FALSE CLAIMS HAVE been shared online that Covid deaths were actually caused by drugs and mechanical ventilation. The claims have spread on Irish social media accounts, despite being baseless.

Although the claim has been spread by Irish people, these claims cite a “whistleblower” nurse who is American and did not work in Ireland. The treatments, which she claims caused millions of deaths that were officially attributed to Covid, also have studies demonstrating their safety.

The claims the nurse makes are simply rehashes of unfounded conspiracy theories that spread during the pandemic.

“BREAKING: Whistleblower Gail Macrae, a registered nurse with years on the front lines, stated that zero patients died from Covid,” a post by an Irish Facebook user reads.

“She claimed they were killed by remdesivir and ventilators,” it continues.

“She said this wasn’t medicine — it was murder for money.

“Patients came in with the flu or pneumonia and left in body bags after being poisoned and suffocated by hospital policy.”

That post has been shared more than 740 times since it was posted on 12 July.

Dozens of other posts making the same claim, some with thousands of shares, have also been found on Facebook, as well as Instagram and X, where one video featuring Macrae has been viewed more than 1.4 million times.

While many of these posts are months old, there appears to have been a resurgence in posts making the claims in early July. A version of the claim was also posted by an X account for Gail Macrae, set up in 2019.

However, the claims in these posts all contain old tropes, spread since the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and debunked for almost as long.

Remdesivir is an antiviral drug. There are numerous studies on the effects of remdesivir, which have led to it being recommended for treating some cases of Covid-19, though many studies found the drug’s effects — while real — were far from a dramatic cure for the disease.

However, when it comes to evaluating the claim that remdesivir is dangerous, it is notable that studies compare the use of remdesivir on like-for-like cases against other patients who do not receive the drug.

For example, one study published in 2020 looked specifically at “Remdesivir use in patients requiring mechanical ventilation due to Covid-19” (which also happens to be the name of the published paper).

The research looked at 113 patients who required mechanical ventilation due to Covid-19 infections — another method that posts about Macrae claimed had killed patients.

The 33 patients who had received remdesivir had half the mortality rate of others who did not take the drug.

In other words, people on remdesivir were more likely to survive. Remdesivir was not killing patients.

Nowadays, remdesivir is usually recommended for mild or moderate Covid-19 that might get worse. It seems to be most effective when taken in the early stages of the illness.

While remdesivir is still sometimes recommended for severe Covid-19, other drugs have a stronger and better-established reduction in mortality for people with severe forms of the illness.

The certainty of evidence about the use of remdesivir on patients receiving “invasive ventilation” has been described by the Infectious Diseases Society of America as “very low” due to concerns about “risk of bias and imprecision”.

The World Health Organization also found that while remdesivir had an effect on stopping hospitalised patients from deteriorating to a state where they needed ventilation, it had “no significant effects” on patients already being ventilated.

Intubation

While the evidence on some of remdesivir’s therapeutic effects is murky, the fact that Covid-19 patients who were not taking it were dying at double the rate shows it was not remdesivir that was killing them — something that subsequent studies have reaffirmed.

“Patients on invasive ventilation [..] treated with remdesivir do not appear to experience greater serious adverse events than those not receiving remdesivir,” reads an analysis of studies by the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

There is a genuine question over how remdesivir should be used in patients with Covid-19. There isn’t evidence that the deaths attributed to Covid-19 were actually caused by remdesivir.

What about ventilators themselves? Could Covid deaths be wrongly attributed to them?

Not likely. Mechanical ventilation for Covid-19 is only used in serious circumstances, often in cases where patients would have a significant risk of death if it wasn’t used.

One Dutch study of Covid-19 patients compared those who requested not to be intubated, which describes a more extreme form of mechanical ventilation.

Of those who were not intubated, 49% died, compared with just 16% of those who had received that mechanical ventilation.

Conversely, healthy people frequently receive mechanical ventilation when they are knocked out for surgeries. However, the rates of mortality for these are very low.

One major 2011 survey by the Royal College of Anaesthetists and the Difficult Airway Society surveyed hospitals for data on all general anaesthetic surgeries that used mechanical ventilation.

That report estimated that, of more than 2.7 million surgeries a year that use mechanical ventilation, there are 16 deaths.

Claims that no one has died from Covid-19 are baseless. Claims that the deaths were actually caused by remdesivir or mechanical ventilation ignore the numerous research studies that specifically looked at patients who did not receive these treatments and who died in larger numbers than the patients who did.

The explanation for these deaths is far more mundane than a worldwide spate of “murder for money” and subsequent simultaneous conspiracies to cover it up. Instead, they are explained simply by a fact that, as many people know from first-hand experience, Covid-19 is a real disease that is very bad for you.

It carries a real risk of death, particularly in older people or those with underlying health conditions.

One leading conjecture on the psychology of conspiracy theories says that people are drawn to them if they feel unsafe and out of control.

Conspiracy theories are often easier to grasp than the science of virology, can negate the feelings of weakness that a pandemic can induce, and can give a sense that things can be fixed by normal people exposing a secretive, nefarious group.

The Journal’s FactCheck is a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. You can read it here. For information on how FactCheck works, what the verdicts mean, and how you can take part, check out our Reader’s Guide here. You can read about the team of editors and reporters who work on the factchecks here.