It reads like a dystopian novel — coercive health care executives running patient care at the expense of thousands of lives, nurse advocates rescuing medically “kidnapped” hospital admittees, public schools rewarded millions of dollars for mandating child masking, and children serving as hosts for experimental vaccines.
In his latest book, What The Nurses Saw: An Investigation Into Systemic Medical Murders That Took Place in Hospitals During the COVID Panic and the Nurses Who Fought Back To Save Their Patients, Ken McCarthy documents real-world America during the earliest months of the Covid-19 outbreak. He sheds light on some of the most egregious and criminal acts committed in broad daylight in human history within our medical system. McCarthy argues widespread corruption of the news media, academia, and ultimately science has resulted in an extremely dysfunctional system that intrinsically places patients last.
McCarthy’s series of interviews with the unsung and often demonized health care heroes of the past few years — those who fought to save lives despite being threatened, accused, sued, and harassed — clarify the movement of funding and the ferocious, insatiable appetite of a system once designed to heal but now intent on hemorrhaging out conscientious employees.
Bateman: The title of your book is What the Nurses Saw. Tell me how you selected the nurses and health care professionals you did for this book. How did you determine which sources were trustworthy?
McCarthy: These are eyewitness accounts. All the people interviewed are veterans in their profession. Though they work in different parts of the country and different countries, their accounts were consistent.
The “prizes” they got for telling the story of what they saw included: demotion, firing, industry-wide blackballing, having their licenses challenged and in some cases revoked, as well as being tracked down and personally harassed by a well-organized group of internet trolls.
Bateman: You began these interviews in 2020. And three years later you saw so little to no traction on the publication of dissenting testimonies to the Covid groupthink that continues to dominate our society. Why compile them in a book versus publishing the interviews in another format?
McCarthy: I like to say “You can’t hand somebody a website.”
Also, as physically large as this book turned out to be, I could’ve written an encyclopedia on the subject. It has a lot of moving parts and requires the acquisition of a lot of specialized knowledge to see and tell the whole story. After the book came out, I’m still learning new things about it every day.
Bateman: You specifically refer to this period in time as the “Covid Panic,” not the pandemic.
McCarthy: In the financial world, the term panic is used to describe a sudden change of mood in the marketplace and is characterized by people racing to take a single action, usually selling, though there can also be panic buying.
There have been times in history when financial panics were induced by stock operators, and actually, this happens routinely with individual shares.
I haven’t run the numbers, but I would be surprised if there has ever been such a volume of “information” published, outside of the run-up to war, that can compare with the media operations used to hype Covid. Given how often assertions made about this or that aspect of Covid have turned out to be completely wrong — always in favor of panic — it’s conceivable to me at least that the terror over Covid was deliberately induced.
Bateman: Does the entire fabric of modern medicine rest on larger structures that remove care further and further from the individual?
McCarthy: When you’re in an examination room or a hospital room with your doctor, you’re aware of the doctor being involved, but others involved in the doctor’s decisions include the hospital administrator, the CFO of the hospital (and likely the chain it is a part of), state-level medical and public health authorities, the various relevant branches of the federal government, and last, but not least, the pharmaceutical companies, which are highly active and spend a great deal of money influencing all of these parties.
You and your well-being are not the only consideration. In addition to the doctor who is drawing a paycheck from the hospital and hoping to maintain his career, there are parties not visible in the room that may have motives contradictory to your own, and they are the dominant figures in the equation.
Bateman: Some of the work you are best known for is commercializing the internet in the early 1990s, this novel marketing and distribution model. Your book, The Internet Business Manual, was one of the first internet entrepreneurship books. So you certainly understand how the World Wide Web is used as a tool and how widespread and involved its effect is. How was the internet used as a tool of terror during the panic?
McCarthy: The same way Goebbels used the then-new radio, motion pictures, and print: control of the message and actively seeking out and destroying alternative media.
Network TV news, which used to be the go-to source for information is still influential and very easy to control, but as viewership numbers reflect, fewer and fewer people take it seriously. So podcasts, independent news organs, and easily shareable media have become very important.
People have taken to assembling reels of video from the network news showing how extraordinarily and consistently inaccurate Covid reporting was and how no small part of it involved aggressive attacks against anyone who questioned the official narrative. Having a professorship in a relevant discipline from schools like Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale was not as important as simply being Anderson Cooper or Rachel Maddow with a network-provided bullhorn.
I do consider how the government, at all levels, and the news media conducted itself during Covid to be a terror campaign. Comparable only to the type of manufactured hysteria you see in the run-up to a war, which never happens spontaneously but is always ambitiously organized.
Bateman: Why were both medical personnel and individuals so easily manipulated during this time?
McCarthy: For society to operate, we have to trust the people around us. If federal bureaucrats and scientists are telling people that a completely unique disease, easily transmitted, with a high fatality rate, has appeared and that there is no cure, it makes sense that people who had no technical basis to question that would initially both believe it and be very afraid.
That the majority of doctors, nurses, and even scientists persisted in these errors for so long, and that many still support them despite abundant evidence to the contrary, is concerning.
We have an entirely new breed of doctors today, very different from the ones our grandparents knew. They are overwhelmingly hired hands. They know that if they are classified by one hospital as “difficult,” they may find themselves blackballed regionally. The idea of walking away from an investment of eight years (pre-med and medical school) and years of residency, not to mention six-figure student loans, I’m afraid, is enough for the majority of them to keep their heads down and just follow orders.
There is no penalty for following orders, even if those orders repeatedly result in the unnecessary suffering and death of patients. In contrast, questioning orders can get you disciplined, marginalized, fired, and attacked in other ways.
Under Covid, these dynamics, which are always in play, were multiplied exponentially.
Bateman: Tell me your opinion of investigative journalism during the pandemic and the suppression of truth and dissenting opinions at this time in history.
McCarthy: If you mean truly independent journalists, there was some good work done.
If you mean the independent journalists who are contractors for the corporate news media, it would be impossible for me to overstate the depth of their failure. In their defense, their outlets would not have published worthwhile material even if they submitted it, and like doctors and nurses, they could very well have found themselves fired and blackballed for even trying, and indeed, that did happen in some cases.
If you’re about to carry out a massive crime in broad daylight, you have to include in your plan the control of the news and other authorities that might otherwise interfere, and the folks behind the Covid panic and who profited from it mightily did.
To use the war example again, it is impossible to mobilize a fighting force and sustain it without very thorough, relentless propaganda, much of which, if not all of it, is contrived and designed solely to generate emotional reactions.
If you can push people’s fear and anger buttons and suppress all other opinions, I’m afraid most people will abdicate their responsibility to think for themselves and follow the path of least resistance, however illogical or destructive.
I believe there are evolutionary reasons for this. No man or woman can be an island. We are absolutely dependent on the cooperation and goodwill of others to survive. Most people play by the rules and honor this mutual dependence. Some don’t and instead exploit this fundamental system for their own gain without any concern for the damage they create.
Bateman: Will you continue to publish the stories of doctors and nurses who fought the system during Covid?
McCarthy: I am hoping that this book will create enough of a buzz that it will inspire other people to start researching and writing about this story.
More than 1 million Americans are said to have “died of Covid,” and 92 percent of those people died in a hospital or other “health care” facility.
Many of the “approved” treatments for Covid — and we really should say mandatory and coerced treatments — are known to have serious negative side effects up to and including death.
How many people were given not only a dose of remdesivir but also multiple courses of it? What was the medical justification?
How many people were intubated and put on ventilators for an extended period of time, a dangerous procedure under the best of circumstances, when in the entire history of medicine it was never resorted to so quickly and with such little justification?
Why were these two extreme measures richly incentivized by the federal government?
Why were experienced health care professionals who questioned this so aggressively singled out for retaliation?
How many of the more than 900,000 people who “died of Covid” in U.S. hospital facilities were given a treatment that was not medically supportable?
Ultimately, my book is a question book, not an answer book.
Ashley Bateman is a policy writer for The Heartland Institute and blogger for Ascension Press. Her work has been featured in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, The New York Post, The American Thinker and numerous other publications. She previously worked as an adjunct scholar for The Lexington Institute and as editor, writer and photographer for The Warner Weekly, a publication for the American military community in Bamberg, Germany. Ashley is a board member at a Catholic homeschool cooperative in Virginia. She homeschools her four incredible children along with her brilliant engineer/scientist husband.
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