FRESNO, California (LifeSiteNews) – Attorneys representing 14 families are bringing wrongful-death claims against three California hospitals for giving their loved ones the controversial drug Remdesivir for COVID-19 without proper informed consent.
The Epoch Times reported that on August 30 the law firm of Watkins & Letofsky, LLP and Cornerstone attorney Michael Hamilton announced they would be bringing cases against Saint Agnes Medical Center, Community Regional Medical Center, and Clovis Community Medical Center on behalf of 14 families.
The suits, which were filed September 7 in the Superior Court of California in Fresno County, allege that their loved ones were given Remdesivir without being adequately informed of its warning signs, such as a December 2019 study from the New England Journal of Medicine, in which use of the drug was suspended after more than half the Ebola patients who took it died.
Charging the hospitals with fraudulent concealment leading to wrongful death, violation of the Elder Abuse and Dependent Adult Civil Protection Act, medical negligence leading to wrongful death, and medical battery leading to wrongful death, the lawsuits claim that the hospitals subjected patients to a “Remdesivir Protocol” under which someone who seeks treatment for an unrelated issue is diagnosed with COVID or “COVID pneumonia,” then separated from family members and told Remdesivir is their only option.
“They are placed on a BiPap machine at a high rate, making it difficult for them to breathe,” the suit alleges. “Their hands are often tied down so they can’t take the BiPap machine off their face.” If and when this setup agitates them, they are sedated. From there, they are allegedly given inadequate nourishment, intubated, and eventually die, all without the ability to contact anyone outside the hospital or have their treatment changed.
Such treatment is perpetuated by financial incentives, according to Hamilton, who is also with the Truth for Health Foundation.
“If you bring them into the hospital and treat them as a non-complex COVID patient, the average charge rate is $111,000,” Hamilton said at a September 7 press conference. “However, if you treat them as a complex COVID patient, which means you have to either intubate them or put them in intensive care, by definition they become complex, and for that the average charge rate is roughly $450,000.”
“So you can see why there’s a great incentive not to just give them something that works and send them home, but to actually bring them in, find a way to intubate them, call it a complex case, and get $500,000 instead of $3,200,” he added. “That’s a tremendous financial incentive.”
The suit notes that Remdesivir “received Emergency Use Authorization in or around May of 2020, after being recommended by an [National Institutes of Health] panel that contained nine individuals with financial ties to its creator, Gilead Sciences.” Writing for the Brownstone Institute, Liam Cosgrove added that the NIH “funded trials for remdesivir, still under patent with Gilead, despite being less effective and having more severe side effects than ivermectin,” and that the U.S. Food & Drug Administration “approved remdesivir under EUA despite published trials later stating ‘remdesivir was not associated with statistically significant clinical benefits.’”
“Doctors have a duty to review the literature, especially in an emerging crisis, and to stay abreast of these developing guidelines,” the attorneys argue in a press release. “Safety and avoiding harm should always come first in a clinical environment. Covid-19 has a 99.97% survival rate. Remdesivir decreases this survival rate exponentially. This protocol is cruel, deadly, unnecessary and also, as it turns out, highly financially incentivized.”