The rush to put COVID-19 patients on ventilators during the early days of the pandemic caused thousands of needless deaths, according to respiratory therapist Mark Bishofsky, who witnessed this phenomenon firsthand.
Speaking to Good Morning CHD, Bishofsky recounted how he personally saw hospital staff intubating numerous coronavirus patients prematurely while denying them other treatments that could have been effective and came with fewer risks.
“Many, many thousands of patients died because of this rush to early intubation and not allowing early treatment with medications like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine or even vitamin D — they wouldn’t even give these patients vitamin D. They just wanted to intubate them and put them on remdesivir,” he said.
Mechanical ventilators work by pushing oxygen into people with failing lungs. They are first sedated before a tube is placed into their throat, and many people who received this intervention during the pandemic never recovered.
He also claimed that their rush to intubate patients went against typical protocol, with some people being intubated despite needing just a small amount of oxygen. For example, he saw people being intubated for needing just three liters of oxygen, which he said is something he hadn’t seen in 25 years of practice.
He explained: “That’s so little oxygen to the point where if you took the patient off of it, they’re gonna be fine.”
The respiratory therapist conceded that ventilators are a crucial tool for saving lives, but they can also be “extremely dangerous” given their propensity to cause bacterial pneumonia.
He said he spoke out at first, trying to convince doctors they were making a mistake. Intubation was always considered a last resort, he said, and the hospital didn’t seem to have a good explanation for why they were using it so much.
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