How One Covid-19 Doctor Became a Ventilator Whistleblower
While caring for people with the disease, Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell began to suspect that the Covid-19 treatment consensus was wrong
The memory of the patient in her fifties still haunts Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell. She was one of the first with Covid-19 he treated at an emergency Covid-19 ICU he established at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn on March 23, just as coronavirus cases began to overrun the city. Her blood oxygen level had dropped into the 80s despite receiving high levels of oxygen support. This was concerning and indicative of hypoxia — a healthy oxygen level is in the mid-90s.
The hospital’s protocols called for placing her on a ventilator except she didn’t seem ill enough to warrant it. She should have been gasping for breath and possibly comatose, yet she was fully cognizant, talking to Kyle-Sidell and other caregivers, with no complaints of shortness of breath. Kyle-Sidell wondered if Covid-19 was somehow causing a false blood oxygen reading, but additional tests revealed the reading was accurate. Doctors would soon start calling patients like this — who they had never seen so frequently before — “happy hypoxics.”
When Kyle-Sidell told the patient that they wanted to place her on a ventilator…
