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Leaked Zoom Video Reveals Hospital Officials
Discussing COVID-19 Scare Tactics



BY MATT MCGREGOR
September 14, 2021
Updated: September 14, 2021



A leaked Zoom conference reveals a doctor questioning how to increase the count of
COVID-19 patient numbers on the hospital’s dashboard report.

The media outlet National File said it obtained the recording from an “internal source”
at the Novant Health System that includes New Hanover Regional Medical Center in
Wilmington, North Carolina.

National File posted the video on its Twitter feed on Sept. 10.

National File and other local media outlets that reported on the leak identified the people
in the video as Mary Kathryn Rudyk, a physician at the medical center, who is asking Carolyn Fisher,
the hospital’s director of marketing, how to inflate the number of people classified as
COVID-19 patients for the purpose of generating fear in the unvaccinated.

“I think we have to be more blunt, we have to be more forceful—we have to say something
coming out—if you don’t get vaccinated, you know you are going to die,” Rudyk said in the video.
“Let’s just be really blunt to these people.”


The video begins with Fisher explaining how her department is communicating
“meaningful numbers”—the percentage of the unvaccinated, vaccinated, and percentage
of deaths in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU)—to the public.

Rudyk then asked how post-COVID cases can be included in the number of people
hospitalized for COVID-19.

“My feeling at this point in time is that maybe we need to be completely a little bit more scary for the public,”
Rudyk said. “There are many people still hospitalized that we’re considering post-COVID, but we are not
counting in those numbers, so how do we include those post-COVID people in the numbers of patients
we have in the hospital?”

Fisher asked if she meant every patient who has been in the hospital
“since the beginning of COVID?”

Rudyk answered, “Well, that are still in, and that’s something I can take to someone else,
but I think those are important numbers: the patients that are still in the hospital, that are
off the COVID floor, but still are occupying the hospital for a variety of reasons.”

Also on the Zoom conference call was Shelbourn Stevens, president of New Hanover Regional
Medical Center, who said those patients are classified as “recovered.”

“But I do think, from our standpoint, we would still consider them a COVID patient because
they’re still healing,” Stevens said.


Rudyk said she thinks those patients need to be “highlighted as well, because once they’re off isolation,
they drop from the COVID numbers,” prompting Stevens to say that they can later talk offline about
“how we can run that up to marketing.”

Novant Health Response
In response to questions asking for confirmation on if people in the video were employees of
New Hanover Regional Medical Center and what the context of the video was, a spokesperson
for Novant Health told The Epoch Times that staff involved in the excerpt of the video are seeing
the “highest levels of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths so far in this pandemic, despite
having safe and effective vaccines widely available.”

“This was a frank discussion among medical and communications professionals on how we can
more accurately convey the severity and seriousness of what’s happening inside of our hospitals
and throughout our communities,” the spokesperson said. “Specifically, the data we have
been sharing does not include patients who remain hospitalized for COVID-19 complications even
though they are no longer on COVID-19 isolation, so it does not provide a complete picture of the
total impact of COVID-19 on our patients and on our hospitals.”

The hospital continues to be concerned with misinformation, the spokesperson said, and that it
strives “to be transparent and tell the whole story.”