted, and urged her to put him on a “‘do not resuscitate’ order,” Delfico said.
When she refused, the nurse said, “We’ve probably broken all his ribs and he’s probably in excruciating pain.” At that point, Delfico and other family members made the difficult decision to “let him go.”
“This is the hardest part for me,” she said. “I never got to see him, not even one bit. What were they doing to him? I don’t know.”
It was only after Delfico obtained her stepfather’s medical records that she learned about the specific treatment he received in the hospital.
“I saw that they gave him remdesivir, which made his kidneys worse. He already had acute kidney disease,” she said. “They also gave him baricitinib. They gave him propofol and midazolam [and] they also added precedex and fentanyl.”
Delfico had not approved any of these treatments. “They also gave him a flu shot,” she said, even though “he was sick and on a ventilator.”
‘Unbelievable that my mom survived’
The agony was just beginning for Delfico and her mother. Inez remained in isolation for a total of 25 days, unaware her companion of 30 years was dead.
Delfico said it was almost impossible to visit or communicate with her mother, or to learn what doctors and nurses were doing to her without informed consent.
Delfico’s visit was limited to looking through the window at her mother, wearing a mask and talking on the phone — and it was always difficult to reach her by phone. A nurse said her mother didn’t want to talk to her, “And that broke my heart because I was missing her,” she said. “I could tell my mother didn’t know who I was.”
Finally, when they had a chance to talk, Delfico asked her mother, “‘What’s going on? They told me you were leaving the phone off the hook.’” Her mother said they took the phone from her. She begged her daughter for water and food, saying, “I’m so hungry.”
There was no nursing button in the room to call for help, her mother said. Delfico later discovered the button was “on the wall” beyond her mother’s reach, and that the hospital phone was regularly being placed in the closet, “along with all the food that I’d been bringing up for my mom.”
The hospital staff said her mother didn’t have an appetite. But Delfico said her mother didn’t eat because she was too weak to open the food, and nobody helped her. Even the cup of water on her mom’s hospital table was out of reach. Alone and without water, she was afraid of choking in the room if she ate.
“I would call the nurses, say she’s begging for water, and I said, ‘Why are you not giving her water? Is there a limitation for some reason?’” Delfico said. “There was no reason.”
“It’s really unbelievable that my mom survived when I look at everything that happened,” she said.
Delfico learned more details about her mother’s experience at the hospital when she asked a nurse to examine her mother’s medical records.
“I found out that at midnight on Jan. 1, 2022, they put my mom in restraints … for a minimum of 11 hours,” she said. “They said it was because of medical interference. But my mom said, ‘I was sitting in urine and feces,’ and that was why she was trying to get out of the gown.”
Delfico said she has possession of an audio recording from the hospital, where a doctor was speaking to her mother while he was removing her restraints, and her mother was asking for a phone to call her daughter and “begging for water” but “could hardly talk.”
Yet the doctor ignored her pleas, telling her, “You’ve got to cooperate, or you’re going to go back in the restraints.”
Doctors and nurses wouldn’t let Delfico tell her mother in person that Inez’s life companion had died. They insisted that she tell her mother over the phone. Delfico refused.
A nurse filed an ethics complaint against Delfico to force her to tell her mother the tragic news over the phone. Delfico stood firm. Finally, a priest called her from her mother’s bedside, insisting that she give the news over the phone while he was in the room with a health worker to help her mother grieve.
Delfico, who was raised Catholic and attended Catholic school, shouted at the priest, “Who the hell are you? It’s none of your business! This is a family matter.”
An attorney helped her arrange an in-person visit. Depressed in isolation, her mother started refusing her medication and refusing physical therapy. “What’s the point?” she asked. “I’m not going to make it out of here alive.”
Delfico demanded of “everyone I talked to” in the hospital that her mother be allowed to leave isolation, leave the hospital and not be sent to a nursing facility. Hospital staff pushed back on all points.
But on Jan. 27, 2022, one month after being admitted, Inez was finally released to go home.
‘I thought I was going crazy’
Her mother is a shadow of herself, Delfico said. She suffered two bed sores and a deep-tissue injury that “was bad,” she said. “She couldn’t walk, she couldn’t talk, she couldn’t use the bathroom, she couldn’t turn her head from side to side.”
While caring for her mother with home health assistance, Delfico was haunted by what had happened in the hospital. She said it felt like “psychological warfare … to teach me a lesson,” in part due to her parents’ unvaccinated status. “It was all over the medical charts, ‘unvaccinated, unvaccinated,’” Delfico said.
“I was alone, I thought I was going crazy,” she said. She funneled her grief and confusion into purpose.
Facing the financial consequences of her stepfather’s death, Delfico went online to cancel their subscription to The Epoch Times. Up popped a story about the nightmare of 54-year-old Gail Seiler, also hospitalized in December 2021, in a Plano, Texas, facility and treated cruelly and abused until her husband, fearing she would not survive the hospital and the remdesivir and ventilator protocol, managed to get her out.
An organization called the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation was quoted in the story.
Delfico called the FormerFedsGroup immediately. “I met people who had gone through the same thing and I knew I wasn’t crazy. I was going to make a difference.”
She joined the FormerFedsGroup and became an activist for other COVID-19 hospital protocol victims and their families. Today, she is the organization’s New Jersey state chair and a member of its legislative committee.
As part of her advocacy efforts in New Jersey, Delfico said that in August, the state chapter hired a plane to fly over the Jersey Shore with a banner reading “COV19 HOSPITAL DEATH? R U SURE?” to raise awareness of the COVID-19 hospital protocol. They also launched a billboard campaign throughout the state.
‘Tragically common’ story
Delfico was horrified to learn of the hospital protocols set by the Centers for Disease Control, including remdesivir.
“They ran roughshod over my parents,” Delfico said. “There were incentives for the hospital stay, the oxygen, the remdesivir. I saw $13,000-plus for a dose of remdesivir. You add in the other doses and that gives them a pretty big chunk of change. The standard of care is out the window in hospitals now. A bounty was put on my parents’ head.”
Dr. Ryan Cole, an Idaho pathologist and scientific leader of the health freedom movement, said that the World Health Organization recommended against using remdesivir in autumn of 2020, but the U.S. persists in using the dangerous drug on COVID-19 patients from the elderly down to 6-month-olds, giving hospitals financial benefits for each use.
“Fauci fudged the trial on remdesivir, which was a known failure in Ebola trials,” Cole said, “and it was known to be kidney toxic in one-third of animals in animal trials.”
Remdesivir is an antiviral, he said, which “has no possibility of working unless you get it in the first couple of days of infection.” Instead, it is often administered days later “when the virus is done replicating and the patient is in the inflammation and clotting stage of the disease, when it only has the possibility of harm with no possible benefit.”
In interviews with The Defender, Cole and Ralph Lorigo, a Buffalo, New York, lawyer who represented dying COVID-19 patients in 40 states suing hospitals for denying ivermectin (while the hospitals followed the remdesivir protocol), said Delfico’s story is a tragically common one in the U.S.
“We all need to stand up for individual medical freedom and be willing to not trust the white coat,” Cole said. “People need to get involved.”
Delfico said she is focused on getting justice for COVID-19 hospital patients. “I know that there are others out there who are suffering in silence,” she said. “I’m hoping to reach those people and I want them to understand that they’re not alone. We have to stop what the hospitals are doing because they’re still doing it.”
She knows her efforts are making a difference. “Last year, when I was trying to talk to people about what was happening in the hospitals, they looked at me like I had three eyes,” she said. “Now, as I talk to people, they know what’s going on.”
“I have a favorite saying,” she said. “Justice will not be served until those that are unaffected are as outraged as those who were affected.”
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