A former Chief of Medical Staff for a regional medical center in North Carolina was recorded during a virtual meeting with a team, discussing the ways the hospital can make its messaging "a little bit more scary for the public" by adding "post-COVID" patients in the hospital's number of cases in the hopes it would manipulate people into getting vaccinated.
The virtual meeting was attended by Dr. Mary Rudyk, who was the former Chief of Medical Staff for Novant Health New Hanover Regional Medical Center and NHRMC president Shelbourn Stevens. Joining the meeting was the hospital's Director of Marketing, Carolyn Fisher.
According to the Daily Wire, Fisher explained during the virtual meeting that a dashboard was set up to "get information out to the community on meaningful numbers" on a weekly basis. The dashboard was published on the hospital's website and was shared "through social channels,", as per Fisher.
She added that graphics "show the number of patients in-house, the percentage of them that are unvaccinated, percentage of unvaccinated people in the ICU and the percentage of deaths and the numbers."
But for the team of North Carolina doctors, the published numbers were not enough to manipulate people into getting vaccinated. Rudyk stated that "my feeling at this point in time is maybe we need to be completely a little bit more scary for the public." The North Carolina doctor argued, "There's another comment that I completely agree there are many people still hospitalized that we're considering post-Covid but we're not counting in those numbers."
Rudyk then asked how they could "include those post-Covid people in the numbers of the patients we have in the hospital." Fisher clarified if Rudyk meant all patients who have been in the hospital since the beginning of the pandemic, to which Rudyk replied, "Well, or but are still in.... The patients that are still in the hospital that are off the Covid floor but still are occupying the hospital for a variety of reasons."
Stevens interjected by explaining that these patients were called "recovered," as they are being listed on the dashboard but "from our standpoint we would still consider them a Covid patient because they're still here."
Rudyk argued that these "recovered" patients "needs to be highlighted as well" because when they come out of their isolation period, "they drop from the Covid numbers." She added that "we have to be more blunt; we have to be more forceful...we have to say something coming out, you know you don't get vaccinated; you know you're going to die."
"Let's just be really blunt to these people," Rudyk concluded.
A tweet from the National File shows the video reported above:
SHOCK VIDEO: Senior doctors and a marketing director at in North Carolina discussed inflating COVID-19 numbers by counting recovered patients as active COVID patients.
"We need to be... more scary to the public... If you don't get vaccinated, you know you're going to die." pic.twitter.com/66CcIsVR4B
"” National File (@NationalFile) September 10, 2021
According to Not the Bee, Novant Health came to the defense of the three doctors and released a statement saying that it was merely "a frank discussion among medical and communications professionals" to determine ways to "more accurately convey the severity and seriousness of what's happening inside of our hospitals and throughout our communities."
Novant Health also clarified that the data they previously shared did not include patients who have tested negative for COVID following treatment, which then "does not provide a complete picture of the total impact of COVID-19 on our patients and on our hospitals."
They also said they are "concerned" over "misinformation" and strive to be more "transparent and tell the whole story."
