On a Monday afternoon in late September, a Senate room filled with people who say a hospital stay during the pandemic took someone they loved, or nearly did. Most news desks gave the day a short mention, if any. The testimonies ran for hours. The question they left behind is simple: why did so many families, in so many states, describe the same doors closing?
U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, held the roundtable on September 28, 2026, in the Kennedy Caucus Room. His office called it COVID-19 Hospital Protocols: Real Stories from Real People. Twenty-one patients, family members, doctors and nurses spoke. As of September 26, the office said it had received 583 written testimonies from 46 states. Johnson said he was giving them a platform “so that this kind of cruelty will not be repeated.”
That line is the part large outlets mostly skipped. A few carried a short note that a hearing had happened. Almost none sat with the pattern the witnesses described: locked doors, a narrow menu of drugs, breathing machines offered early, and families told there was nothing else to try. Alternative desks and the senator’s own site carried the names. The gap between those two kinds of coverage is the story under the story.
What the room was for
Johnson has held earlier panels on the federal response to COVID-19, including a January 2022 event called COVID-19: A Second Opinion. This one was different. His office said it was the first devoted entirely to what happened after a person walked into a hospital.
In the video release posted on September 30, he put the charge in plain words. Rigid rules, “rarely questioned,” became the norm. Many doctors, he said, saw that as a break with the old duty that the patient comes first, not the protocol. Patients lost their freedom. Families could not sit with the dying. Comments made to unvaccinated patients, he said, were “almost unbelievable.” The stories, he added, did not come from one or two hospitals. “The fact that these attitudes were widespread is indisputable.”
“There were leaders who used the fear of the unknown to gain undue power and control over our response to COVID.” — Sen. Ron Johnson, September 28, 2026
Fear is not a theory. In the spring of 2020, hospitals were told to prepare for a wave no one could size. Visitors were barred. Staff worked in gear that made a human face hard to see. Some of that was caution in a new illness. The witnesses this week were not arguing about March 2020. They were describing 2021, long after early drugs, oxygen rules, and the limits of the approved antiviral were already being debated in public.
A fair reading has two parts. One: a new virus did kill a great many people, and hospitals were under real strain. Two: a single national script, tied to payment and to fear of being the doctor who broke ranks, can still harm the person in the bed. Both can be true. The roundtable was about the second.
The freight elevator, and a woman who lived
Brad Seiler, a registered nurse and a former Army captain, told the room what staff said about his wife, Gail, of Plano, Texas. She was “unsavable.” A nurse told him, “She’ll be dead tonight, or before you even get home.” When he got her out, he said, they were not allowed through the front doors. Gail was taken down a freight elevator used to move bodies, and out through doors used by funeral homes.
She lived. He said she is now “alive, healthy, active, and enjoying life.” Gail told the same room that once the hospital doctor learned she was not vaccinated, he looked at her and said he was sorry, but she was going to die. From then on, she said, death was treated as the expected end. She asked for ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, budesonide, zinc and vitamin C. She said those requests were denied, and that the menu narrowed to remdesivir and a ventilator. She has also said she was denied water for days and food for longer, and that a priest was allowed in only after she accepted a dose of remdesivir so she could receive last rites.
“When the hospitalist in the ICU learned that I was unvaccinated, he looked directly at me and said, ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs. Seiler, but you’re going to die.’” — Gail Seiler, as reported from the September 28 roundtable
Her account is testimony, not a court finding. It is also hard to file under “one upset family.” Spectrum News 1, a Wisconsin station, quoted her on physical and verbal abuse tied to her vaccine status. LifeSite and The Center Square carried the same scene. The Senate participant list confirms she and her husband spoke.
What mass coverage rarely asks is the plain follow-up. If a patient can leave, recover at home, and still be here years later, what did the word “unsavable” mean in that building? Was it a clinical judgment, or a script?
Consent, a ventilator, and a father the children did not see again
Stephanie Williamson said her husband, David, was admitted on December 10, 2021, in Pomona, New Jersey. She said he was denied other treatments, given remdesivir without consent, and that she was pressed into agreeing to a breathing tube. “The night my husband was intubated, I realized I was coerced into consenting,” she said. He died about 30 days later. “My children never saw their father again.”
She framed it as a human question, not a party one. “Patient care should not be driven by reimbursements. A doctor’s hands should never be tied, and no patient should ever be left alone.”
The Senate list names the same pattern in other states, in the office’s own short bios, not only in advocacy write-ups:
- Peggy Hokett said her husband, Raymond, died 24 days after admission in Oklahoma City. He was given remdesivir, told he would die because he was unvaccinated, and placed on a ventilator without consent.
- Darla Smith said her husband, Keith, entered a York, Pennsylvania, hospital on November 19, 2021, and died on December 12 after a ventilator. She had gone to court in 2021 to force ivermectin. Spectrum News noted that fight and his death.
- Karen Hayles said her son, Chase, a childhood cancer survivor with kidney damage, was promised he would not get remdesivir in a Houston hospital in 2021. She said he received it anyway, his kidneys worsened, and he died waiting for a transplant.
- Cori Peth said her father, George, died on April 7, 2022, in Colorado after three months. He was denied monoclonal antibodies, given remdesivir, and told he would die if he refused a ventilator.
Isolation sits under every one of these accounts. A patient who cannot have a spouse in the room cannot refuse in real time. A power of attorney on the phone is not the same as a person at the bedside. That rule was sold as infection control. Families now say it also removed the only witness.
The nurse who was fired, and the doctor who was disciplined
Donna Lowery, a Florida registered nurse, said she had 31 years at one hospital, inside a 39-year career. She advocated for a patient to receive a doctor-ordered course of ivermectin. She was fired. A complaint was filed against her license. She said the patient then worsened, was put on a ventilator, and died. “For me, there was a patient. There was a family in need of help, and there was a choice. I chose to help. I paid for that decision, but I would make it again.”
Gail Macrae, an intensive-care nurse from Santa Rosa, California, told the room she pushed back on protocols she believed broke medical ethics and increased harm. Nicole Landers, a Maryland nurse with more than 30 years in practice, said she offered other treatments when doctors would offer only the standard COVID path.
Dr. John Littell, a Florida family doctor, said he was disciplined for prescribing ivermectin. His line was short: doctors must stand up for patients “abandoned by a healthcare system,” and “there is no healing without hope.” Dr. Pierre Kory, the former chief of critical care at the University of Wisconsin and now chief scientific officer of Rebuild Medicine, was also on the panel. So was Dr. Susan Rohr, a lung and critical-care doctor from Sioux Falls, who said she argued for more options when families were told nothing else could be done.
Here the two public stories split, and a reader should see both.
Large outpatient trials — including ACTIV-6 in the United States, TOGETHER in Brazil, and PRINCIPLE in Britain — generally did not find a clear drop in hospital stays or death when ivermectin was given at ordinary anti-parasite doses, often late. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not approved it for COVID-19. In 2026 the agency did delete its “you are not a horse” posts after a lawsuit by doctors, and it agreed not to republish that consumer page. It did not change its view that trial data, as it reads them, do not show the drug works against this virus. That settlement is covered in an earlier Planet Today piece, FDA Backs Down on Ivermectin: Removes ‘Horse Paste’ Warnings After Landmark Lawsuit.
Doctors who used it early, in combination, say those trials under-dosed the drug or started it after the window had closed. That argument is not the same as proof. It is a reason the file is not closed. Firing a nurse for asking that a legal, doctor-ordered drug be given is a separate fact from whether the drug works. One can doubt the drug and still ask why a license was put at risk for a disagreement.
An attorney’s scorecard, and what it cannot prove
Ralph Lorigo, a Buffalo-area lawyer with more than 50 years in practice, said he represented 212 families in 40 states who could not get hospitals to allow other drugs. Journalist Michael Capuzzo has written that Lorigo won 72 of those court fights, and that 69 of those patients lived, while three died after long comas. In 140 cases where the hospital won, or the family never reached a judge, Capuzzo wrote that all 140 patients died. Johnson called that “pretty powerful evidence.”
It is powerful as a set of cases. It is not a randomized trial. Families who hire a lawyer are not a random sample. Judges who grant an order may be looking at patients who still have time. Hospitals that refuse may be looking at people already past help. A honest reader holds both thoughts at once: the gap in outcomes is too wide to shrug off, and it is too selected to treat as a final number.
Lorigo told the room he used to trust agencies and hospitals to do all they could. “That all changed in 2021.” He described one woman who left the hospital alive after a judge ordered more ivermectin, and another who crushed the pills herself and put them down her husband’s feeding tube for two weeks while he was on a ventilator. He lived. “That woman is a hero,” Lorigo said. He added that the fight is no longer about one drug. It is about the right to try, and about who gets to decide.
The money in the chart, stated the way the rules were written
This is the part television rarely opens. Under the CARES Act, Medicare paid hospitals a 20 percent add-on for inpatient stays coded as COVID-19. A later Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services program, the New COVID-19 Treatments Add-on Payment, raised pay again for eligible inpatient cases that used certain new products, including remdesivir (sold as Veklury), convalescent plasma, and baricitinib with remdesivir. CMS described the add-on as a way to remove a money reason not to use those new products. It ran from November 2, 2020, until the public health emergency ended. The official page is still on the CMS site.
Critics go further. They say a COVID label, a long stay, and a ventilator each pulled more money than a cheap generic and a discharge. A 2023 essay republished by Planet Today, The Death of Informed Consent, put a hard version of that claim in print: a small federal payment if the patient went home on a cheap drug, versus the whole bill plus a bonus if the path ran through remdesivir. Hospital groups answer that the add-on covered real extra cost in a crisis, and that doctors did not bill by the pill at the bedside.
The documented core is narrower, and still awkward. The only antiviral with a federal payment sweetener in the inpatient COVID file was the new, expensive one. The old generics families were begging for had no such sweetener, and in many hospitals they were banned by protocol. A system can produce that result without a memo that says “do harm.” It only has to reward one path and punish the doctor who leaves it.
Remdesivir’s own trial record is mixed, and it should be quoted, not waved away. The U.S. ACTT-1 trial found a shorter time to recovery. The World Health Organization’s Solidarity trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found little or no effect on death overall in its interim cut, and in the final remdesivir analysis a small benefit against death or ventilation only in patients who were not already on a machine. Among patients already ventilated, Solidarity did not show a gain. The FDA approved the drug on October 22, 2020, for hospitalized patients. National Institutes of Health guidelines later recommended it for many hospitalized adults, especially those on ordinary oxygen. Kidney injury is on the label as a risk to watch. Families who say a loved one with weak kidneys was given it anyway are describing a choice, not a mystery.
What a Wisconsin jury decided, and what it did not
One case from Johnson’s own state has already been in front of twelve citizens. Grace Schara, 19, who had Down syndrome, died on October 13, 2021, at Ascension St. Elizabeth Hospital in Appleton, seven days after admission for COVID-19. Her father, Scott Schara, sued. The family said a mix of Precedex, lorazepam and morphine, plus a do-not-resuscitate order they say they did not approve, caused her death.
On June 19, 2025, after about two hours, an Outagamie County jury found for the hospital, the doctor and the nurse. No negligence. No wrongful death. No break of informed consent. Wisconsin Public Radio reported the verdict. A later bid for a new trial, built on a claim of judicial bias, was denied in December 2025. Ascension said it stood by the care and was sorry for the family’s loss. Scott Schara said the family had done what it was called to do, and that he did not trust the legal system to deliver the win.
Advocates called the verdict proof that the system protects itself. The hospital called it proof the care met the standard. A reader can hold the grief and the verdict in the same hand. A jury loss does not erase the other 582 files. A stack of testimonies does not overturn a jury.
What large newsrooms did not stay for
Just the News noted the roundtable the day it happened and said Johnson streamed it. Spectrum News 1 led with the frame that at least two speakers were longtime critics, then quoted Darla Smith and Gail Seiler. C-SPAN posted the public-affairs video. The HighWire carried a long live cut. Children’s Health Defense, which had previewed the event on September 25, published Jill Erzen’s full witness piece the day of the hearing.
What did not happen, in the main national broadcasts, was a segment that named the 583, played the freight-elevator account, and then asked a hospital executive or a federal official to answer it. Johnson’s office said the testimonies would be posted on his Senate site and that more would be collected. TrialSite News, cited by the families’ advocates, asked Congress to pull the protocols, the revisions, the family records, and testimony from clinicians, hospital executives and federal health officials. “America owes its deceased something more durable than competing pandemic narratives,” the outlet wrote. “It owes them the record.”
Dan Rudy, founder of Hope House Orlando, told The Defender he wanted “truth, accountability and justice for those who are no longer here, and healing for the families left behind.” Carolyn Blakeman of the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation has been logging protocol cases and pushing legal action. Those groups are not neutral observers. Neither is a hospital trade group. The records they are arguing over — order sheets, consent forms, visitor logs, billing codes — are neutral. They either exist or they do not.
A quiet pattern, not a secret handshake
People reach for a plot when the same sad story shows up in Oklahoma, Texas, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida, Colorado and Wisconsin. A plot is not required. A protocol is enough.
In 2020 and 2021, federal agencies, hospital chains and professional boards converged on one inpatient path: isolation, remdesivir for many, steroids, and a ventilator if oxygen failed. Doctors who left the path risked their job, their board certificate, or a public label as a danger. Nurses who handed a family an outside prescription could be walked out. Patients who declined the vaccine, witnesses said, were spoken to as if the outcome were already written.
That is how an elite consensus works when it does not need a memo. The people who write guidelines, pay the add-on, staff the boards and book the evening news do not have to meet in one room. They only have to treat dissent as a threat. Johnson’s phrase was “undue power and control.” A plainer phrase is: one script, and a price for leaving it.
None of this makes every death a killing. COVID pneumonia killed people who got every approved drug and people who got none. Early care outside hospital, late care inside it, age, weight and other illness all changed the odds. The thing the roundtable puts on the table is narrower. Did patients and families get a real choice? Were cheap, already-legal drugs banned while a new drug with a payment bonus was treated as the only option? Were the unvaccinated spoken to as lost causes? Those are questions a records request can answer. They do not need a theory of the cosmos.
What would close the file
Johnson said the medical establishment has to admit the stories are real, or the same thing can happen again. Hospitals say they followed the evidence they had, under rules written in an emergency. Both claims can be tested.
A useful record would include the protocol each chain used in 2021, the date it changed, the consent language for remdesivir and for intubation, the visitor rules, and the billing codes tied to the 20 percent add-on. It would include the board complaints filed against doctors and nurses who prescribed ivermectin. It would include the full Solidarity and ACTT-1 numbers beside the Lorigo case list, with the selection problem labeled in the open. It would include the Schara verdict beside the Seiler discharge.
Until that file is public, the country is left with competing stories and a Senate website full of grief. The newest official piece of that file is the September 30 video release from Johnson’s office, four hours of the September 28 roundtable, posted two days after the room emptied. The chairs are empty again. The 583 letters are not.
Sources
- Office of Sen. Ron Johnson, video release, September 30, 2026: COVID-19 Hospital Protocols: Real Stories from Real People
- Office of Sen. Ron Johnson, media advisory, September 24, 2026: Roundtable reminder
- Jill Erzen, Children’s Health Defense / The Defender, September 28, 2026: COVID Hospital Protocols: ‘This Kind of Cruelty Will Not Be Repeated’
- Just the News, September 28, 2026: Ron Johnson holds roundtable on COVID-19 hospital practices
- Spectrum News 1, September 28, 2026: Senator holds hearing on how hospitals handled COVID
- C-SPAN program page: Sen. Johnson holds roundtable on hospitals
- CMS, New COVID-19 Treatments Add-on Payment: NCTAP official page
- WHO Solidarity remdesivir results, The Lancet / PMC: Final remdesivir results and meta-analyses
- WHO Solidarity interim, New England Journal of Medicine: Repurposed antiviral drugs for Covid-19
- NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines, hospitalized adults: Therapeutic management
- Wisconsin Public Radio, June 20, 2025: Jury clears Wisconsin hospital in death of Grace Schara
- Related on this site: FDA Backs Down on Ivermectin · The Death of Informed Consent
Original article: COVID Hospital Protocols: What 583 Families Told a Senator on Planet Today 🚀
Automatically republished from the main blog.