This just goes to show how sideways the world has become over Covid-19. Leaked footage shows a Novant Health New Hanover Regional Medical Center in North Carolina doctor proposing staffers lie about the number of active Covid cases to ‘scare the public into getting the shot. As the footage slowly goes viral, the hospital system was forced to respond.
Dr. Mary Rudyk said she wanted to turn up the heat on the unvaccinated and send a message that says if “you don’t get vaccinated, you know you’re gonna die.” The leaked footage came following a meeting between the hospital and its marketing team. The fact that the vaccine is a topic for a hospital’s marketing team should alarm anyone.
Rudyk proposed they include people who have recovered in their current case report to inflate the number of cases the hospital shows the public. She made that proposal to Carolyn Fisher, the hospital’s director of marketing.
“I think those are important numbers — the patients that are … off the COVID floor but still are occupying the hospital for a variety of reasons,” she said.
Those numbers are already counted in the hospital’s ‘recovered cases’ which would likely mean the doctor’s plan was to inflate current cases and count recovered cases twice. She was corrected by Shelbourn Stevens, president of NHRMC who suggested they talk about this off-camera.
“But I do think, from our standpoint, we would still consider them a COVID patient because they’re still healing,” Stevens added before telling Fisher that he could speak to her “offline” in regard to “how we run that up to marketing.”
As if the doctor’s proposal wasn’t shocking enough, the hospital system released the following statement:
“The team members involved in this excerpt of an internal meeting are seeing the highest level of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths so far in this pandemic – despite having safe and effective vaccines widely available. This was a frank discussion among medical and communications professionals on how we can more accurately convey the severity and seriousness of what’s happening inside of our hospitals and throughout our communities. Specifically, the data we have been sharing does not include patients who remain hospitalized for COVID-19 complications even though they are no longer COVID-19 positive, so it does not provide a complete picture of the total impact of COVID-19 on our patients and on our hospitals. We continue to be concerned with the amount of misinformation in our communities and consistently strive for more ways to be transparent and tell the whole story. The continued rise of hospitalizations makes it evident that we have more work to do to reach our communities with these messages.”
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While the hospital system did not openly condone the doctor’s behavior, they certainly didn’t condemn it, either. In fact, that read to me as if they sympathised with the doctor’s perspective. Keep in mind this footage was leaked which makes me wonder how many Rudyks are out there right now.
