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'Undercover Epicenter Nurse' Debunked

— ZDoggMD reacts to internet misinformation

MedpageToday

ZDoggMD examines and debunks the claims of a widely circulated video about what it's like to be in the epicenter of the pandemic. Following is a partial transcript:

Hey everyone, it's Dr. Z. It's time for another debunking of a BS YouTube exposé on the pandemic.

Before we did "Plandemic," which was pretty obvious within 30 seconds of watching that video, I detected crazy sauce all over it. And I was just angry that anyone would have believed it. The video I'm gonna review today is called "Perspectives on the Pandemic," the undercover epicenter nurse. And about a billion people have sent it to me as usual, just came out and already has about 100,000 views despite being over an hour long.

And, this one's tricky because you start watching it, and you ... it takes awhile to figure out that this person is insane. But it does take time, and you can use your critical thinking toolkit to actually debunk this systematically.

So that's what I wanna do with you guys, because I'll tell you going into this video, I actually kind of have a bias that sides with the nurse who is purporting to expose our mismanagement and murder of patients with COVID at an epicenter hospital, Elmhurst in New York in Queens.

And, the reason is that a lot of the things she talks about are things that, you know, I've seen. So, mismanagement, over-treatment, financial incentives that don't align with the actual care of the patient, not listening to patients' wishes, those kinds of things. So, I'm already like on her side, like, I want to believe what she's saying. And despite that, I don't believe a single word that she says, even though there's truth sprinkled through the video in terms of conceptual truth.

So, let's go through it carefully in this video, so that you don't have to watch the hour and 10 minutes slog that I watched at 2x watching her cry crocodile tears, at 2x was entertaining, but really gets boring fast. She basically is a nurse who's traveling.

She decides to go to New York -- and we'll talk about her background in a second, because that's important -- decides to go to New York to help out at Elmhurst hospital, which is the epicenter of the epicenter according to the documentary.

Now, she immediately sees that there's a ton of patients and starts to make a series of claims, decides she's gonna become an undercover reporter and videotape, not just medical record charts, which are shown in the video with minimal reaction, but audiotape her colleagues, other physicians, other nurses without their knowledge or consent. And, they put it in this video.

So, this is the structure that she's doing. Now, her claims in the video, which we're gonna go through some of them, are that they weren't even testing properly for COVID. They were calling people with negative tests positive, presumably because they get paid more for positive COVID tests by Medicare and Medicaid.

This was a poor, racial minority population that was being specifically targeted by this hospital because of money. The doctors were incompetent, the residents were incompetent. They were forcing patients to be do not resuscitate when they could have saved them, or they could have coded them. And they didn't talk to the families. And, they were intubating and ventilating patients that didn't need to be intubated and ventilated, among other claims. Also, they weren't giving life-saving treatments like hydroxychloroquine, and zinc and vitamin C, because you know, Cuomo, that was literally the claim. Alright, so let's go through this.

The first thing to do is to look at your conspiracy checklist.

Number one, is there a conspiracy theory that they're presenting? The answer is yes. They're saying that we are killing COVID patients and non-COVID patients, putting them together, calling them COVID, potentially getting them infected because we get paid $29,000 per COVID patient if they're diagnosed with COVID, alright. Yes, and financial incentives do matter. Yes, that can influence care.

Is that what's going on here? Well, we have no contrary voice in the video, which is already a red flag. So already you go, well, wait, nobody else who's saying that that's not happening from Elmhurst or anywhere else is given a voice.

This post originally appeared on , where you can read the full transcript.