in World News The Great COVID Ventilator Death Cover-up
Tens of thousands of Americans died after being placed on mechanical ventilators in spring 2020. It’s long past time we got real answers as to how many were killed this way.
It’s long been something of a mystery why there have been no major studies on how many COVID patients were killed by mechanical ventilators in spring 2020. Early data from China had suggested that ventilators would need to be used widely in the treatment of COVID patients, and this led to a major rush to procure ventilators on the part of politicians and hospital systems all over the world.
A small sample of the hundreds of headlines from that period features ones such as: “Cuomo refutes Trump, insists NY needs up to 40,000 ventilators,” “NY may need 24,000 more ventilators to fight COVID-19. Here’s how it could get them,” “Which coronavirus patients will get life-saving ventilators? Guidelines show how hospitals in NYC, US will decide,” “Amid Ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic, Governor Cuomo Announces 1,000 Ventilators Donated to New York State,” “A New York hospital is treating two patients on a device intended for one.”
However, it soon became clear that ventilators were being vastly overused, and the medical community gradually ceased this practice of mass intubation. Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell acted as an early whistleblower, sounding the alarm in a widely-shared video:
We are operating under a medical paradigm that is untrue… I fear that this misguided treatment will lead to a tremendous amount of harm to a great number of people in a very short time… This method being widely adopted at this very moment at every hospital in the country…is actually doing more harm than good.
In interviews with major media outlets, several practitioners later disclosed that patients had often been put on ventilators not for their own benefit, but in order to stop the virus from spreading. As one doctor later told the Wall Street Journal:
We were intubating sick patients very early. Not for the patients’ benefit, but in order to control the epidemic and to save other patients. That felt awful.
As another doctor told Time Magazine:
He says some doctors are intubating early because they fear that less-intensive forms of ventilation, like high-flow nasal oxygen, can aerosolize a virus, putting health care workers at risk of getting sick. ‘This is more theoretical fear than a real fear,’ Hill says, since there’s not strong evidence that COVID-19 spreads this way.
As Dr. Rich McCormick told the House COVID Select Subcommittee:
The healthcare professionals…got it wrong. We were going off of old technologies, old assumptions. And I remember we were intubating people that probably shouldn’t have been intubated.
As Meredith Case, an internal medicine resident at NewYork-Presbyterian Medical Center, put it in a series of since-deleted threads, hospitals were “early intubating” patients for “many days if not weeks” in part “to avoid aerosolizing procedures to protect staff,” and several “practice changes lead to more time on the vent.”
One problem is the sheer number of patients. Another is that we are early intubating these patients given data suggesting improved outcomes and also to avoid aerosolizing procedures to protect staff.