The shocking testimony of the Covid-19 nurses: book review
Author: Niall McCrae
January 25, 2024
MOST people seem to have moved on from Covid-19. They may occasionally refer to the ‘pandemic’, but they’d rather put it in the back of their minds. So it’s important that we critical thinkers don’t let the truth be buried by an official narrative that a deadly disease struck, radical interventions were necessary and then a miraculous vaccine saved millions of lives.
I know a nurse who worked throughout covid at the local intensive care unit. She believes that while the disease was exaggerated, it was distinct from the usual respiratory infections. Positively-tested patients admitted to her unit frequently suffered from asthmatic attacks. But such symptoms probably resulted from the terror induced in society by the government. And these patients were right to be terrified, because they faced being hooked on to a ventilator, totally dependent on overworked clinical staff, with no visitors allowed. As Roger Watson and I explained on TCW, many never took another natural breath.
The book What the Nurses Saw by Ken McCarthy features interviews with nurses who worked in the killing fields of US hospitals. An army veteran, Erin Marie Olszewski qualified and practised as a nurse in Florida. When New York became the American epicentre of Covid-19, she answered the urgent call for nurses from the city authorities. On arrival Olszewski was surprised to be boarded in a luxury hotel, having no work assigned but paid $10,000 weekly by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Clearly the crisis was not as bad as portrayed on the news.
Eventually Olszeswki was posted to a large public hospital, to find doctors and nurses following extraordinary and harmful protocols. Rather than a last resort, intubation to breathing machines was primary treatment. Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, acted as medical dictator, ordering 30,000 ventilators. As paycheck employees following administrative policy, doctors abandoned their Hippocratic Oath, mistreating patients who walked into hospital but left via the morgue. Consent, so fundamental to healthcare, was reduced to doctors telling patients that their only chance of survival was mechanical ventilation.
According to Olszewski the throughput was like a factory production line, manufacturing the desired morality data. Nurses, normally reticent in challenging decisions made by doctors in a rigid hierarchical culture, failed to put their patients first. They were complicit in state-sanctioned murder. This was particularly awful in the public hospitals of New York, where the majority of patients were poor and funded by Medicare, the federal system that incentivised use of ventilators, paying hospitals $39,000 per case. As patients were expected to perish, little care was given and they lay unwashed on their faeces. As soon as a corpse was carried out, the apparatus was used for the next admission.
Another whistle-blower, Nicole Sirotek, observed that institutional power was rarely needed to ensure nurses’ compliance with the covid regime. The nursing staff policed themselves, making clear that any dissident would be ostracised, imperilling their professional career.
According to Kimberley Overton, a nurse in Nashville, nurses were told not to spend time near patients’ beds to reduce spread of the virus, despite their full exposure in wards dedicated to covid cases. This was unnecessary cruelty. Patients were deliberately isolated, deprived of nutrition and water (drips were regarded as sufficient fluid intake), and communication was impossible with nurses covered head-to-toe in PPE.
Wards should have had a warning at the entrance to abandon hope, all ye who enter here. Overton observed that covid was killing only people in hospital, not at home nor among the homeless. The treatment regime was devised to end lives efficiently. Ventilators were key to this, as Overton described:
‘In all my career, I had never seen the PEEP (positive end-expiratory pressure) settings set so high. Typically we see it at about five, and we were seeing that pressure at fifteen. We were blowing people’s lungs out.’
To sedate intubated patients, high doses of fentanyl were administered. It was standard practice to conduct a breathing test on patients after a day on the ventilator. They almost always failed, because of the respiratory suppressant effect of fentanyl. But the most dubious intervention was remdesivir, declared by Anthony Fauci as the ‘drug of choice’ for covid sufferers. This antiviral was originally tested on Ebola cases, but over half died in the trial. For covid a rushed and incomplete trial was claimed as evidence of its efficacy, but the drug often caused kidney failure.
British readers will be particularly interested in the account of Kevin Corbett. I spoke alongside Corbett at Trafalgar Square in September 2020, when he warned the mass audience of the ‘Nazification’ of the NHS. Covid-19 was not panic by the authorities, but a deliberate and planned takeover of the healthcare system. Individual care, to which taxpaying citizens believe they are entitled, was replaced by Nazi-style viral hygiene. Petty dictators in matrons’ uniform had never enjoyed so much power: no mask, no shift. The rationale for covid rules was never therapeutic, but exertion of totalitarian authority.
The NHS was bad, but American hospitals were much worse. The profit incentive was irresistible to unscrupulous administrators, with incredibly high payments for concluded cases (i.e. deaths). Another factor is that senior managers and clinicians of Democrat leanings were dealing with patients of lower socio-economic status and populist Trump proclivities. Vaccination rates in the US confirmed this political divide.
The motto, should another pandemic be declared (Disease X, as the media are priming), is ‘stay out of hospital’. That’s a terrible indictment on doctors and nurses, so many of whom broke their code of conduct to participate in crimes against humanity.
What the Nurses Saw should be required reading for politicians, administrators and clinicians who uncritically accepted and applied the Covid-19 orthodoxy. McCarthy’s compendium of bedside experiences shows what happens when all professional and moral standards are abandoned in favour of a globally enforced problem-reaction-solution contrivance. As Bill Gates excitedly foresees, there will be a ‘next time’, and if as a society we do not learn the lessons from the pseudopandemic and confront the evil-doers, we deserve whatever follows.
January 25, 2024
MOST people seem to have moved on from Covid-19. They may occasionally refer to the ‘pandemic’, but they’d rather put it in the back of their minds. So it’s important that we critical thinkers don’t let the truth be buried by an official narrative that a deadly disease struck, radical interventions were necessary and then a miraculous vaccine saved millions of lives.
I know a nurse who worked throughout covid at the local intensive care unit. She believes that while the disease was exaggerated, it was distinct from the usual respiratory infections. Positively-tested patients admitted to her unit frequently suffered from asthmatic attacks. But such symptoms probably resulted from the terror induced in society by the government. And these patients were right to be terrified, because they faced being hooked on to a ventilator, totally dependent on overworked clinical staff, with no visitors allowed. As Roger Watson and I explained on TCW, many never took another natural breath.
The book What the Nurses Saw by Ken McCarthy features interviews with nurses who worked in the killing fields of US hospitals. An army veteran, Erin Marie Olszewski qualified and practised as a nurse in Florida. When New York became the American epicentre of Covid-19, she answered the urgent call for nurses from the city authorities. On arrival Olszewski was surprised to be boarded in a luxury hotel, having no work assigned but paid $10,000 weekly by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Clearly the crisis was not as bad as portrayed on the news.
Eventually Olszeswki was posted to a large public hospital, to find doctors and nurses following extraordinary and harmful protocols. Rather than a last resort, intubation to breathing machines was primary treatment. Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, acted as medical dictator, ordering 30,000 ventilators. As paycheck employees following administrative policy, doctors abandoned their Hippocratic Oath, mistreating patients who walked into hospital but left via the morgue. Consent, so fundamental to healthcare, was reduced to doctors telling patients that their only chance of survival was mechanical ventilation.
According to Olszewski the throughput was like a factory production line, manufacturing the desired morality data. Nurses, normally reticent in challenging decisions made by doctors in a rigid hierarchical culture, failed to put their patients first. They were complicit in state-sanctioned murder. This was particularly awful in the public hospitals of New York, where the majority of patients were poor and funded by Medicare, the federal system that incentivised use of ventilators, paying hospitals $39,000 per case. As patients were expected to perish, little care was given and they lay unwashed on their faeces. As soon as a corpse was carried out, the apparatus was used for the next admission.
Another whistle-blower, Nicole Sirotek, observed that institutional power was rarely needed to ensure nurses’ compliance with the covid regime. The nursing staff policed themselves, making clear that any dissident would be ostracised, imperilling their professional career.
According to Kimberley Overton, a nurse in Nashville, nurses were told not to spend time near patients’ beds to reduce spread of the virus, despite their full exposure in wards dedicated to covid cases. This was unnecessary cruelty. Patients were deliberately isolated, deprived of nutrition and water (drips were regarded as sufficient fluid intake), and communication was impossible with nurses covered head-to-toe in PPE.
Wards should have had a warning at the entrance to abandon hope, all ye who enter here. Overton observed that covid was killing only people in hospital, not at home nor among the homeless. The treatment regime was devised to end lives efficiently. Ventilators were key to this, as Overton described:
‘In all my career, I had never seen the PEEP (positive end-expiratory pressure) settings set so high. Typically we see it at about five, and we were seeing that pressure at fifteen. We were blowing people’s lungs out.’
To sedate intubated patients, high doses of fentanyl were administered. It was standard practice to conduct a breathing test on patients after a day on the ventilator. They almost always failed, because of the respiratory suppressant effect of fentanyl. But the most dubious intervention was remdesivir, declared by Anthony Fauci as the ‘drug of choice’ for covid sufferers. This antiviral was originally tested on Ebola cases, but over half died in the trial. For covid a rushed and incomplete trial was claimed as evidence of its efficacy, but the drug often caused kidney failure.
British readers will be particularly interested in the account of Kevin Corbett. I spoke alongside Corbett at Trafalgar Square in September 2020, when he warned the mass audience of the ‘Nazification’ of the NHS. Covid-19 was not panic by the authorities, but a deliberate and planned takeover of the healthcare system. Individual care, to which taxpaying citizens believe they are entitled, was replaced by Nazi-style viral hygiene. Petty dictators in matrons’ uniform had never enjoyed so much power: no mask, no shift. The rationale for covid rules was never therapeutic, but exertion of totalitarian authority.
The NHS was bad, but American hospitals were much worse. The profit incentive was irresistible to unscrupulous administrators, with incredibly high payments for concluded cases (i.e. deaths). Another factor is that senior managers and clinicians of Democrat leanings were dealing with patients of lower socio-economic status and populist Trump proclivities. Vaccination rates in the US confirmed this political divide.
The motto, should another pandemic be declared (Disease X, as the media are priming), is ‘stay out of hospital’. That’s a terrible indictment on doctors and nurses, so many of whom broke their code of conduct to participate in crimes against humanity.
What the Nurses Saw should be required reading for politicians, administrators and clinicians who uncritically accepted and applied the Covid-19 orthodoxy. McCarthy’s compendium of bedside experiences shows what happens when all professional and moral standards are abandoned in favour of a globally enforced problem-reaction-solution contrivance. As Bill Gates excitedly foresees, there will be a ‘next time’, and if as a society we do not learn the lessons from the pseudopandemic and confront the evil-doers, we deserve whatever follows.
