Erin Marie Olszewski – The Edward Snowden of U.S. Healthcare

By this point, Edward Snowden is almost a household name for his great deeds in exposing illegal and unethical NSA surveillance and spying. Such activities not only violate the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, but they had been going on for decades prior to Snowden’s public revelation. Thanks to Snowden, all the lies regarding how the NSA and other government agencies were not spying on U.S. citizens, as well as citizens in essentially all other countries, were completely disproven. The so-called “conspiracy theorists” who warned the public about the NSA’s above-described activities long before Snowden went public have indeed been vindicated, to say the very least. Not only did Snowden became the focus of major news headlines, both in mainstream and alternative media, he even got a 2016 Oliver Stone film in his name; Stone’s film is called Snowden. Although it is sad that Snowden will mostly likely not get a well-deserved pardon before President Trump leaves office, despite having the election stolen from him, nor will Snowden ever receive a much-deserved Nobel Peace Prize(unlike warmongers such as Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama), he isn’t the only whistleblower in modern history to make monumental expositions, even about illegal NSA spying. In the age of the COVID-19 pandemic, the new Edward Snowden is nurse Erin Marie Olszewski.

As a former combat nurse who served bravely in Iraq during then-President George W. Bush’s administration, Olszewski has decades of experience as a nurse. During the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, or at least the beginning of the moment in which the U.S. implemented nearly nation-wide lockdowns, shutdowns of nearly all retail and office commerce, as well as stay-at-home orders in addition to some curfews, Olszewski volunteered herself into action as a travel nurse, working at Elmhurst Hospital in New York City(NYC) in the spring of 2020. This was after Olszewski was furloughed as a nurse in her former hospital in Florida, despite all the numerous dishonest media headlines hyping how hospitals across the U.S. were getting overwhelmed and overcrowded. During her time serving at Elmhurst Hospital, she experienced and exposed horrific gross negligence, malpractice, and truly deadly practices inside the hospital. Her incredible bombshell book, Undercover Epicenter Nurse: How Fraud, Negligence, and Greed Led to Unnecessary Deaths at Elmhurst Hospital, provides all the gory details and evidence of the massive injustice. The link in the previous sentence is not an affiliate link, and this author makes no commission, nor any revenue whatsoever, from any sales of Olszewski’s book. Literally every single human being must read Olszewski’s book; literally all schools, universities, and media outlets need to be teaching and encouraging students and audiences to read it too. The rest of this post will discuss specific points of the book that are horrendous beyond even what words can describe, though this author will give his best effort to do so, and why it absolutely matters for the functional survival of humanity and civilization.

Ventilators are Dangerous & Deadly, Not Life-Saving

By this point, it is no secret that Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York has been obsessed with ventilators ever since COVID-19 started making major headlines in the U.S. On countless media appearances and speeches, Cuomo would emphasize the need for hospitals to obtain more and more ventilators. Cuomo has had a rather ostentatious and psychotic fetish for ventilators. Essentially, in Cuomo’s opinion, those who didn’t receive ventilators would die; however, quite the opposite actually occurred. As Olszewski describes, “On April 6, Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell of the Maimonides Medical Center in New York City posted a video to YouTube that quickly went viral. In the video, Dr. Kyle-Sidell calmly explained how doctors at his hospitals and around the nation were basically murdering patients. “We are putting breathing tubes in people and putting them on ventilators and dialing up the pressure to open up their lungs,” he explained….to doctors all around the country, and it is becoming increasingly clear that the pressure we’re providing may be hurting their lungs, that it is highly likely that the high pressures we’re using are damaging the lungs of the patients we are putting the breathing tubes in.”(Olszewski 43) In addition to corroborating Kyle-Sidell’s horrifying observations, Olszewski also explains that “putting these patients on ventilators and cranking up the volume would basically blow out their lungs. It was a point of no return.”(Olszewski 43) Therefore, Cuomo, the media, and all other public figures who’ve been preaching the indispensability of ventilators and touting them as the solution, have been totally dead-wrong; in fact, they have blood on their hands. Have they admitted any mistakes or expressed remorse for their directives that actually caused unnecessary deaths? Not a chance. In fact, the hospitals kept receiving more and more federal money for every patient put on a ventilator. This is why the hospitals put so many patients on these dangerous ventilators, for the money, funded by far too many unwitting and hapless taxpayers: the patient’s health, and life, be damned. To compound this perversion of humanity, for every death the hospitals would code as a COVID-19 death, the hospitals would receive more of the taxpayer-funded federal “emergency aid” money. To make things even worse, no formal audits of fraudulent coding of patient deaths as caused primarily by COVID-19 have been done. Of course, the hospitals couldn’t get away with this deadly neglect had patients’ family members been allowed to observe the neglect; but of course, for everyone’s safety, as the public has been emphatically told, family members were barred from visiting. But if the patient ends up dying after being put on a ventilator, it most certainly cannot be said that prohibiting patient family visits and observations either promoted or improved the safety of patients, health care staff, or quite frankly, anybody else. Folks, the true reason why so many patients were dying in NYC hospitals is primarily because of hospital staff malpractice, enabled by Governor Cuomo’s unethical stupidity, NOT because of COVID-19. The fact that people praised Cuomo for the “good job” he did by issuing all of his orders, none of which have any legal or constitutional justification, is as disgusting as the millions who laud Fidel Castro as a saint who was compassionate to the poor and downtrodden when in reality, Castro was the antithesis of his undeserved reputation. This author is in no way saying that Elmhurst, as well as all other hospitals, didn’t legitimately have any COVID-19 cases and deaths, but it is indisputable that the REPORTED number of COVID-19 cases and deaths from Elmhurst, and from pretty much all other hospitals, was flagrantly misreported as much higher than the numbers truly are, when considering all the points expressed in Olszewski’s book.

Deadly NYC Hospital Negligence & Malpractice

As emphasized in the prior section, hospital malpractice caused the large number of unnecessary patient deaths, not COVID-19, running quite contrary to the deceptive and misleading popular narrative. Olszewski details many more examples outside of unhealthy and improper application of ventilators. The horrors of Olszewski’s story are hard to explain in words alone. To begin, it is imperative to understand how Cuomo, and New York state law, enabled all this deadly malpractice. As Olszewski explains, “On March 23 governor Cuomo issued a breathtaking Executive Order that declared immunity for “all physicians, physician assistants, specialist assistants, nurse practitioners, licensed registered professional nurses, and licensed practical nurses; caring for COVID-19 patients. According to Cuomo, these medical professionals could not be held accountable for a wide variety of mistakes and actions of malpractice during the outbreak, including:

• Injury or death
• Failure to “comply with any recordkeeping requirement,” including “requirements to maintain medical records that accurately reflect the evaluation and treatment of patients, or requirement to assign diagnostic codes, or to create or maintain other records for billing purposes”
• Allowing physician assistants to operate unsupervised(which is normally subject to both civil and criminal penalties)
• Practicing in New York without a New York State license
• Practicing in New York State without a current registration (Olszewski 43)

Good lord, talk about legalizing malpractice! In emergency times, especially if COVID-19 truly is as severe and deadly as the popular narrative screams, then doctors, nurses, and healthcare workers should all be more diligent and careful, not less, per Cuomo’s executive order.  Rather than issuing emergency orders to give more leeway to healthcare workers, the orders should be more strict and should therefore prohibit careless activities, rather than enable and legalize them, especially when non-healthcare personnel, the people Cuomo and Anthony Fauci belittle and demean as “non-essential”, are under such strict orders to stay at home, close their businesses and sustain extreme poverty as a consequence, never come within an arbitrary six feet of another human body, and wear masks everywhere they go outside of their homes.  At this point, readers may still wonder, what is the point of this section? The point is that hospitals, doctors, and many other healthcare practitioners, contrary to popular belief, are not guaranteed to be competent, compassionate, or responsible. It would appear that those who, for a very long time, have refused to trust or patronize the mainstream healthcare industry under any circumstance have a point. It would also stand to reason that the concerns and fears held by such people are indeed warranted, quite unfortunately.

Instead, Cuomo gives a free pass for healthcare workers, the glorified “frontline workers”, to do the disgusting things that Olszewski, and several others, observed and complained about quite loudly. On her first day at Elmhurst, Olszewski plainly states “The floors were filthy; catching cockroaches scuttling around corners was not uncommon. I’ve never thought of myself as high-maintenance, but it was like nothing I had ever seen”(Olszewski 50). Trash cans were overflowing inside the hospital, and when Olszewski asked where housekeeping is, she received a response from hospital staff that “Well….you can take out the garbage?”(Olszewski 51). Olszewski recorded conversations she had with several other disgruntled nurses who agreed with her. She observed other staff not using personal protective equipment properly, such as catching people “texting on their phones with gloves off”(Olszewski 53). One might think that the doctors, for all their years of schooling and education, wouldn’t be prone to gross incompetence. Olszewski had radically different observations; as she recounts “There were interns and residents who couldn’t even read the pulse oximeter correctly to determine a patient’s oxygen level”, and as she later explains, that’s a critical step to determine if a patient can SAFELY be put on a ventilator (Olszewski 60). Olszewski and the other nurses had to step in to nullify the incompetence by the interns and residents.  As Olszewski also states “Watching interns and residents intubate people who don’t need it is absolutely chilling.  They do it almost eagerly, happy to practice a complicated task, but to me it looks like the same as stabbing someone in the heart i.e. the Twilight Zone” (Olszewski 79).  For all the emphasis on social distancing, keeping at least six feet(an arbitrary figure) between any other individual, Elmhurst miserably failed to adhere to this most fundamental COVID-19 protocol. As Olszewski explains, “Patients who were not confirmed as COVID-positive were supposed to be protected…by being placed in isolation on a non-COVID floor. As the hospital filled up, though, that protocol went out the window. By the time I arrived in May, they were literally housing patients with no COVID diagnosis in the very same room as patients who had been confirmed. Was it any surprise, then, when those non-COVID patients later tested positive”(Olszewski 67). The hospitals, by malpractice, are exacerbating the spread of COVID-19, not those who go outdoors without masks and/or refuse to practice social distancing or close their shops and/or offices.

Thus far, only words have been expressed. The following is visual evidence, taken from Olszewski’s book, of doctors and nurses sleeping while on shift! The hospital malpractice at Elmhurst is both extreme and real folks, and there’s photo evidence to prove it, not that any mainstream media(MSM) outlet, such as ABC News, CNN, NBC News, CBS News, would care to discuss it or express any concerns, let alone ring warranted alarm bells about this. See below, from Olszewski’s book:

Perverse Financial Incentives

Olzsewski describes the perverse financial incentives by stating “Elmhurst was already struggling when the pandemic began, and in the early weeks it got even worse as elective surgeries – normally big moneymakers-were cancelled. By the time the CARES Act was passed in April 2020, they needed every penny they could get. Hospitals are already notorious for upcoding – the practice of tacking on unnecessary medicines, services, and procedures to help rack up a bill. (That’s considered fraud, but it’s still as common in hospitals as a $50 band-aid)…it is a slippery slope to labelling patients who were COVID-negative as COVID-positive”(Olszewski 70). All of this was done so that the hospitals could fraudulently get more federal money. On average, a hospital receives a five-figure federal payment per patient who tests positive for COVID-19. The worst part is, Cuomo’s executive orders, as described earlier, exempts hospital staff from documenting their procedures, such as inaccurately labelling patients as positive for COVID-19.

Olszewski Received No Justice, Just Like Snowden

Eventually, Olszewski was “demobilized”, meaning dismissed. Much like Edward Snowden, Olszewski received no justice from her superiors. At the hotel ballroom where she was summoned, Olszewski was essentially told that the Elmhurst staff, run by an organization called Krucial Staffing, was dismissing her because of posts Olszewski made on social media and other online websites about the horrific negligence and malpractice she witnessed first-hand, on the “front-lines”. When Olszewski asked what specifically warranted her dismissal, she was answered with a lot of typical bureaucratic non-answers, run-around, and B.S. The representative from Krucial couldn’t even give a specific answer as to who Olszewski should specifically contact to dispute her dismissal. That’s when Olszewski courageously, and righteously, verbally exposed to the whole ballroom “The hospital is getting rid of people who go on social media, bashing the hospital. That’s censorship”(Olszewski 109). Just like Edward Snowden blew the whistle on NSA malpractice, Erin Marie Olszewski is the whistleblower who exposed the gigantic and absolutely horrific, and deadly, malpractice at Elmhurst hospital. Like Snowden, Olszewski got fired and branded as a traitor, rather than a brave soul who tried to save patients and their rights, as well as their families’ rights too. Among the most disturbing realities of this whole situation is that many current nurses still on staff share Olszewski’s feelings, and have even told her that they are keeping it to themselves out of fear. These nurses should be praised and admired, not disrespected and extorted – shut up or your fired; most importantly, hospitals should reform immediately and stop punishing these nurses, no excuses.

Other Disgruntled Nurses Corroborated Olszewski’s Observations

For those who may be tempted to dismiss Olszewski on the mistaken belief that she is a minority or the only one reporting such atrocities, this section is especially for you. Even before Olszewski traveled to Elmhurst, a whistleblower lawsuit had been filed in April 2020. The lawsuit was initiated by three nurses traveling from Alabama who had been summoned to work at NYC hospitals. The three nurses from Alabama filed suit against the medical staffing company Krucial, the same one that staffed Olszewski. Essentially, the three nurses, Wyatt Logan(fake name), Alexis Allen, and Latricia Hickenbottom, are suing because they had been assigned to do procedures that were not qualified by their licenses. As Olszewski describes in Chapter 10 of her book, when Logan expressed his concern to his staffing company Krucial Staffing, he was forced to eventually contact the CEO, Brian Cleary. Cleary’s response is absolutely shocking, to say the least. Here it is: “Brian Cleary shouted over the phone and said, ‘You mean to tell me you’re a freaking rehab nurse and you are not going to work with med-surg! That is ridiculous! I have clinical nurses who have never set foot in a hospital and now they are working in ICU!”(Olszewski 114). As Logan rightly later stated, this was a damning admission and evidence of gross negligence. Cuomo’s executive orders described above did not exempt anyone from committing gross negligence. Would any one really argue that assigning nurses to practice medicine in fields that fall outside the qualifications of the nurse’s license DOES NOT count as gross negligence? It absolutely is gross negligence, and U.S. hospitals better be held accountable and forced to reform by immediately ceasing this disgusting gross negligence. Otherwise, civilization can count on even more patients needlessly dying from gross negligence.

The final big example of another nurse corroborating Olszewski is nurse Nicole Sirotek, a travelling nurse to NYC from Las Vegas, NV. As Olszewski explains, Sirotek’s complaints. which she made on her own independent initiative, are pretty close to identical to Olszewski’s. Sirotek posted a video on YouTube that went viral explaining her story. See it here BEFORE YOUTUBE CENSORS IT like they did this Dana Ashley video that is thankfully still available on BitChute. Better yet than that, see Sirotek’s video on LBRY here, especially in the spirit of recommending viewers to see Peter Schiff’s podcasts on LBRY, instead of YouTube any longer. After explaining how some of her African-American patients were mistreated, and died as a result, Sirotek reached out to the media, but got no response or invitation for an interview. Sirotek also reached out to black advocacy groups, but was also met with no response, just like the media. Does Black Lives Matter(BLM) not care about the poor, deadly, treatment that black patients have been receiving in NYC hospitals, like Elmhurst, during this entire pandemic? Especially if BLM screams so loudly about defunding the police, it seems at least just as sensible, if not actually far more so, for BLM to demand a defunding of the hospitals, especially in light of all the deadly negligence and malpractice witnessed by numerous nurses.

Why All of The Above Matters?

Hopefully, up to this point, the answer should be clear enough. However, it would be incomplete to not dedicate a section on this crucial question. For almost a year, the U.S. public, as well as the global public, has been pressured, even bullied, into believing that the massive number of hospital deaths in NYC, and other hospitals, have definitely been primarily, if not solely, due to the presence of COVID-19 in the deceased. This author’s heart goes out to all who have lost their lives, including the families of the deceased, since COVID-19 first made any media headlines, such as back in December 2019. To add to that, this author’s heart goes out to all people who lost their lives even prior to COVID-19, and the families of the dead, just like it did during 9/11. Much like 9/11, justice cannot be served, to either the living or the dead, from covering up the truth, let alone outright lying. Just as the official story regarding 9/11 was full of holes, impossibilities, deceptions, and total lies, the narrative regarding the cause of death in NYC, and other, hospitals has been a grossly exaggerated deception, which is actually putting it lightly. If gross negligence and malpractice are truly illegal and abhorrent in our civilization, as per the popular narrative, then Olszewski’s observations should only be a script for a fictional horror movie, not reality. Furthermore, when such negligence and malpractice do occur, especially when numerous people needlessly die, such as the hapless patients of Elmhurst and other hospitals, justice must be served. The justice that must be served must hold all involved parties accountable. These involved parties include the NYC hospital system, Governor Andrew Cuomo, and all hospital staffing agencies, such as Krucial Staffing, which inappropriately delegated personnel to unqualified positions. What should these punishments be? Well, the answer to the question in the previous sentence is the same as the answer to this following question; how should murder be punished?

From now on, all federal funding to hospitals, for which hapless and unwitting taxpayers have to pay, must cease immediately. In fact, considering that taxation is inherently theft, and that the stolen taxpayer funds have failed to prevent needless deaths or hospital malpractice, this should be the easiest thing to do. Honestly, no private enterprise, whether they by hospitals or Wall Street banks, should be receiving any taxpayer money whatsoever. It is one thing to use taxpayer money to legitimately help the truly poor and needy and not, for example, Wall Street banks that recklessly speculate money, only to later demand a taxpayer-funded bailout to cover their losses. For federal funds to be sent to institutions that fail to help the poor and needy, or really anyone else besides corporate executives, such as hospitals, is completely unacceptable.

Furthermore, from now on, family members of patients must be allowed to stand or sit at the bedside of patients. The physical presence of family members gives patients highly-needed emotional support and also lets family members visually ensure that nurses and doctors are doing their jobs properly. Under the watchful eyes of family members, doctors and nurses could never get away with conducting the malpractice described by Olszewski and other nurses, especially if family members could observe how disgruntled the nurses, like Olszewski and her colleagues, were while serving on the front lines. Fewer patients would die if family members were allowed to observe patients, and what the doctors and nurses do to them.

Maybe those who believe that the medical and healthcare industries should be avoided like the plague have a valid, if not completely true, point. Their beliefs are certainly not unwarranted and/or irrational. After all, if hospitals like Elmhurst don’t ever get punished for deadly gross malpractice, how could anyone be blamed for wanting to avoid such risks by making themselves patients? Whenever there is a risk, there must ALWAYS be a choice. Even though people with such beliefs are branded as fringe extremists, alarmists, or maybe conspiracy theorists, such ad-hominem brands don’t prove their beliefs wrong, nor are they effective for the purpose of promoting civil discourse. Could this be why so many people hesitate to take mainstream medications? Is Anton Chekov’s quote “Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too” actually valid, if not totally true?

For Olszewski, she, like Snowden, suffered an enormous and totally unjustified loss for performing her civic duty as a human being. For exposing internal malpractice, and honestly criminal activities, within their own industries of expertise, both Olszewski and Snowden lost their jobs, making it harder for them to feed themselves and their loved ones. And for what; calling attention to injustice and then calling on the people, especially our elected officials, to take proper corrective action? For advocating for the end of all these ineffective, draconian, and totally unwarranted shutdown and lockdown orders? How will anyone else be expected to convert their internal inspiration from Olszewski’s and Snowden’s courageous deeds into productive action? This has a dangerous chilling effect on whistleblowers, and if whistleblowers are intimidated into silence via threats of unemployment i.e. extortion, how can anyone ever expect corruption, malpractice, and injustice to ever be eradicated? How can we expect today’s civilization to avoid going in the same direction as the Greek and Roman civilizations both did; total demise? What will people today tell future generations of humanity when they ask how this generation of humanity could possibly let these horrors, available as public knowledge thanks to Olszewski’s efforts, ever come to pass?

Olszewski’s Media Appearances

As mentioned earlier, most MSM outlets didn’t care to broadcast Olszewski’s story. One did though, and that’s Fox News, specifically Tucker Carlson – watch the short segment here. Olszewski’s interview with Tucker Carlson can also be viewed on her website here. She is also featured in this viral video – see it BEFORE YOUTUBE CENSORES IT. Additionally, Olszewski has been interviewed by Alex Jones here and here, as well as by David Knight here.

Source

1. Undercover Epicenter Nurse: How Fraud, Negligence, and Greed Led to Unnecessary Deaths at Elmhurst Hospital, by Erin Marie Olzsewski