Hospitals Turned Into Killing Centers During Pandemic — Will We Learn From the Mistakes

Public health leaders didn’t follow the data — they followed panic and centralized narrative control promulgated by a confluence of government, industry and academia. And the price was paid in hospital wards across America.

by TrialSite News

JULY 7, 2025

By Daniel O’Connor

When historians one day sift through the wreckage of the COVID-19 pandemic, the central question won’t be how many lives the virus claimed. It will be: how many were lost to a system that collapsed into fear, censorship and fatal conformity?

At TrialSite News, we chronicled the crisis as it unfolded. We reported — early, relentlessly, and despite immense pushback — that the majority of COVID-19 infections were mild to moderate.

Peer-reviewed research later affirmed what we knew by spring 2020: roughly 90–95% of infections did not require hospitalization, and those at real risk were predominantly the elderly or chronically ill.

Even Bill Gates eventually admitted the fatality rate was relatively low and the disease pattern was akin to the flu. Just think of the implications.

But public health leaders didn’t follow the data — they followed panic and centralized narrative control promulgated by a confluence of government, industry and academia. And the price was paid in hospital wards across America.

A misdiagnosed disease met with misguided protocols

Ventilators became the instrument of tragedy. Early guidance — mirroring protocols from China — promoted rapid intubation. In New York’s spring 2020 surge, nearly nine out of 10 intubated patients died.

Though that number softened as more data emerged, the damage was done. Hospitals, misreading COVID pneumonia as typical ARDS, deployed invasive mechanical ventilation far too aggressively.

Patients with “silent hypoxia” — low oxygen but no distress — were sedated and intubated when non-invasive oxygen support might have sufficed.

What followed was a cascade of preventable deaths: ventilator-associated pneumonia, sedation complications, ICU delirium and multi-organ failure. We heard the stories. We saw the data. Too many walked in with breathlessness and left in body bags. It was a tragic disaster.

This wasn’t just clinical failure; it was bureaucratic blindness and potential criminality. Across hospital systems, the practice of “homogenized care” erased the art of medicine in favor of algorithmic treatment pathways.

Individual patient context vanished. And families — banned from the bedside — couldn’t intervene.

The forgotten treatments — cheap, effective, ignored

As thousands perished under sedation, treatments that could have helped were either dismissed or demonized. The RECOVERY trial in June 2020 showed that dexamethasone — a low-cost steroid — cut deaths by one-third in ventilated patients.

But months had already passed. Why didn’t we try anti-inflammatory therapies sooner?

Remember the ICAM protocol TrialSite reported on? Early on in the pandemic, a pharmacist for a southern health system was saving lives with a combination of steroids, blood thinners and the like. Yet this was shut down, we were told to due to a Pfizer contract with the health system.

Meanwhile, the government rushed emergency use approval for remdesivir, a drug that shortened hospital stays but did not reduce mortality — and carried notable toxicity risks. The opportunity cost was tragic. Time and attention were stolen from better solutions.

Frontline doctors proposing repurposed drugs like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, in carefully designed early protocols, were silenced or sanctioned.

TrialSite News, remember, scooped ivermectin itself, then gave these doctors a platform — from Peter McCullough to Pierre Kory-publishing observational data, real-world insights and field-tested regimens.

But the Dr. Anthony Fauci-led National Institutes of Health dismissed outpatient care entirely. Americans were told to stay home, take nothing and seek help only once they couldn’t breathe. For many, that was too late.

Isolation and inhumanity — dying without dignity, a horror story

As if clinical missteps weren’t enough, hospitals enforced one of the most brutal policies of the pandemic: isolation until death. Patients, many alert and conscious, died without family. No one held their hand. No one fought for their care. Loved ones said goodbye through screens, if at all.

This was not just a moral failure. It was a clinical vulnerability. Families are essential patient advocates. They catch subtle changes, speak up for needs and fill gaps when nurses are overwhelmed. When hospitals cut them off, patients suffered alone and unseen.

Even after personal protective equipment (PPE) shortages eased and vaccines rolled out, the bans often persisted. As one medical journal put it: “Dying alone is not justifiable, even in times of pandemic.” But by then, the damage had been done.

The censorship industrial complex: science gagged

Throughout it all, a chilling consensus smothered dissent. The so-called Trusted News Initiative, backed by tech giants and government agencies, became an apparatus for narrative enforcement — not truth-seeking.

YouTube deleted Senate testimony on ivermectin. Facebook throttled peer-reviewed data that contradicted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s messaging. Twitter flagged doctors for sharing early treatment findings.

TrialSite News was labeled, demonetized and de-ranked on social media. Not because we spread misinformation — but because we challenged the official line.

We joined Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in a lawsuit against the Trusted News Initiative; the legal theory is not freedom of speech but rather antitrust — that a cabal of media companies sought to use the pandemic to put competition out of business. That lawsuit may advance, as we reported recently.

The irony is that as the pandemic evolved, our reporting was repeatedly vindicated. But by then, the public had been force-fed a false sense of consensus. And trust — once lost — became impossible to recover.

A synthesis of systemic failure: What the data really showed

A recent report, “Constraints from geotemporal evolution of all-cause mortality on the hypothesis of disease spread during Covid” — a rigorous and sobering analysis we reviewed — drives the point home: epidemiological modeling and policy decisions rested on flawed assumptions.

According to this report:

• There was no robust correlation between reported “case surges” and viral spread metrics in key geographies.
• Hospitalization and death counts often spiked without clearly matching transmission curves, suggesting misclassification or overreporting.
• Government-enforced interventions (e.g., lockdowns, mandates) had inconsistent, even paradoxical impacts on outcomes.
• The data, when evaluated statistically, contradicted the uniformity of the official narrative about COVID-19’s trajectory and lethality.

What is the implication? Much of the policy response was driven by fear (and profit motive, we believe), not facts.

This aligns with what we saw in hospitals: intubations without individualized assessments, treatment bans without safety justification and patients left to deteriorate behind locked doors — all in the name of science, while science itself was being gagged.

Final grade equals D for disaster, F for failure

The U.S. COVID-19 response, judged on prevention, treatment and communication, deserves no more than a D. Only the heroism of frontline workers, those who bent rules to save lives, rescued the system from an F.

This wasn’t just a failure of medicine. It was a collapse of courage residing in a river of greed. Agencies silenced dissent. Hospitals crushed autonomy. Public health became political theater. And too many Americans paid with their lives.

A reckoning is due

Hospitals are meant to heal — not to kill by consensus. If we do not face these failures honestly, we will repeat them.

Why were nursing home residents left unprotected? Why did we shame doctors exploring outpatient care? Why did we allow censorship to eclipse scientific debate?

I found TrialSite News to ask these sorts of questions in the biomedical and health-related world. And we will not stop asking them. Because the next pandemic will come. And next time, our survival depends on whether we’ve learned from the pain of this one.

Originally published by TrialSite News.

Daniel O’Connor is the founder and CEO of TrialSite News.