An anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist is peddling falsehoods about coronavirus treatment at New York City’s Elmhurst Hospital -- where she briefly worked as a traveling nurse -- that have spread on major social media platforms and were heavily promoted by conspiracy theory outlet Infowars before landing on Fox News. The nurse's claims, which include that Elmhurst was intentionally infecting patients with COVID-19, have been strongly refuted by some of her former colleagues who say she is smearing hospital workers who were working under extremely fraught circumstances.
Nurse Erin Marie Olszewski leveled her accusations about Elmhurst in a documentary series called Perspectives on the Pandemic. The documentary was published on YouTube on June 9, and as of June 15 has amassed more than 850,000 views. Reuploads of the documentary on YouTube have amassed more than 370,000 views combined, with at least one of them carrying ads, meaning the account and YouTube made money off of it.
In the documentary, Olszewski recounts how she spent a month working as a nurse at Elmhurst Hospital, which was the epicenter of New York City’s devastating coronavirus outbreak. In addition to interviews, the documentary also plays hidden camera footage that Olszewski filmed while working at the hospital. Olszewski, the founder of an anti-vaccination group in Florida, is also publishing a book about her experiences at the hospital and has a GoFundMe that seeks to raise $150,000 on the basis of her claims.
In Perspectives on the Pandemic, Olszewski promoted several conspiratorial falsehoods about what happened at Elmhurst that were later comprehensively debunked. Olszewski claimed that Elmhurst was designating people without coronavirus as having COVID-19 and then putting those patients on ventilators, where they later died; that Elmhurst resident physicians were “practicing their skills” with unnecessary procedures on ventilated patients; that the majority of patients admitted with breathing problems were actually suffering from “anxiety”; that Elmhurst was intentionally exposing immunocompromised patients to coronavirus for monetary reasons; and that medical workers at Elmhurst may have killed her only patient who was expected to survive. During the documentary, Olszewski repeatedly showed patients’ medical charts on her phone while she was being interviewed in a hotel room and also in footage shot at the hospital, with some information redacted.
Several of Olszewski’s Elmhurst colleagues contacted Dr. Zubin Damania, a hospital reform advocate “dedicated to improving healthcare for everyone” who publishes videos under the name ZDoggMD, to express disgust at and offer detailed refutations of Olszewski’s claims.
A physician fellow at Elmhurst who wishes to remain anonymous wrote to Damania, “As someone who worked in those units and know the individuals and patients she referenced I can say without question that she spoke from a place of ignorance. That she would use lazy and faulty conclusions based on superficial observations to assign motives to and assassinate the character of people who worked tirelessly is unconscionable.” They went on to explain that the patients who had a negative COVID-19 test but were still categorized as COVID-19-presumptive cases were examples of “false negatives” and that “those patients all had horrendously deranged inflammatory makers (with distributive shock on pressure) and chest x rays clearly demonstrating lung injury.” According to the physician fellow, “Each of her other arguments/points could be similarly refuted by anyone with first hand knowledge of the situation.”
A traveling nurse that worked at Elmhurst with Olszewski also refuted her claims about non-COVID-19 patients being categorized as such and emphasized that Olszewski “is NOT a critical care nurse,” but rather is an emergency department nurse who had to be taught much of the care that was being provided to COVID-19 patients. The traveling nurse also claimed that Olszewski was “terminated by Elmhurst and Krucial staffing for accusing a physician of murdering her patient.” Of Olszewski’s claims, the nurse wrote, “To express the level of betrayal, hurt , doubt, pure disgust and anger is something I can not put into words” and that their “heart hurts for the regular staff at Elmhurst-they are good nurses-they have good docs(and bad docs) but who doesn’t. But, the amount of mistrust, doubt, and fear that her video portrays to an otherwise already underprivileged city hospital-that’s not ok.”
A pulmonary attending physician at Elmhurst said they were “shocked” by Olszewski’s “misleading” claims and said that her account of a colleague causing her patient's death was “absolutely untrue.” An ICU nurse that contacted Damania wrote that “so many of us got sick and to have someone who came to make up some story and twist it is so wrong. This nurse deserves her license revoked. She puts the profession of nursing to a shame.” Another traveling nurse added, “Have we done everything right? No, it’s an unknown disease and mistakes were made. I know for a fact that everyone here has worked their hardest and done everything possible to treat the patients here.”
Media Matters contacted Elmhurst for comment and will update this piece if the hospital responds.
Damania published his own debunk of Olszewski’s claims, pointing out that she lacked the knowledge base to make the claims that she did. Damania described how he was initially sympathetic to Olszewski’s claims of being an advocate for COVID-19 patients but after viewing the documentary in its entirety, he doesn’t “believe a single word that she says.”
