Hospitals Took Bribes to Kill You and Blame It on COVID
And they were given legal immunity to do it.
The medical system is the leading cause of death in the United States, killing well over half a million people every year. But the COVID-19 era that began in 2020 marked a distinct chapter in its history: COVID protocols in hospitals killed massive numbers of people on top of the medical system’s usual death toll. Another half a million Americans were likely killed this way.
To be clear, the COVID protocols discussed here are separate from the COVID vaccine that became widely available in 2021. I am referring to the treatment protocols—the testing, the drugs, and the mechanical ventilation of people’s lungs—that defined the 2020 hospital experience.
This article examines the financial incentives the medical system had to kill patients and blame those deaths on “COVID.” What follows is an analysis of the money, the hospital protocols, and the death toll—regardless of one’s view on COVID itself.
Hospitals awarded $100,000+ for killing you
When a person with flu-like symptoms was advised to go home, rest, and hydrate, reimbursement was limited to a minimal consultation fee. But if that same person was admitted under a COVID diagnosis, administered remdesivir, and placed on a ventilator, the hospital could charge well over $100,000—and sometimes more than $400,000.
The COVID hospital protocols functioned as a highly lucrative federal payment pipeline, where the treatments that generated the most revenue were the ones most likely to kill you.
I. Testing (up to $1,419 per COVID test)
A positive COVID test result was the triggering event that unlocked the federal COVID payment pipeline—allowing hospitals to transition patients into an extremely lucrative clinical pathway. While Medicare paid hospitals at lower rates for tests, the private market was effectively a free-for-all. Under the CARES Act, providers would post a cash price for testing, which insurers were required to pay for out-of-network claims. Labs charged as much as $1,419 per test, and hospitals repeatedly tested patients to create a recurring revenue stream. By treating testing as both a standalone profit center and the necessary key to unlock subsequent, high-value inpatient billing codes, hospitals used COVID testing as a key driver of revenue.
II. Admission (20% premium for COVID diagnosis)
A positive test result funneled patients into the hospital under ICD-10 code U07.1—the universal designation for COVID. The federal government paid a 20% premium on top of the standard Medicare payment for COVID-related hospital stays. Because this premium was tied exclusively to the COVID diagnosis, hospitals had a huge incentive to prioritize the COVID designation over other conditions and pursue repeat testing until a positive result was achieved.
III. Remdesivir (65% premium for wrecking your kidneys and liver)
Hospital protocols prioritized the administration of remdesivir, a highly toxic drug costing $3,200 per treatment course. CMS incentivized this choice through the New COVID-19 Treatments Add-On Payment (NCTAP), which provided hospitals another massive bonus payment—calculated as 65% of the costs exceeding the standard billing rate.
Remdesivir—dubbed “Run, Death Is Near” by the doctors and nurses who watched patients deteriorate after receiving it—is a highly toxic drug that causes organ failure. It was a failed Ebola drug that was rebranded as a treatment for COVID, despite the fact that it was associated with a staggering 53% mortality rate in its original Ebola trial.
In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of remdesivir published in The Lancet, patients received either remdesivir or a saline placebo. Remdesivir is so toxic that patients in the remdesivir group were forced to stop treatment early due to adverse events at 2.4 times the rate of those receiving the saline placebo.
The drug’s toxicity is not a secret. It’s documented in the FDA’s own prescribing information, which mandates monitoring for liver damage because the drug is known to lead to liver failure. And it’s not just the liver. In a study published in Frontiers in Pharmacology, patients receiving remdesivir were nearly four times more likely to suffer acute kidney injury than those receiving other treatments. And once the kidneys failed, the fatality rate for those patients was over 36%.
The World Health Organization found that remdesivir provided no survival benefit and recommended against its use—yet American hospitals continued administering it for years.
IV. Mechanical ventilation ($50,000+ for destroying your lungs)
After wrecking a patient’s kidneys and liver with remdesivir, the next stage of the COVID protocol was the most lucrative and deadly of all: mechanical ventilation.
The average cost to treat a non-ventilated COVID patient was $12,700, but by placing the patient on a ventilator, the average cost skyrocketed to over $65,500.
Mechanical ventilation was a death sentence. Despite the well-known risks of ventilator-induced lung injury, hospitals ignored decades of best practices—which favored non-invasive oxygen support—and pivoted to early, aggressive intubation. Patients were sedated, paralyzed, and kept in a chemically induced coma while ventilators forced high-pressure air into their lungs.
The results were catastrophic. In many hospitals, the death rate for patients placed on ventilators was above 80%. In New York, the death rate for people over the age of 65 was 97%.
V. Death ($100,000+ altogether for killing you)
After wrecking your kidneys and liver with remdesivir, then finishing you off with a ventilator, the hospital could collect well over six figures for killing you—and in some cases hospitals charged more than $400,000. But the death certificate said “COVID.”
This is another example of how the medical system launders the deaths it causes—with misleading ICD codes and death certificates that erase the hospital’s culpability. It was a self-reinforcing feedback loop: hospital-caused deaths inflated the official COVID death count, which was then used to justify the very protocols that caused those deaths.
The financial incentives didn’t require the people working at hospitals to consciously think “let’s kill this patient for more money”—but they handsomely rewarded the sequence of interventions most likely to kill you. The protocol that maximized reimbursement was also the protocol that maximized mortality.
At least half a million killed
About a half million people in the United States were killed by COVID treatment protocols in hospitals—but similar protocols were adopted around the world, making the global death toll much higher.
According to an analysis of all-cause mortality data by Denis Rancourt and colleagues, there were 653,463 excess deaths in the United States during the first 50 weeks of the COVID period, before the COVID vaccine was widely available. This figure represents deaths above the pre-COVID baseline during the period when COVID hospital protocols—including remdesivir and mechanical ventilation—were in effect. While Rancourt attributes these excess deaths to the broader government and medical response, the hospital protocols were the most direct means by which many of these deaths occurred.
The spike in excess deaths during the pre-vaccine COVID period was synchronous with the protocol rollout, and the jurisdictions hit hardest were those that applied the protocols most aggressively, while places with different approaches were largely spared. This same pattern of synchronous, response-induced mortality hotspots was observed around the world, not just in the United States.
John Beaudoin also estimates that about a half million people in the United States were killed by COVID treatment protocols in hospitals. He obtained 1.6 million death certificates through FOIA requests and reviewed thousands of them line by line, including doctors’ notes and cause-of-death narratives. Beaudoin compared what certifying physicians wrote with what the CDC’s parser generated and found massive discrepancies.
Beaudoin documented large increases in deaths from kidney failure and respiratory failure in 2020—conditions consistent with the harm caused by remdesivir and mechanical ventilation. These deaths then declined as hospital protocols became less aggressive and ventilators were used less indiscriminately.
Legal immunity to kill you
The medical system had full legal immunity for the treatments that killed people.