TUCSON, Arizona (LifeSiteNews) — COVID-19 patients across America are being denied treatment and “even the basic standard of care” in what has been described as an “ungodly, unholy, un-American, unconstitutional response by hospitals” to the coronavirus crisis, according to speakers at the latest Stop the Shot conference.
The fourth installment of the Truth for Health Foundation’s conference series took aim at patient freedoms, which have been under siege throughout the coronavirus crisis, with patients being denied life-saving medication for COVID-19, being coerced into using potentially dangerous and expensive treatment plans, and being forcibly secluded, without the ability to see their families.
One such case is that of Caroline Carroll, a mother who, after apparently contracting the virus, was told by staff at Baylor, White & Scott hospital in College Station, Texas, that “she had waited too long to be treated.”
Jodi Carroll, Caroline’s daughter, spoke at the conference, revealing that her mother initially believed she was experiencing nothing more than allergy symptoms. It was only after her condition deteriorated that her husband decided it would be wise to get a medical opinion, at which point Caroline went to the hospital, subsequently testing positive for COVID. Medics then sent Caroline home and told her to return only if her symptoms progressed further.
“By the next morning, unfortunately, her blood oxygen concentration was at 70, so my father rushed her back to the hospital, at which point she was admitted from July to August,” Jodi explained.
Once hospitalized, the family observed that the physicians were employing a “wait and see approach,” despite their requests to be more proactive following “research that we had done on COVID” showing that “it was a treatable disease.”
After consulting Dr. Peter McCullough, M.D., renowned cardiologist and chief medical adviser to the Truth for Health Foundation, a treatment plan was established, part of which was to prescribe anti-coagulants to combat a possible thrombosis, or blood-clotting.
The hospital, however, saw fit to place Carroll on “supportive care,” which her family understood to mean hospice care.
At this point, the family “escalated our efforts to get the intervention that we required. We began speaking with the chief medical officer at the hospital, asking for the same medications. We were denied.”
In desperation, the family attempted to invoke what is known as the “Right to Try Act … which allows a family who has a family member in a critical, life-threatening condition to try experimental medications,” even though the medication prescribed by McCullough has been “completely FDA [Food and Drug Administration] approved.”
Ultimately the Carrolls were denied again, forcing them to seek legal intervention. “We went to court and we were unfortunately denied the request for the medications we were asking for.” Just three days later, Caroline Carroll died.
An autopsy showed that Carroll died from “complications related to … inadequate anticoagulation,” which has convinced her bereaved family that “the medication that we were asking for would have been helpful,” potentially saving her life.
“The outside recommendations that we were receiving were appropriate and sound. They simply were not heeded by the medical staff at the hospital,” Jodi added.
Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D., CEO of the Truth for Health Foundation, noted that Carroll’s case is “another unconscionable example of the failure of hospitals to carry out the basic fundamental patient right in all of their forms on admission, the patient’s right to request treatment, and the patient’s family advocates — the power of attorney rights — to ensure that they get that treatment according to their wishes.”
In South Carolina, Attorney Lauren Martel discovered that many hospitals in the state, instead of treating COVID patients according to their specific needs and desires, are “beating all to the same step as far as how to treat COVID-19.”
Martel described the widespread uniformity of treatment for the virus as a “huge violation of constitutional and civil rights” which “interferes directly with the doctor and patient relationship for informed consent and decisions on [the] right to try medications and how to proceed on treating individuals.”
A client of Martel was admitted to a South Carolina hospital with COVID and pneumonia, but was left untreated for the condition, leading to a decline in in his health, the attorney said. The doctors then prescribed remdesivir, an experimental antiviral drug which has been demonstrably detrimental to the recovery of many COVID patients and which led to a further decline in the man’s health, according to Martel.
“Ultimately, he was intubated and put on a ventilator,” Martel added, which led the family to seek legal advice. Martel penned a series of letters to the hospital, even putting the chairman of the board of trustees “on notice” for liability. The result was that Martel was able to have her client moved to another hospital within the state; however, “the protocol for treating COVID-19 was the same.”
The lawyer attempted to invoke the Right to Try Act, but was unable to receive authorization from at least three hospitals. “They were all the same,” Martel lamented.
She discovered that hospital decisions regarding COVID treatment have been heavily influenced by politics, rather than medicinal science. “What I personally was able to observe was that there was a manipulation of the pharmaceutical market to promote only one set of protocols that almost has an 80 percent failure rate,” Martel explained, “meaning if you continue to do this protocol, you’re going to have people die there.”
“I now tell people we’re at war, and the leviathan of the administrative state has infiltrated our hospital system, it’s infiltrated our education system,” Martel said.
She posited that agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which are handing down regulations on healthcare without accountability to the public, are opening themselves to “a tortious interference with the contractual relationship between the doctor and the patient, or between the doctor and the hospital that he’s working with.”
“What we have to do is dial back and remember that the Constitution is the law of our land,” she suggested. “We must push back. It’s a house of cards … It’s corporate bullying.”
Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder and national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, a conservative non-profit noted for defending healthcare freedom, contended that “it’s very important that as Americans, we continue to stand for the doctor patient relationship, that we don’t allow that sacred relationship between the doctor and the patient to be replaced by a government patient relationship, which may be a one size fits all solution to health care rather than personal health care based on one’s own health history.”
Echoing Martel and Martin was Emmy Award winning reporter and conservative analyst Graham Ledger, who told the conference that in addition to assaults on American culture and history, “we have this layer of COVID-19, which is, was, and will always be politically motivated.”
Ledger stated that “it appears to me that hospitals are at this moment in time not in the business of saving lives, not doing their fiduciary duty, but they’re in the business of making money and following and toeing the line of exactly what the government tells them to do.”
Vliet added that “one of the things we are seeing from the standpoint of patients, families, legal advocates, and power of attorney is that if you look at the policies in America’s jails, prisoners have more visitation rights than covid patients in America’s hospitals.”