Who is really hospitalized?

“I’m not going to fight the administration over where to put you,” Dr. C., a highly trained gastroenterologist, said quietly to my friend who was in bed in an emergency room triage room. “We just want to put you in a bed so that we can figure out what’s wrong and get you treated.”

We were at the hospital in our small town. No one really knew why, but my friend had only been able to keep a handful of raspberries from complicated surgery for a chronic condition three weeks ago. Dehydrated and unable to eat, my friend had vomited violently after taking just a sip of water or sucking on a piece of ice, and had lost nearly twenty-five pounds.

I was with my husband when he had a gallbladder attack so bad it made his hands tremble. I have had three non-medicated deliveries and have witnessed many more, both as a journalist and as a patient advocate. Yet I have never seen a human suffer so much.

Diagnosed with pancreatic disorder, admitted as COVID patient

After a battery of tests, my friend was diagnosed with pancreatitis. But it was easier for the hospital bureaucracy to register the admission as a COVID case.

Let me explain. This patient did not have any of the classic symptoms of COVID: no shortness of breath, no fever, no chills, no congestion, no loss of smell or taste, no neurological problems. The only COVID symptoms my friend had were nausea and fatigue, which could also be explained by surgery. However, nearly three weeks earlier, a COVID test had come back positive.

The mainstream media report that severe cases of COVID mainly concern unvaccinated people. A June 29 Associated Press headline read: “Almost all COVID deaths in the United States are now among the unvaccinated.” Another, from the same date: “The vast majority of intensive care patients with COVID-19 are not vaccinated, according to an ABC News survey. “

Is this really what is happening? This is certainly not the case in Israel, the first country to fully immunize a majority of its citizens against the virus. Now it has one of the highest daily infection rates and the majority of people who catch the virus (77% to 83%, depending on age) are already vaccinated, according to data collected by the Israeli government.

After carefully reviewing the available data, including the safety and efficacy profiles of mRNA vaccines, my friend took a cautious approach. Despite being a doctor who administers vaccines in the office every day, my friend chose to wait and see. According to WebMD, a “large number” of frontline hospital workers have also chosen not to be vaccinated. Indeed, various reports, from California to New York, confirm that up to 40 percent of healthcare workers have decided that the risks of vaccines do not outweigh the benefits.

After admission, I spoke to the COVID ward nurse. She was wearing a disposable yellow plastic gown, teal gloves, and two masks under a personal recirculating breathing system that buzzed so loudly she could barely hear. The nurse told me that she had received both vaccines but she was worried: “Two-thirds of my patients are fully vaccinated,” she said.

Data limitations

How can there be such a disconnect between what the COVID nurse told me and the mainstream media reports? On the one hand, it is very difficult to get any precision when it comes to real numbers. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have publicly acknowledged that they do not have precise data.

As the Associated Press reported, “The CDC itself has not estimated the percentage of hospitalizations and deaths among fully vaccinated people, citing limitations in the data.”

At the same time, data collection is done state by state. In most states, a person is not considered fully immunized until fourteen days after receiving the full series of vaccines.

This means that anyone entering a US hospital who received only one dose, or who received both vaccines but received the second less than two weeks previously, will likely be considered “unvaccinated.”

So when the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control released a report on the severity of COVID on July 23, 2021, it reported higher morbidity and mortality rates among those “not fully vaccinated.” . Are these people who had a vaccine and got sick, two vaccines and got sick, or no vaccine at all? Without more details, it’s impossible to know what’s really going on.

“We don’t have exact numbers,” insists Dr. James Neuenschwander, a vaccine safety expert based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

But what we do know, says Neuenschwander, is that vaccines aren’t as effective as public health officials told us. “It’s a product that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. It is supposed to stop the transmission of this virus and it does not. “

Overcome COVID

Then there is the problem of attributing serious illnesses and deaths from other causes to COVID, as in the case of my friend. Health authorities around the world have been doing this since the start of the COVID crisis. For example, a young man in Orange County, Florida who died in a motorcycle accident last summer was originally considered a death from COVID by state health officials (after investigation by Fox News, the classification has been changed.) And a middle-aged construction worker fell from a ladder in Croatia and was also counted as one death from COVID (it is still not clear if COVID played a role in his death.)

To further muddy the waters, even people who test negative for COVID are sometimes counted as deaths from COVID.

Take the case of Matthew Irvin, 26, a father of three from Yamhill County, Oregon. As reported by KGW8 News, Irvin went to the emergency room with stomach pain, nausea and diarrhea on July 5, 2020. But instead of admitting him to the hospital, doctors have him. sent home.

Five days later, on July 10, 2020, Irvin passed away. Although his COVID test came back negative two days after his death and his family told reporters and public health officials that no one around Irvin had symptoms of COVID, the medical examiner reportedly told family that an autopsy was not needed, listing his death as a coronavirus case. It took two and a half months for the Oregon Health Authority to correct the error.

In an even more striking example of overestimating COVID deaths, a New Jersey nursing home with only 90 beds was falsely reported as having 753 COVID deaths. According to a spokesperson, they killed less than 20 people. In other words, the number of deaths was overestimated by 3,700%.

Who suffers from severe COVID, vaccinated or unvaccinated?

In the countries with the most people vaccinated, we also see a high number of infections. Iceland has one of the most vaccinated populations in the world (over 82 percent) and reports that 77 percent of new COVID cases are fully vaccinated Icelanders, according to Ásthildur Knútsdóttir, director general of the Ministry of Health.

According to media reports, more than 85% of Israel’s adult population has been vaccinated. But a July report from Israel’s health ministry found that Pfizer’s vaccine was only 39 percent effective. Although Israeli health officials tell the public the cases are milder in vaccinated individuals, this upsurge in COVID cases and deaths is leading the Israeli prime minister to issue further restrictions.

Dr. Peter McCullough, a university internist and practicing cardiologist in Dallas, Texas, says a large number of people hospitalized today have indeed been fully vaccinated. “Fully vaccinated people are hospitalized and… 19% of them have died,” McCullough said. “This is not a crisis of the unvaccinated. It’s just a topic of discussion. The vaccinated take part in it.

Other doctors see the same thing. “In my practice, several fully vaccinated patients have been admitted to local hospitals,” says Dr. Jeffrey I. Barke, a certified primary care physician based in Newport Beach, California. Barke thinks part of the problem is the exaggeration of efficacy: “If the vaccine works so well, why are we now pushing a booster?