In exclusive interviews with CHD.TV’s “Vax-Unvax” Bus and The Defender, California intensive care unit nurse Gail Macrae shared her story of pushing back against hospital COVID-19 protocols that she said violated medical ethics and resulted in increased harm to patients.

Macrae worked at the Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Santa Rosa from 2015 until 2021, when she was fired for not complying with the staff vaccine mandate.

After the Covid-19 vaccine rollout, Macrae witnessed a dramatic spike in hospitalisations with side-effects she had never seen before. Meanwhile, proven and recommended treatments were banned and record-keeping systems were manipulated to obfuscate vaccine-related injuries and breakthrough infection cases, she said.

Hospital staff faced threats for reporting adverse events and retaliation for objecting to protocols isolating patients and denying families access and input over their treatments.

In his new book, What the Nurses Saw: An Investigation into Systemic Medical Murders That Took Place in Hospitals During the COVID Panic and the Nurses Who Fought Back, Ken McCarthy details similar events.

According to Macrae, in the first months of the pandemic hospitals were nearly empty as elective procedures halted – a scene that contrasted with media claims of overwhelmed capacity.

Even during the 2020-2021 winter surge of hospitalisations due to normal respiratory issues, she said “not once” were hospitals overwhelmed – an observation she corroborated with colleagues across the state.

“The public was being lied to,” she said. “So that really opened my eyes to the fact that there were things going on that shouldn’t have been going on.”

Macrae reported the implementation of strict isolation protocols for Covid-19 patients that prohibited visitations from patient families and advocates. She claimed these restrictive policies facilitated unchecked “fear-mongering from the media,” while removing a support system that would have provided a buffer against administrative coercion.

Despite Covid-19 being “the most inflammatory disease process that humanity has ever seen,” experienced hospital staff were blocked from administering steroids — “the best treatment for an inflammatory process,” Macrae said.

“So for the government and the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and these three-letter organisations to tell practitioners that they could not administer steroids … was absolutely criminal,” she said.

California was not the only state to ban steroids. McCarthy, in a recent interview with AMP News, said he found it “just mind-boggling” when nurses told him standard anti-inflammatories like steroids were banned under rigid protocols in hospitals across the US.

Meanwhile, remdesivir, already found ineffective as an Ebola therapeutic, was administered under rigid protocols although evidence indicated it “causes more harm than good,” Macrae said, adding that antivirals, in general, do not work “more than two days post-symptom onset.”

Macrae suggested profit motives were to blame, noting “each one of those doses was over $3,000.” With all of these new restrictive policies and protocols, Macrae said, “Every day I felt like I was violating my oath as a practitioner.”

Once Covid-19 vaccines were introduced in early 2021, Macrae reported an immediate and drastic shift, with a “300 per cent increase in hospitalisations,” and hospital staff overwhelmed amid uncharacteristic patient conditions.

Macrae said “code blue” alerts — when somebody stops breathing or their heart stops — which had been happening perhaps once per shift, begin happening as many as 10 times per shift.

“They would always call them down to the lower level of the hospital, where we had a vaccination clinic,” she said.

Two nurses who administered the shots directly — colleagues she met through a practitioner support group in her community — said they were seeing between 10 and 20 episodes of anaphylactic shock every day. They told Macrae they were threatened with termination if they said anything about it publicly.

One day near the end of June 2021 as she was working a 16-hour shift split between two units, Macrae said she got a report that every single patient in both units – 60 overall – had unusual injuries that were likely the result of the Covid-19 shots.

She described uncommon blood clots, bleeds, heart attacks, strokes and Bell’s palsy increasing in frequency during the early months of the vaccination campaign.

“There were all of these bizarre peripheral vascular clotting disorders,” she said, “and literally, I had never even heard of them or seen them before.”

She even saw four “rapid onset” Guillain-Barré syndrome cases, compared to only two cases in all of her previous years of experience as an acute care nurse. Macrae asked two of these patients what they thought caused their condition, and they said they had received the Covid-19 shots “within 24 hours of onset” of their symptoms.

During this time, the hospital and the press maintained that it was the unvaccinated who were filling the hospitals, she said.

The hospital’s charting system was also rigged to not show post-vaccination breakthrough infections, Macrae said. “Any patient who was diagnosed with Covid the chart would automatically populate as ‘unvaccinated. If anyone tried to change that manually, the only other option was “vaccination status unknown.”

This was a feature of the Epic software used in all Kaiser Permanente hospitals, said Macrae, a limitation corroborated by others.

“I’ve talked to nurses all over the country who saw the scamming of the charting systems,” she said.

Macrae said staff at her hospital were deterred from drawing logical conclusions or lodging reports, saying her manager told her, “We cannot report these because we cannot prove that these [shots] are what is the cause.”

“I felt like we were being handcuffed, duck-taped across the mouth and threatened with harm,” she said.

• The Defender report