Another day, another antivaxxer conspiracy video about COVID-19. Here’s how to cut through the BS.

The offending video in question.

And here’s our followup: The Elmhurst staff and faculty speak out!

Transcript Below!

Hey everyone, it’s Dr. Z. It’s time for another debunking of a BS, YouTube expose on the pandemic. Before we did plandemic, which was pretty obvious within 30 seconds of watching that video, I detected crazy sauce all over it, and I was just angry that anyone would have believed it. The video I’m gonna review today is called perspectives on the pandemic, the undercover epicenter nurse, and about a billion people have sent it to me as usual, just came out already has about 100,000 views despite being over an hour long. And, this one’s tricky because you start watching it, and you, it takes a while to figure out that this person is insane. But it does take time and you can use your critical thinking toolkit to actually debunk this systematically. So that’s what I wanna do with you guys, because I’ll tell you going into this video, I actually kind of have a bias that sides with the nurse who is purporting to expose our mismanagement and murder of patients with COVID at an epicenter hospital, Elmhurst in New York in Queens.

And, the reason is, is that a lot of the things she talks about are things that, you know, I’ve seen. So, mismanagement, over-treatment, financial incentives that don’t align with the actual care of the patient, not listening to patients wishes, those kinds of things. So, I’m already like on her side, like, I want to believe what she’s saying. And despite that, I don’t believe a single word that she says, even though there’s truth sprinkled through the video in terms of conceptual truth. So, let’s go through it carefully. In this video, so that you don’t have to watch the hour and 10 minutes slog that I watched at TwoX watching her cry crocodile tears at TwoX was entertaining, but really gets boring fast. She basically is a nurse who’s traveling. She decides to go to New York and we’ll talk about her background in a second, because that’s important, decides to go to New York to help out at Elmhurst hospital, which is the epicenter of the epicenter according to the documentary.

Now, she immediately sees that there’s a ton of patients and starts to make a series of claims, decides she’s gonna become an undercover reporter and videotape, not just medical record charts, which are shown in the video with minimal redaction, but audio tape, her colleagues, other physicians, other nurses without their knowledge or consent. And, they put it in this video. So, this is the structure that she’s doing. Now, her claims in the video, which we’re gonna go through some of them, are that they weren’t even testing properly for COVID. They were calling people with negative tests, positive, presumably because they get paid more for positive COVID tests by Medicare and Medicaid.

This was a poor, racial minority population that was being specifically targeted by this hospital because of money. The doctors were incompetent, the residents were incompetent. They were forcing patients to be, do not resuscitate when they could have saved them or they could have coded them. And they didn’t talk to the families. And, they were intubating and ventilating patients that didn’t need to be intubated and ventilated, among other claims. Also, they weren’t giving life saving treatments like hydroxychloroquine, and zinc and vitamin C, because you know, Cuomo, that was literally that was literally the claim. Alright, so let’s go through this.

The first thing to do is to look at your conspiracy checklist. Number one, is there a conspiracy theory that they’re presenting? The answer is yes. They’re saying that we are killing COVID patients and non-COVID patients, putting them together, calling them COVID, potentially getting them infected because we get paid $29,000 per COVID patient if they’re diagnosed with COVID, alright. Yes, and financial incentives do matter. Yes, that can influence care. Is that what’s going on here? Well, we have no contrary voice in the video, which is already a red flag. So already you go, well, wait, nobody else who’s saying that that’s not happening from Elmhurst or anywhere else is given a voice.

And we in healthcare know that this is probably not occurring you guys, because it would come out. There would be a ton of staff who would openly revolt, not one person. Now, remember with conspiracy theories, you have to look at who’s talking, who’s proposing the conspiracy. And as quick Google search of this nurse is not sufficient. You have to dig a little deeper into the Google. Guess what? Erin Marie, the nurse in question is an anti-vaxxer, not just an anti-vaxxer. She is queen of the anti-vaxxers. She started an organization called the Florida something Alliance, I forget what exactly what it’s called. That is an anti-vaccine pro personal choice site. So, already she has this agenda. She’s been noted by a community scientific community before as being a vocal anti-vaxxer, which already oughta disqualify you from being a nurse. But in this case, and in this country, it doesn’t because there’s this thing called freedom.

I don’t know why. And as a result, you’re already going, wait, what? Then you look at our previous posts about the pandemic. She denied it existed. She’s in Florida. And even in the video, she says, “we went to the beach. “The cure for this is go to the beach, “salt water, sunlight, that’s what we need.” Sound familiar? The crazy woman from Plandemics said the same thing. So already, you know, she has an agenda. She decides she’s gonna get attention, goes to New York and volunteers at Elmhurst as a traveling nurse, however, she structured it. Coming with a camera, coming with an agenda to make some noise about this, about the pandemic that she denied was existing just a couple of weeks prior. And you can follow some of this on Twitter. So, that’s the background of the person. Now, the second thing on your conspiracy checklist is to go, do they trot out a bunch of fake experts? How can you tell a fake expert? Because the real experts can be contrasted with them. So, who do they trot out in this video? They trot out an urgent care doctor who runs urgent care company, talking about hydroxychloroquine, and zinc.

That’s not an expert on hydroxychloroquine and zinc. That’s a random doc in the box. Just like those two Bakersfield clowns that were talking about all this stuff, pulling stuff out of their butts, that has nothing to do with science. That’s fake experts. You can get real experts who actually disagree and they should disagree on COVID-19 because we don’t actually have all the answers. That’s called a healthy debate. And there’s a thing called red teaming, where you actually set up an opposing view to challenge your own views so that you can make sure you’re not wrong. This is not that, this is a one-sided conspiracy with fake experts. So, that’s another thing on the checklist. Next thing, cherry picking data and studies to support your viewpoint while discounting evidence to the contrary. Well, in this one, she starts in her pre-recorded stuff. She starts railing against these doctors, saying, “why aren’t we giving them zinc? “Why aren’t we giving them hydroxychloroquine? “These things are shown to work.” And the doctor says, “actually the evidence is kind of mixed” and actually he’s very patient with her and explains that some of these things can cause harm. “Well, what if they’re all gonna die anyways?” And he says, “well, they’re not. “The 10% that would live, might actually die “if you give them something that’s gonna hurt them.” And that’s completely discounted. Instead she cherry picks these very poor quality studies and just throws them out there.

And it’s clear that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about because she herself is a fake expert because she, first of all, she does not have the expertise required to talk about these trials. And it’s clear from what you hear her talking about. The next thing that happens is there’s cherry picking of stuff. So, she says, there’s dentists running the ICU because they’re so under-staffed and it’s just a mess and this and that. And then, she starts attacking one doctor on the recording saying, you know, you’re terrible and this and that and this and that.

And the doctor is very patient with her and basically says noted. And the interviewer says, “what? “So, was this the dentist that you were yelling at?” And she goes, “no, it was a CCU fellow.” The CCU fellow by definition, has many more hours of experience managing high level ICU patients than you do. So, suddenly there’s a false equivalence between a traveling nurse who’s come here with an agenda and a CCU fellow. Now, could the fellow be wrong? Sure. Did the fellow attack her and jump all over her? No, she was quite respectful of somebody who was attacking her.

So, already you’re starting to discredit the main element of this video, which is this incredibly unprofessional and criminally negligent nurse who’s anti-vax. So put all this together. She’s secretly recording patient data, secretly recording her colleagues with her personal agenda, who knows what it is. Making huge logical fallacies, which is another checklist on your conspiracy, you know, how to debunk this stuff. So, her logical fallacies are all over the place. Listen to this one. “They’re intubating patients. “When we know that when you intubate patients, they die.” Now, this is true to the extent that there are these cases of happy hypoxemia, which we’ve talked about on our show with Scott Weingart, who is an expert in emergency medicine, critical care doc in New York city. He’s been on our show, right? None of this was mentioned by Scott because Scott is actually at a world-class physician and an expert, and this is not happening the way she’s saying. So, she’s saying a lot of patients are coming in and getting intubated on vents because they get paid more to be put on a vent.

And, that the primary diagnosis for many of these patients is anxiety. So, she’s making the claim, the logical fallacy that anxiety can lower your blood oxygen levels enough that would trigger physicians to put a breathing tube in you. That is insane. Let me repeat that. That is insane. So that’s a logical error, right there. That just doesn’t happen. Also, she has the failure to understand all the other reasons for the claims she’s making, for example, well, they’re calling this patient COVID, presumptive COVID when the test is negative. Do you understand that false positive tests are very common? The swab for COVID-19 RNA is only 60% sensitive, which means 40% of the time, it’s gonna be negative when you have COVID. So, if they are acting like they have COVID and you’re concerned about COVID and they’re trying to die on you, that’s a presumptive positive, even though the test is negative. So, that’s a big part of her video debunked right there.

She just doesn’t understand medicine. Doesn’t have the logic to be able to understand that. The other, you know, claims that she makes that, you know, a patient should be extubated sooner and all that. We’ve talked about that on our show as well. This may be true, but there are criteria for extubation. If they’re unable to breathe on their own, you cannot take a breathing tube out. So, there’s a lot of logical errors that she makes, but I think the fun, you know, and the other thing that these guys do is they move the goalposts. So if you go, okay, here’s the answers to your questions. They go, yeah, but what about this? Or, they re-spin it. Well, you’re just a shill. And this happens again. And you start to see her bias in the last third of the video, where she talks about, you know, they’re Cuomo and hydroxychloroquine, and her own politics, which are COVID denial. And this thing isn’t real, and we should just go to the beach.

So, she’s a completely unreliable person in a conspiracy-laden video that doesn’t show the opposing side, that makes slanderous claims about the murder of patients. The only good to come out of this video is we are now talking about the suffering of our poor and minority patients in hospitals that are underfunded, which is very important. We are talking about financial incentives, like the payments to hospitals, which by the way, Elmhurst deserves those payments. Does one of these big hospitals that makes billions of dollars in revenue deserve the payments they’re getting? No, and yet this is a great injustice, so we should be talking about that. We should be talking about nurses standing up and having a voice and being able to call out where they see mistakes are being made.

And there’s a process for that in the hospital to do that. There are ways to report misconduct and you know, perceived errors. This is not it. This is a criminal, unprofessional con artist who is trying to get attention. Who’s already shown us that she doesn’t care about the health of children because she’s anti-vaccine. So, this is not how you do that. You guys know, I support speaking out. You guys know, I support nurses. You guys know, that this is horrific. And the worst part is she’s badmouthing a teaching hospital where residents are trying to learn. Yes, they will make mistakes. Yes, they do need support. They are working on the front lines and many of them are immigrants. Many of them are foreign medical graduates. She’s talking about racism. What is she doing right there? Right? Every person that she’s interviewing on the show has a thick accent and she’s just calling them incompetent. So, let’s just pay attention to that too. So, that’s just my personal bias on this. And, this is what I would ask you guys to do. When you look at a video like this, go through this checklist, do a little searching on the background of it. Don’t believe it at face value.

I’ve been really impressed with the people who have been sending me this, because they’ve been sending me it this time saying, “I’m really suspicious of this, what do you think?” And this one’s tough. And so, I think we need to all come together and go, yeah, let’s look at this. Okay, all right, took a minute, but this is a scam, this woman should be punished. She should lose any professional licensure she has anywhere in the United States, by the way, we should have a national licensure instead of the state nonsense, because she can just go to another state, get another nursing license. It’s ridiculous. It’s criminal what she’s doing.

All right guys. And, whatever this Journeyman Pictures is, you know, they have some good interviews on there. Like I think they had David Katz on there talking about, we need contrarian opinions, but we don’t need conspiracy lies like this and horrible thinking. All right, guys, I love you. Please, if you’re a supporter of the show, thank you for making what we do possible. Leave a comment, share the video. We are also a podcast on every platform. My website ZDoggMD.com has everything archived, and we out, peace.

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