Harvey Risch on the Question of What Happened in New York City in Spring 2020

I think it’s worthwhile to document what some well-known people who weren’t “on the ground” in New York City during the spring 2020 death spike event are saying about it now.

Toward that end, I’m sharing a segment of a recent episode of The Tom Woods Show in which Woods asked Harvey Risch for his opinion about what happened.

Risch’s view on what drove the NYC death spike involves five factors: panic & fear, hospital overload, brainwashing healthcare workers about outpatient treatments, failure to use oxygen in outpatient settings, and military management.

---

Woods: What do you think was going on in New York City in early 2020? Was it simply a matter of nobody knew what they were dealing with and so their response was not going to be as good as it would be later when doctors had more experience? Do you think it's just that?

Risch: I think it was a combination of things. I think, number one, people were panicking. The medical staffs were panicking. That everybody was believing in This is a Calamity -- that this illness is going to kill everybody. They were believing in the 10% mortality across the board that was coming out of the UK modelers -- that fake modeling. And so everybody had a large fear quotient, including the medical healthcare staffs.

And so lots of cases were being seen in hospitals. It was overloading their care abilities at certain timepoints.

And everybody was brainwashed to think that there were no outpatient treatments, and so nobody was getting hydroxycholorquine, zinc, azithromycin, or doxycycline, and various other medications. There’s a whole armamentarium of things that work to treat outpatient COVID.

And those are the people and people with comorbidities who desperately needed that kind of treatment to prevent them from getting in the hospital.

Numbers more patients could have been treated with oxygen as outpatients and those regimens, without having to be hospitalized

So there was a lot of control in the military management of the pandemic to say, “We want to overload the medical system, we want to let patients die, so that there will be fear, so that when the vaccines come out people will be so afraid they will rush to take them, proving that the vaccine are the end result of what had to be accomplished in the pandemic.”

I think that that this is the nefarious actions of our military control and the military system of managing the pandemic.

My reactions to Risch’s assertions follow:

• Panic and fear. The extent to which Risch is linking “panic" and “fear” to medical errors that led to injury, severe illness, and/or and death is fuzzy. He says nothing, for example, about guidelines involving unilateral DNRs and policies that barred visitors¹ - both of which would obviously increase the likelihood of poor decisions, maltreatment, and death. I don’t dispute that a sense of fear descended over NYC and many other places, but if “panic” is going to be blamed for deaths in hospitals, then it should be defined (as a phenomenon), documented, & explained. There simply isn’t enough hard evidence (i.e., genuine contemporaneous eyewitness accounts, rigorous qualitative interviews) to assert that medical staff in NYC hospitals were “panicking” en masse.

• Hospitals overloaded by cases. Though he didn’t specify, I assume Dr. Risch meant “COVID cases” when he said “cases.” Regardless of what he meant, his belief that New York City hospitals were “overloaded” with cases of anything - let alone that such cases hindered doctors’ & nurses’ ability to care for patients - is unsubstantiated by available data on hospital activity. If Risch is alluding to something other than the number or severity of patients coming into hospitals, I would love to know what it is.

• Brainwashing of healthcare workers about outpatient treatments for outpatient COVID. Risch limits his statements about treatment to outpatient care for “outpatient COVID.² At least one outpatient study seems to contradict his claims. It found the number of antimicrobial prescriptions in outpatient clinics at a Brooklyn hospital in March - May 2020 was comparable to the number in March - May 2019, and the prescription rate was higher overall. We can’t know how many people should've received antimicrobial medicines but didn’t as a result of not coming to the clinic. Risch is implying there was a cycle during the 11-week event that involved patients a) calling telehealth or showing up to the ED/clinics, b) being sent home with/given no or insufficient treatments for their ailments, and c) being subsequently hospitalized and dying. Without a comprehensive review of patient records that ascertains the nature and timeframe of decedents’ pre-hospitalization healthcare encounters, I don’t see a basis for this speculation. Can we imagine it occurring in some instances? Of course. But doesn’t mean it is or could be responsible for the staggering hospital death toll.

• Failure to treat more outpatients with oxygen. Dr. Risch implies that if more outpatients in New York City received oxygen, there would have been fewer hospitalizations and deaths. Yet we have no idea how many outpatients in those weeks received oxygen, let alone how many should've but didn’t. I’m sure Risch is aware that oxygen isn’t necessarily helpful and can induce acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Oxygen as an alternative to sedation & ventilation in the ICU sounds reasonable, until one realizes high levels (like those demonstrated by Cameron Kyle-Siddell) are potentially deadly. Reports that New York hospitals were running out of oxygen tanks suggest oxygen was being used quite a bit.³ So the idea that more oxygen would've prevented hospital admissions & deaths saved lives in New York City is at-odds with what the circumstances appear to have been.

• Nefarious actions of military control in military management of the pandemic.⁴ It’s hard to tell what Risch is saying about military actions with respect to the New York City event. What did it mean for the military to "overload the medical system" and “let patients die” in New York? What “had to be accomplished in the pandemic” — and what was the role/purpose of the New York City event in that plan? I get the sense Risch would be hard-pressed to elaborate on what the military did in the Big Apple, or why it was done.

Unfortunately, Risch wasn’t compelled to elaborate on anything he said about New York, because Woods did not probe him further.

1. Removing third-party witnesses also raises serious questions about whether the massive death event occurred as presented by official data. I see multiple avenues for fraud.

2. “Outpatient COVID” is undefined.

3. e.g., https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/04/16/marines-sprint-down-nyc-pier-deliver-oxygen-tanks-dying-coronavirus-patients.html and https://abcnews.go.com/Health/hospitals-facing-oxygen-shortage-amid-coronavirus-crisis/story?id=69915446

4. Unlike Risch, I believe there was no pandemic.

Jonathan Engler

’s summary statement represents most of my views on that subject very well.