Hospital Workers Speak Out About COVID Protocols From Coast to Coast

'We knew if change was to occur it was going to come from the provider level, meaning the doctors had to be willing to speak up'

A stock photo of hospital workers. (sfam_photo/Shutterstock)

For months, Americans lived in fear about contracting COVID-19, hearing stories about infected patients ending up on ventilators in hospitals while constantly being told that getting vaccinated would prevent such a situation and contraction of the disease itself.

From mandatory lockdowns and students forced to navigate the challenges of virtual school to businesses shut down and controversial vaccine mandates, the pandemic permeated our lives.

Now, as the dust has settled, more physicians and nurses have come forward to speak about the unethical and erroneous treatment protocols that occurred–and are still occurring–inside hospitals.

Despite differing experiences and roles, these healthcare professionals all have basically the same story–that hospital administrators knowingly enforced COVID-19 protocols set for them by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Those included treating patients with the medication remdesivir that harmed and sometimes led to a patient’s death as well as putting patients on ventilators, both of which came with hefty reimbursements while other more effective treatments were forbidden.

Hospital Providers Set the Rules Handed Down by the CDC/NIH

CDC and NIH protocols were given to upper hospital administration that then handed them down to clinicians. If nurses or doctors stepped outside the protocols, they would no longer be shielded from liability under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act. The PREP Act is a controversial law originally intended to protect vaccine manufacturers from financial risk in the event of a declared public health emergency. Then it was amended to cover health workers during a public health emergency if they abided by government mandate protocols.

The vast majority of hospitals use a system that has the healthcare worker examining the patient and pulling up their file through a computer where set up in the electronic medical record are pre-set treatment plans.

Sometimes that plan comes with pre-checked boxes of certain drugs to be used, thereby sending that nurse down a treatment path. In the case of COVID patients, remdesivir or a type of steroid would be pre-checked, for example, but never hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, medicines found to be effective by some clinicians. Rules also didn’t allow pharmacies to approve treatment medicines outside the protocol.

“It was like something came down from on-high that only allowed us to do prescribed protocols,” said Staci Kay, now a nurse practitioner with the North Carolina Physicians for Freedom, a non-profit network of physicians, healthcare leaders, and medical providers that exists to support medical freedom. “Now, I see how administrators forced things down our throats and it was all based on money. I couldn’t see that at the time because we were just trying to take care of people.”

“People don’t want to consider outside-the-box options–cheap drugs that nobody makes a ton of money off of,” Kay added. “People died, and I also think people were not treated like they should have been–using treatments that had no place in treating lung dysfunction and using wrong treatments at the wrong time, like remdesivir, which was supposedly to be given very early on and we were giving it in the ICU.”

That’s why Kay, who has previously been interviewed by The Epoch Times, left the hospital system to start her own early treatment private practice independent of corporate, federal, and state control. Her business, Sophelina Health, provides telemedicine services, mobile IV therapies, and advice on COVID-19 prevention, early treatment, and how to treat long COVID and vaccine injuries.

Another nurse who still works at a North Carolina hospital and requested not to be named for fear of losing her job or career reputation said that the remdesivir protocol was an immediate red flag, because of her previous experience working with Ebola patients who after being given remdesivir experienced liver and kidney failure.

Remdesivir is an anti-viral medication developed by the biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences.

“It had the same effect on COVID that it did on Ebola–flooding people’s systems with remdesivir with no way to excrete it,” she said. She noted that the drug can put people in renal (kidney) failure. Remdesivir and its active metabolites are mainly excreted by the kidneys through urine so that the drug won’t accumulate in the patients’ body.

“The whole time working at the hospital it was so hard to fathom that no one would change the protocol.”

That’s as she and other colleagues were always met with resistance from the top, who were set on following the protocols set by the CDC and the NIH.

Meanwhile, she began to work outside the hospital system with Kay to provide better quality steroids than what the hospitals were providing, along with treatments that included high doses of vitamin C, D, and zinc.

“Between September to December of 2021, I knew–I had been working with them and saw that I treated thousands and not sent anyone to the hospital, but I was inside watching multiple people die daily,” she told The Epoch Times. “We couldn’t bag them quick enough and get them to the morgue.”

“I got to the point where I thought  ‘I’m working on the outside and no one is going to the hospital’,” she added.

“By the end of 2021 we definitely knew none of this was working. There were doctors willing to stand up and say ‘Wait a minute, we’re doing the same thing and nothing is changing’,” she said. Her own queries about why alternatives couldn’t be used consistently fell on deaf ears.

‘These Are Things We’d Never Done Before’

She also told stories of patients being put on ventilators when they could have been kept on oxygen. Part of that, she explained, was out of fear that if patients were on oxygen, nurses were more likely to catch COVID because the CPAP/BIPAP system is considered an “open” system as opposed to a ventilator being a “closed” one.

“The thinking was ‘so it might be safer for staff if we just go ahead and put them on ventilators’,” she said. “Some patients were put on ventilators when they were still at 96 percent oxygen. Ventilator or no ventilator, nurses were still catching COVID.”

Circumstances became so dire that inside one facility, one of the policies was to paralyze severely lung-compromised patients using paralytic medicines including propofol, midazolam (brand name Versed), and fentanyl.  Once the patient was paralyzed, remdesivir was started for each patient, but soon after patients were going into renal failure, which would create fluid volume overload where the body was unable to excrete waste.

“We started on the paralytics and then used the machine to verify they had worked. The thought was ‘let’s paralyze the body so it’s not overworking’ but what we learned was that the patient’s body was not excreting everything from the remdesivir,” she said. “Instead, those patients that were paralyzed were dying quicker.”

While this policy was supposed to be for the more lung-compromised patients, she said there was never a strict criterion for why they were using it.

“You have to remember, COVID was new to us too. These are things we’d never done before,” she added. “We also weren’t giving food tubes to these patients, which added to them becoming unnourished.”

At the same time, she witnessed the pain experienced by family members who weren’t allowed into hospitals to be by the bedside of or to advocate for their loved ones. That’s as she too discovered the incentives behind the hospital COVID protocols set by the CDC and NIH—protocols that were also being followed in other hospitals across the nation.

Heightening the emotions of this nurse was the fact that in July of 2021, just after she had given birth to her third child, she lost her first pregnant patient. That’s when she said the whole situation “hit home.”

“She [the mother] had COVID and afterwards the baby went to NICU while the mother was convinced to go on a ventilator. Remdesivir toxified her body. Two weeks after that, the baby got out of NICU,” she recalled.

“That was the icing on the cake for me–I started speaking out, created a protest with a friend against the vaccine mandates and collaborated with Staci. We knew if change was to occur it was going to come from the provider level, meaning the doctors had to be willing to speak up,” she said, noting that’s how North Carolina Physicians for Freedom was formed.

Hospital Profits Through Billing and Reimbursements

Another nurse who also didn’t want to be identified for fear of retribution from her employer/s but has worked in multiple sides of the healthcare industry (including urgent and pulmonary care, as a case manager in the hospital setting and as a third party administrator) also spoke to these protocols.

She too explained that, early on, patients were given remdesivir prior to shifting towards the use of immunosuppressive drugs tocilizumab and baricitinib, a Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitor. It was the way providers (hospitals and thereby the doctors administering the drugs) were billing the corporate insurance plans of patients that became the main driver behind the use of remdesivir.

While one hospital facility may have tried some different treatments–for example using paralytics–the standard across the board had very little deviation between hospitals. For most patients, the protocol was to go on remdesivir and then a ventilator, which was verified by one nurse who contacted former colleagues across several states.

In terms of financial incentives, for every ventilator or administration of remdesivir, there was an x amount of dollars on reimbursement, ranging from $7,500 to $15,000 for remdesivir and $30,000 to $40,000 for being a put on ventilator, depending on how long the patient was on one. These were estimated figures for those patients on corporate private pay insurance plans.

“On all corporate plans, the main driver is the drugs and corporate plans were paying anywhere from $7,500 to $15,000 for remdesivir,” she said. “I know they were making a lot of money if billing under a corporate plan.”

That’s while she noted drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, which she said have been used effectively to treat the virus, had mere reimbursement rates of $4 and $1. Thus, there was no financial incentive to use them.

In terms of tocilizumab, which she described as a great choice for COVID patients in moderate disease phase, the NIH changed the guideline for administering it to be given in the late phase of COVID.

Additionally, she said innumerable patients were misdiagnosed with many actually dying from methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) due to sepsis while the cause of death was incorrectly blamed on COVID.

“The thing is that’s why it’s so critical to get labs. You can have a patient thinking it was COVID who really had a bacterial infection,” she said. “They sat there and let them [patients] get so bad.”

All the while, she saw nurses and doctors who tried to treat patients outside the hospital experience repercussions from their efforts.

“Brave doctors, and nurses, once they defied their non-compete are threatened or fired,” she said. “Once these guys leave and start their own practices using ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, they run it through the plan and it gets turned in to Blue Cross, United Healthcare—they [states’ medical boards] would ask pharmacies to print out any prescriptions they filled for hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin including the prescribing physician’s name so they would be reported and then could be investigated.

“This is how dark it is,” she added.

Forcing the Jab on Healthcare Workers Came Into Play

Meanwhile, healthcare workers who didn’t want the vaccine themselves or didn’t agree with treatment protocols were feeling increased pressure.

Sandy Craig was one of those. As an emergency medicine physician and residency director over a three-year training program for ER doctors, she’s spent her entire career working at the same medical center.

It was in August 2021 when the hospital network announced a vaccine mandate that included people that had already had the virus that she knew something wasn’t right. Craig found it interesting that three different healthcare systems all reached the same conclusion and announced it simultaneously on the exact same day.

“‘We’re not going to be able to vaccinate our way out of this’,” she thought, based on her knowledge of immunology and the fact she knew she had antibodies against COVID and that a vaccine under Emergency Use Authorization should not be mandated by employers.

“They’re not making exceptions for pregnant people or people who had the illness?”

“This was not at all following the science. I knew if you just had COVID-19, which many healthcare workers have, there was no need for a vaccine,” she said.

Despite being granted a religious exemption from having to get the vaccine, after struggling with treatment protocols, Craig decided her best option was to retire.

“I was increasingly feeling like an outsider with respect to how we treated our patients with COVID, in a community of people I spent 34 years with and loved doing the work we were doing,” she said.

Meanwhile, outside of the hospital, Craig was treating more and more patients with ivermectin when their own physicians wouldn’t, and seeing good results.

“I was asking—why, when we see dozens of people every day that have COVID, are we telling people to go home and isolate, and to come back if they got short of breath, and not initiating early treatment? Why are we advising patients to this experimental vaccine regardless of prior infection, age, or low risk profile?” said Craig. “Not only are we not treating people with a medicine that appears to be safe and effective, but we’re withholding early treatment, and in many cases patients come back to the emergency department having gotten so sick that they require ICU treatment.”

CDC/NIH Protocols Carried Out Across the Country

Across the country from the Carolinas a press conference was held earlier this month in Fresno, Calif. That’s where attorneys Dan Watkins with Watkins & Letofsky and Michael Hamilton with Hamilton & Associates spoke to three complaints filed on behalf of 14 Fresno area families who had lost loved ones at the hand of healthcare providers who used remdesivir. Charges include “medical deception” and “unconsented to medical care” with the four causes of action including fraudulent concealment, elder abuse, medical malpractice and battery.

In it they noted how the NIH, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Health and Human Services (HHS) and CDC had failed the American people.

“It was never the virus, the majority of it [hospital deaths] came from the drug protocol using remdesivir,” said Watkins during the press conference held at Fresno’s Adventure Church.

“The overreach of hospital administrators and federal health agencies to dictate what doctors will and will not do, to threaten them with their licenses, their rights to actually practice in that hospital. To refuse the rights of families to be at the bedside of their loved ones. It is ultimately disgusting. Something is very very corrupt and evil about it all,” he told the crowd full of family members and involved physicians.

The NIH and the CDC didn’t respond to The Epoch Times’s request for comment about COVID-19 treatment protocols.

Now, in the wake of the worst of COVID seemingly over, those on the hospital front lines that spoke to The Epoch Times said they would never be the same after what they experienced.

“When I lost that pregnant mom, it rocked my soul,” said the earlier unnamed source. “I will never be able to look past what we allowed to happen the last two years. I no longer trust people just because they have MD and RN behind their name.”