Original article was published on 15/12/2020
Erin Marie Olszewski, who introduced herself to the world as a nurse whose shocking experience of working at Elmhurst Hospital turned her into “an investigative journalist”, is a long-time anti-vaccination activist, who came to this hospital with “premeditation”.
Therefore, it is not surprising that her “research” is actually a set of manipulations and untruthful claims, packaged in the form of a dramatic “documentary”.
A video from June, based on a “report” made by a Florida nurse, Erin Marie Olszewski, is spreading again on social media.
The first time the story appeared in the region was on June 27, 2020, on a YouTube channel called BALKANQ, associated with the conspiracy cult QAnon. The video, featuring Olszewski, contained a description which suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic is not real:
“SHOCKING, THE NURSE REVEALS EVERYTHING – SHARE THE VIDEO – Erin Marie Olszewski REVEALS everything that’s happening in one hospital during a “pandemic”
In the video which, up until the publishing of this analysis has been viewed 142,822 times, Olszewski describes the death of a patient at New York’s Elmhurst Hospital. At one point, she is questioning whether the patient was killed by “them” (referring to the hospital staff).
Shortly afterwards, the same YouTube channel published a translated recording of her guest appearance on The Highwire, hosted by Del Matthew Bigtree, one of the prominent anti-vaccination lobbyists in the United States. Bigtree is the producer of the “documentary” film called Vaxxed, which featured the “founder” of the anti-vaccination movement, Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield lost his license to practice medicine due to fraudulent research aiming to “prove” his unfounded claims about vaccines.
These and similar claims made by Olszewski have been circulating the region for half a year now. All the re-posts of this story that we managed to find, including YouTube videos, articles, Facebook groups and profiles posts, have collected hundreds of thousands of views and almost 100,000 interactions on social networks.
Who is Erin Marie Olszewski?
Olszewski is a nurse who secretly filmed the staff at Elmhurst Hospital, which resulted in the film called Perspectives on the Pandemic | The (Undercover) Epicenter Nurse. Olszewski accused her colleagues of negligence and even murder.
(27’40”)
The documentary states that Olszewski entered the project as a “witness”, “at the cost of personal damage and without any political prejudice”, to save lives. But these claims are incorrect. They are refuted by her very biography, as well as her public appearances and the narratives she has published about the pandemic in recent months.
In fact, Olszewski is not someone who accidentally happened to be at Elmhurst Hospital and got driven to public engagement after being shocked by what she saw there. She is a long-time anti-vaccination activist, and the shooting of this “documentary” was part of her regular propaganda activities.
The collaboration between Olszewski and Bigtree existed before the pandemic, as can be seen in this video, in which she does not appear as an “investigative journalist” but rather as a “nurse fighting against vaccinations” who encourages other health professionals to do the same. Olszewski is also a co-founder of several groups that oppose vaccination, such as the Nurses For Vaccine Safety Alliance and the Florida Freedom Alliance.
She is continuously engaged in anti-scientific propaganda directed against science-based medicine, presenting her views as fighting for “freedom of choice”, in a similar fashion as anti-vaccination movements in the region do it. Among others, Olszewski “advertised” Robert F. Kennedy Junior, and these misinformative claims have also reached our region.
In line with the narrative she promotes, at the very beginning of the pandemic, she claimed that the whole thing was “inflated”, and there is evidence of this on social media. In late April, she arrived in New York, a city which at the time was hardest hit by the pandemic. Olszewski began working as a nurse at New York’s Elmhurst Hospital, located in Queens.
The story of Erin Olszewski, which was presented as one in a series of “evidence” for various pandemic conspiracy theories, is rather unconvincing for several reasons, and the first reason is hidden in her perspective of a pandemic.
What was going on at Elmhurst Hospital?
Doctors, some on the verge of tears, have said a lot about the situation at the Elmhurst Public Hospital, where treatment is usually given to poor urban residents of ethnic minorities. The staff at Elmhurst even got sick due to a lack of protective equipment and tools to help patients, and this hasn’t been resolved until the end of May.
As soon as Olszewski arrived at the hospital, as claimed in her social media posts, she saw refrigerated trucks parked on standby in front of the hospital, as morgues were running out of space for bodies.
Olszewski then changed her original story of the “fictional pandemic”: The problem is no longer that the pandemic is fictional, but that it was created. All due to irresponsible and/or malicious behaviour of medical staff, aiming to make money off it.
Before we devote our attention to the claims from the documentary, let’s also say that her film received support from Mercola.com, a website of one of the most famous financiers of the anti-vaccination movement in America, a tycoon Joseph Mercola. Shortly after the film was released, Olszewski also published a book about her experiences at Elmhurst Hospital, titled Undercover Epicenter Nurse: How Fraud, Negligence, and Greed Led to Unnecessary Deaths at Elmhurst Hospital. She also launched a GoFundMe campaign, asking for $150,000, based on her claims.
Triage and virus “entering” the hospital
Olszewski accused her colleagues of deliberately “creating” a pandemic by putting COVID-19 patients with people who were negative for the new coronavirus.
People who have been tested negative for COVID-19 multiple times have been described as confirmed cases of COVID… Patients without confirmed COVID are put in the same department with those who have been confirmed… They’ve got COVID-19 in the wards and so this is how they literally created the pandemic.
Improper isolation was the most common motive highlighted in the headlines of the media who wrote about her video. The secretly made video also shows a nurse who claims that one patient who came with a stroke and had a negative test, was infected in the ward and ended up on a ventilator. The nurse also presented two negative SARS-CoV-2 test results related to a patient who ended up on a ventilator. It is called “confirmed Covid-19”, she stated, although at one point she also used the term “suspected Covid-19” (presumptive).
When talking about people who became infected with the new coronavirus in hospitals, the data that Chinese doctors gathered by the end of March and published in the Annals of Translational Medicine in May this year, state that this includes almost half of the patients.
“The proportions of nosocomial infections with early outbreaks of COVID-19… were 44.0%”, they stated.
Furthermore, up to 40 percent of negative tests for SARS-CoV-2 could be considered false negative. This is why, in triage, for instance, doctors don’t take into account the test results only, but also the overall clinical picture of the patient.
Although the coronavirus appeared in Croatia in February, the news about “the virus entering the hospitals” is continuously published, stating that, in addition to doctors, other patients are getting sick, too.
In September, the director of the Andrija Štampar Institute of Public Health, Zvornimir Šostar, declared that “the virus had entered all Zagreb hospitals”, including maternity hospitals and the children’s hospital in Klaićeva. Even after that, similar news continued to spread: in October it was Zabok, Bjelovar and Petrova Hospital in Zagreb, in November it was the hospital in Split…
In Croatia, this is happening in the recent period, after several months of dealing with COVID-19; and not in the so-called epicentre of the pandemic when it first began.
The Elmhurst doctors have stated that there were cases in which some people who were injured in traffic accidents and had no symptoms, carried the virus. In early April, Dr. Colleen Smith, an employee at Elmhurst emergency room, said:
“At first, we were trying to isolate patients with cough and fever, and be more careful around them. But we weren’t necessarily being extra careful around all the other patients. And then we started to realise that patients who were coming in with no fever but abdominal pain, actually had findings on their X-rays and chest CT that were consistent with this coronavirus COVID-19. So, someone in a car accident gets brought in, and we get a CT scan of them and their lungs look like they have coronavirus. So, we were seeing a lot of patients who probably had COVID-19, but we didn’t realize”.
“Anxiety”
Olszewski further states:
“They’re coming in with difficulty breathing, and a lot of these patients, they come in with anxiety because they’re scared. They take them, and they tell them pretty much that if they don’t go on a vent, they probably won’t survive. But the reality is that when they go on that vent the likelihood of them walking out of the hospital is slim to none”.
Dr. Zubin Damania has addressed the claims of Erin Marie Olszewski two times. In one of two such videos (the other concerns letters he received from hospital staff, titled “Who is actually harmed by false information”), Damania states:
She, therefore, argues that anxiety can lower blood oxygen levels enough to prompt doctors to put breathing tubes in you. It’s insane. I’ll repeat: insane.
Patients with COVID-19, of course, may have panic attacks and feel anxious while also having low blood oxygen levels. However, anxiety itself and panic attacks lead to hyperventilation or excessive breathing. It has a completely different, paradoxical effect: the feeling that you are short of air, even though you are actually short of carbon dioxide.
Anxiety – which is associated with fear, or the instinct that prepares the body for “fight or flight” response – forces the body to take in as much oxygen as possible to withstand physical strain. As a rule, such strain does not occur, because there is no immediate physical danger. People who experience a panic attack mostly stand still and try to calm down, but the body still breathes heavily. This ultimately creates excess oxygen in the blood. These claims by Olszewski – like many others she makes – simply show a lack of understanding of the topics she aims to “research”.
Money
Among the incorrect claims made by Olszewski, there are some that have been exposed several times since then, both here and in the United States, where they have spread the most [1, 2]. One of those claims suggests that hospitals can “make money” off of deaths of patients – specifically, patients with COVID-19 – and that this is the motive for their alleged killings:
“We’re in a public hospital that needs money. They take these patients and tell them they probably won’t survive without a ventilator. And in reality, if they end up on a ventilator, the chances of getting out of that hospital are slim to none… You get at least $29,000 per (COVID-19) patient. You also charge for the equipment. This is like bonus money.”
Erin Marie Olszewski claims that hospitals receive money for patients with COVID-19, implying that patients who do not need a ventilator still end up with this treatment, which eventually causes their death. The same claim appeared in the United States before Olszewski’s video was published. Republican Senator Scott Jensen from Minnesota, mentioned this on The Ingraham Angle on Fox News:
“Currently, Medicare determines that if someone is admitted to the hospital with COVID-19, you get $13,000. If that COVID-19-infected patient goes on a ventilator, you get $39,000, which is three times as much. No one can tell me, after 35 years in the field of medicine, that sometimes such things have no effect on what we do”.
The claim was made during a discussion on the rules of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on determining the cause of death of a patient with COVID-19, and this quickly spread in the conservative media. Jensen later said he did not think hospitals were deliberately misdiagnosing cases for material gain.
The same was addressed by the fact-checking platform, FactCheck in the article published on April 21, 2020, explaining that the claims were about reimbursement for the costs of treatment of patients covered by Medicare insurance, and not about the “earnings” made by hospitals:
An analysis by Kaiser Family Foundation looked at average Medicare hospital admissions for existing groups of people with similar diagnoses and noted that “the average Medicare disbursement for respiratory infections and inflammation with major comorbidities or complications in 2017… was $13,297. For more serious hospitalisations, we use the average Medicare payment for a diagnosis of a respiratory system and ventilator support longer than 96 hours, which was $40,218”.
Furthermore, hospitals receive an additional 20 percent for Medicare patients with COVID-19, as well as reimbursement for the cost of treating people without health insurance, which comes from the CARES law (adopted on March 27th) on assistance and economic security during the coronavirus pandemic.
FactCheck states:
“The CARES Act created the 20% add-on to be paid for Medicare patients with COVID-19. The act further created a $100 billion fund that is being used to financially assist hospitals — a “portion” of which will be “used to reimburse healthcare providers, at Medicare rates, for COVID-related treatment of the uninsured,” according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services”.
The idea that hospitals will benefit from additional government funding has its roots based in ignorance of the cost of treating patients at the Intensive Care Unit. This is confirmed in the statement of the associate of the non-governmental research organization Urban Institute, Robert Berenson, an expert in the field of health policies and Medicare. The statement was published in the FactCheck article, which explains that the idea of hospitals profiting from a pandemic isn’t based on facts, and that hospitals’ revenues have reduced during the pandemic.
“Berenson said revenues appear to be down for hospitals this quarter because many have suspended elective procedures, which are key to their revenue, forcing some hospitals to cut staff. He surmised that potential instances of patients being wrongly “upcoded” — or classified as COVID-19 when they’re not — are “trivial compared to these other forces that are affecting hospital finances”.
Raskrinkavanje wrote about this when similar claims about “ hospitals profiting on COVID-19 patients” were made by Andrew Kaufman, another conspiracy theorist with a medical background.
Hydroxychloroquine and zinc
In the film Perspectives on the Pandemic, Olszewski also draws a parallel with the private hospital in Florida where she usually works. There, as Olszewski claims, she was not “under pressure” to diagnose COVID-19, and the therapeutic approach was individual, unlike the case at Elmhurst. This approach, according to her, is caused by laziness and comes down to sedation and intubation, which is always followed by death. She also claims that only one of her patients survived – a former drug addict who “pulled the ventilator tube out of his throat”.
During the secret filming, Olszewski questioned Elmhurst’s doctor about hydroxychloroquine, zinc and vitamins – alleged drugs against COVID-19. As she claims in the documentary, this stems from her practice at a hospital in Florida, where she works.
“They were using hydroxychloroquine and the zinc… We didn’t have anybody that died”.
Asked why the combination was “demonized”, Olszewski replied:
“Cause it was working and then people wouldn’t need vents”.
However, as the doctor responds to her in a secret recording, these drugs were simply not confirmed at the time as reliable drugs for all patients. And they have not been confirmed as reliable to this day.
A month before Olszewski shot her video, a study conducted at New York-Presbyterian Hospital on nearly 1,400 patients, concluded that the combination of hydroxychloroquine and zinc had no effect, according to CBS New York.
Hydroxychloroquine, a drug promoted by the US President Donald Trump as a possible treatment for COVID-19, has not helped patients at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, according to a report released earlier this week. The researchers studied nearly 1,400 patients and 60% per cent of them were given hydroxychloroquine within 48 hours of arriving at the emergency room. They did not benefit from the drug. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that more controlled trials are needed.
In a document, last updated on July 17, 2020, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) – the US government’s chief agency for biomedical and health research said there is not enough data to recommend the use of zinc as a treatment method for COVID-19. The document states that the use of zinc in excess of the recommended amount is not suitable for the prevention of COVID-19.
A study published on August 26, 2020, in the scientific journal Clinical Microbiology and Infection showed that hydroxychloroquine does not reduce mortality in patients with COVID-19, but rather increases it when combined with the antibiotic azithromycin.
Thus, the drug has been considered untested in medical circles before and after the publication of the analyzed video, so not using it as a drug for patients with a COVID diagnosis should not be surprising.
Hospital staff expertise
Olszewski also tried to portray the hospital staff as unprofessional:
You don’t have real doctors who deal with intensive care. There’s a dentist working there. There are also students who have no idea what they are doing. Today I had to supervise one of them, because of a drug that can kill a patient if it’s applied in the wrong dose. If I didn’t know that, I could easily have killed a patient, but that would have been OK by ‘COVID standards’. No one is responsible for anything. People on ventilators serve as guinea pigs for practising… unnecessary invasive procedures.
When asked by Faktograf about the allegations in the video, Elmhurst Hospital stated that their patients have always been guarded by appropriate staff:
“Although there are small differences in patient care teams, depending on the hospital, ward, type of patient and whether it is a daytime or night shift, residents and associates are always part of a professional care team regardless of the circumstances. For patients with COVID-19 in the intensive care unit, nursing teams were led by on-duty physicians, and also involved emergency care associates, advanced care professionals, support from medical technicians, and respiratory therapists.
Dr. Zubin Damania’s website shared anonymous testimonies from hospital staff. A travelling medical technician working in Elmhurst commented on these claims:
“ What Erin doesn’t share is that the “dentist and ophthalmologist” working in the ICUs they have a defined role-they are the medical professionals that FaceTime family members at bedside. They are not treating! They are an extension of the nursing staff so we can provide more time caring for our patients and less time answering phone calls and talking to families…during this pandemic.”
So, the department didn’t just include specialists for infectious disease, but also medical professionals from other fields, and this a common practice in moments of crisis.
A study, conducted by scientists from Italy, and which was published in the journal of Internal and Emergency Medicine on June 9, 2020, states that due to the high number of patients during the COVID-19 crisis in Italy, other medical professionals had to come to the rescue.
“The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has distressed our working practice. Infectious disease specialists, pneumologists and intensivists were not enough to face the enormous amount of patients that needed hospital care; therefore, many doctors have been recruited from other medical specialties trying to take care of as many patients as possible. (…) .Endocrinologists, cardiologists, gastroenterologists, haematologists had to refresh their knowledge on interpreting arterial blood gas analysis, managing non-invasive ventilators and prescribing antiretroviral drugs in respiratory care units (ICU)”.
At the time of Olszewski’s work in Elmhurst, the city of New York was the epicenter of the epidemic in the United States, which means that their capacities were full – which is why she herself was there as well.
Therefore, the claim that medical professionals who do not specialize in infectology have worked with COVID-19 patients is probably correct, but its interpretation in terms of the incompetence of the doctors in the ward is misleading.
Hospital response
To find out the other side of the story, Faktograf contacted Elmhurst Hospital, from which we received the following statement:
“NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst has been on the frontline of the COVID-19 crisis saving lives and providing the highest quality care to all New Yorkers in the face of an unprecedented global pandemic. The allegations made by the temporary nurse have been proven to be unsubstantiated. Our expert clinicians provided the most appropriate level of care for all patients, while following all required safety and clinical protocols, and upholding the public health system’s mission of caring for all New Yorkers regardless of ability to pay and immigration status.”
Elmhurst stated that Erin Marie Olszewski’s allegations led to an internal investigation that found her allegations unfounded and that the temporary nurse “callously ignored patient confidentiality and privacy”. When the hospital was overcrowded, they claim, they were adding ICU beds, thus bringing the number of available ICU beds to over 160.
Atiya Butler, a spokeswoman for Elmhurst Hospital Center, says all patients were provided with the most appropriate level of care, despite doctors treating the virus without a known confirmed treatment.
“It has been well documented and broadly reported by health care providers all across the country that COVID-19 patients with severe symptoms were often unstable and their conditions changed rapidly..
(…)
Providers are subject to very specific laws and ethical principles that require them to consult with the patient or their healthcare proxy in making life-altering decisions. Even in the extreme circumstances posed by this pandemic surge, those rules, policies, and ethical principles were in effect at all times.”
Full circle: Back to the disease being “not so serious”
These days Olszewski is back to square one: again spreading videos promoting the thesis that people don’t die from COVID-19, speaking out against masks and vaccines and, of course, advertising her book, InfoWars and Del Bigtree – the man who interviewed her about her secret filming of Elmhurst. On her social media, you will also come across the heroine of the film Plandemic, former scientist and propagandist of the anti-vaccination movement, Judi Mikovits.
On the day of the presidential election in which she supported Donald Trump, as well as in days that came after, she called people to the streets based on provenly inaccurate claims that the elections were “stolen”.
Likewise, she argued that under Trump’s administration, the vaccine against COVID-19 would not be mandatory, but under Joe Biden’s administration, it would, although it “irreversibly alters DNA”, which is nonsense that Faktograf has written about many times. It should also be noted that compulsory vaccination in the United States is regulated at the state level, not at the federal level.
Allegations that the hospital staff deliberately “made sick” or even killed patients in order for the hospital to make a profit, which are confirmed to be untrue, are rated as false news.
The malicious and misleading interpretation of the difficult conditions which Elmhurst – but also other New York hospitals – found themselves in due to the pandemic (such as lack of staff, a problem with patient accommodation, etc.), we rate as manipulation of facts.
Finally, claims of a “scheme” to make money on patient deaths, including the reason for why unconfirmed “drugs” for COVID-19 were not used and its interpretation, are rated as a conspiracy theory.