Hospitals raked in $500K+ Per Patient for using Remdesivir
Three hospitals are being sued in California Superior Court for allegedly treating COVID-19 patients with Gilead Sciences’ antiviral drug remdesivir without informing them about the serious risks of the treatment, which include acute kidney and liver failure, resulting in the patients’ wrongful deaths.
Failure to obtain informed consent is a violation of the Nuremburg Code, which was adopted after the Nazis conducted horrendous medical “experiments” on their victims during World War II.
Attorneys Daniel Watkins with Watkins & Letofsky and Michael Hamilton with Hamilton & Associates filed the first-in-the-nation lawsuits on September 7 in Fresno County on behalf of 14 Fresno families who claim their loved ones were not given proper informed consent before they were treated with remdesivir. In some cases, remdesivir was forced on patients who refused it, the lawsuits state.
The lawsuits allege that Saint Agnes Medical Center, Community Regional Medical Center, and Clovis Community Medical Center “subjected [COVID-19 patients] to medical deception and given a protocol by the Defendants, the centerpiece of which is the poisonous and deadly drug Veklury (remdesivir). Plaintiffs were not properly informed regarding the dangers of this drug and were instead placed on a protocol which was medically unnecessary, causing most of the Plaintiffs to die a horrific death.”
The “remdesivir protocol” involved a lethal combination of IV-infused remdesivir, which causes kidney failure and the subsequent fluid buildup in the lungs, the withholding of nutrition, high doses of morphine-midazolam which further suppresses respiration, and placement on a mechanical ventilator.
“Full informed consent means that patients must be provided with full information about the deadly harm that this dangerous experimental drug causes on its own,” the lawsuits state. “They must be told that the only time it was ever tested, it was pulled because it killed so many people.”
This is a reference to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in December 2019 that reported the drug was used to treat Ebola patients in Africa, but was suspended by the clinical trial’s Safety Review Board after 53 percent of the people who took it died.
On Feb. 4, 2020 the Wuhan Institute of Virology announced its application for a Chinese patent on remdesivir to treat COVID-19, according to Canada Free Press.
Gilead’s still unlicensed, unapproved and failed drug was then taken off the shelf in the U.S. to mitigate the symptoms of COVID-19. In April 2020, remdesivir was pushed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Health, because it allegedly shortened hospital stays by a few days. Remdesivir only received Emergency Use Authorization by the FDA in May 2020 after being recommended by an NIH panel containing nine individuals with financial ties to Gilead.
A study published by the New England Journal of Medicine that same month determined that ”there was a modest benefit only to patients who were receiving oxygen, the results were statistically insignificant vs placebo for patients not receiving oxygen, while in a surprising twist patients on high-flow oxygen or mechanical ventilator/ECMO did modestly better in the placebo group than those taking remdesivir.” (Emphasis added)
The Fresno lawsuits point out that COVID-19 has a 99.97 percent survival rate, but the use of remdesivir “decreases this survival rate exponentially.” Because of the fact that “there is no evidence that remdesivir improves survival and other outcomes,” the Word Health Organization recommended on Nov. 20, 2020 “AGAINST the use of remdesivir in COVID-19 patients ‘regardless of disease severity’.”
This was just a month after the FDA approved the use of remdesivir for hospitalized COVID-19 patients over the age of 12.
“Nevertheless, the drug was forced on the deceased without their consent, as part of the protocol which took their lives,” lawyers for the plaintiffs maintain. At a national press conference in Fresno, Hamilton explained why these three hospitals (and many more across the United States) were so hellbent on violating basic medical ethics by forcing COVID patients to take a drug with such a terrible track record.
Lot’s of Money
Their motive? Money. Lots and lots of money. It costs Gilead about $10 per dose to manufacture remdesivir, for which it charges private insurers, Medicare and Medicaid as much as $3,120 per treatment.
Hamilton said that the average charge for a COVID-19 patient in California who is treated at a hospital and sent home is $3,200. But “if you bring them into the hospital and treat them as a non-complex COVID patient, the average charge rate is $111,000. However, if you treat them as a complex COVID patient, which means you have to either intubate them, or put them in intensive care, by definition they become complex, and for that the average charge rate is roughly $450,000.”
Hospitals are also entitled to a bonus from the federal government that allows them to use the International Classification of Diseases code to charge an extra 20 percent for using remdesivir, for an additional $90,000.
“So, you can see why there’s a great incentive not to just give them something that works and send them home, but to actually bring them in, find a way to intubate them, call it a complex case, and get $500,000 instead of $3,200,” Hamilton noted. “That’s a tremendous financial incentive.”
It’s also a colossal conflict of interest, not to mention an enormous moral hazard, especially after the same corrupt FDA approved remdesivir for babies as young as 28 days in April of this year.
“There is a great evil being done,” Hamilton, who is also an attorney for the non-profit Truth for Health Foundation, stated. “People are being butchered like cattle in hospitals all over this country. People are being tortured to death for MONEY.”
This medical scandal is even worse because American taxpayers were forced to pay $79 million to Gilead in the form of NIH grants to develop the very same toxic drug that is now killing them in droves, according to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., head of the Children’s Health Defense and author of the #1 Amazon best-seller, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.”
Not to mention the millions and millions of tax dollars spent on rewarding doctors and hospitals for violating the Nuremburg Code.
“What happened in these hospitals is inexcusable,” Dr. Peter McCullough said at the press conference announcing the lawsuits. He pointed out that this was the first time in medical history that doctors claimed they had to use the remdesivir protocol, even though he and other physicians had urged them to treat COVID patients with proven safe, non-experimental FDA-approved drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
“The rights of these patients and their families were taken away,” McCullough added. “The ultimate cost was loss of life and justice will be served.“