face to face with covid deniers in the icu
in part 4 of our 5-part series examining the infodemic in quebec, we track the superspreader impact of skeptics.
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by: matthew lapierre
the 48-year-old man struggles to stand up from his wheelchair. he labours to draw air and carries a portable oxygen bottle.
the nurses treating him at a montreal-area hospital call him a “success” because he survived covid-19, but dr. paul warshawsky, the director of adult critical care at the jewish general hospital, doesn’t quite see it that way.
the patient stands out in warshawsky’s memory, an embodiment of many of the challenges he and his medical team have faced during this pandemic.
“yes it’s a success because he’s not dead,” warshawsky said, “but he was a completely healthy 48-year-old with no medical problems whatsoever until he travelled and caught covid. it’s a success, but it would have been a much bigger success had he never ended up in the hospital in the first place.”
when he first arrived at the hospital, requiring admission to the intensive care unit, the 48-year-old didn’t believe in the virus. now, after it has damaged his lungs and nearly killed him, he does.
warshawsky oversees the hospital’s covid-19 patients who need to be intubated or require other intensive care. he spends much of his day surrounded by whirring ventilators and iv pumps, donning and doffing personal protective equipment before seeing patients stricken with the virus.
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he and his staff are tired. for more than a year, covid-19 has pushed them to the limits of their endurance. to their frustration, patients like the 48-year-old — covid-19 skeptics who end up with severe symptoms — arrive at the hospital more often than they would like.
“we’ve certainly had people who admitted to us that they didn’t believe in this and they didn’t think that the precautions were merited,” warshawksy said.
to the staff in montreal’s intensive care units, the virus is only too real, and when thousands march in the streets claiming that the pandemic is an elaborate hoax and that vaccinations are more dangerous than covid-19, the sight fills them with dread.
“how can you call tens of thousands of deaths in quebec a conspiracy?” warshawsky asked. “these people are really dead. i’m sure. i’ve seen them. they are absolutely and truly and incontrovertibly dead. we didn’t make them up. we’re not lying about the numbers. they all really died.”
the patients are often victims of a crisis of disinformation. they believed conspiracy theories that say the virus is less deadly than the flu, or that it doesn’t exist at all.
over the past year, covid-19 deniers have sparked high-profile superspreader events. the most recent, and perhaps most notorious of them all, is the case of quebec city’s méga fitness gym 24h.
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before covid-19 spread at his gym, dan marino, the owner, petitioned the government to allow fitness facilities to reopen. but more than that, he belittled the danger the virus could cause and supported the “complotiste” movement in quebec actively opposed to public health directives. during the months that quebec city remained in the red zone, with gyms among the businesses shuttered temporarily, marino threatened repeatedly to defy the government’s covid-19 measures and reopen.
conspiracy theories littered his facebook feed, including a video by dan pilon, the influencer we looked at in part 3 of this series, warning that the vaccines would contain microchips.
marino touted his views on one of quebec city’s most popular radio stations: choi 98.1, otherwise known as radio x. the station’s commentators have been at odds with the government and health authorities and they have hosted conspiracy theorists on their airwaves.
“you’re opening on monday, dan, are you happy?” host dominic maurais asked marino on march 4, just before the méga fitness gym reopened to the public. “i’m happy, but not satisfied,” marino replied. “we’re in an orange zone but we should be in a normal zone.”
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marino neglected mask-wearing and social distancing at his gym, according to clients and workers who spoke to le soleil. the virus quickly spread, infecting 68 people and prompting public health authorities to close the facility.
officials have since estimated that more than 500 infections were linked to the outbreak and one patron, a 40-year-old man, died after contracting the virus.
cases soared in quebec city in the weeks that followed and the community reaction to the outbreak at the méga fitness facility was swift. a cascade of social media comments lambasted marino. quebec city’s mayor, régis labeaume, hoisted sarcastic congratulations onto marino for the mess: “bravo champion.”
that gym “reopened almost certainly in an unsafe manner,” warshawsky said, “and how many people had to die as a result of that? the quebec city icus were challenged to deal with the volume of patients and not an insignificant portion of them can be traced back to opening that gym. that’s what covid deniers are doing.”
the méga fitness outbreak was one of the more flagrant examples of how conspiracy theorist ideologies can manifest real-world consequences, but on a smaller scale, false ideas about the virus can wreak havoc, lowering people’s guards and leaving them vulnerable to catching it.
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take the case of gwendoline rodriguez who had a serious run-in with the virus this year. “i was one of the people who thought it was a bad cold,” she wrote online in j’ai eu la covid-19, a quebec facebook group where people who caught the virus share their experiences.
a week after she tested positive for covid-19, she was in hospital — and a month later, she was still having headaches, body pain, chills and fatigue.
“i have never been so sick in my life,” she wrote. “having had it and having currently 60 per cent of my lungs affected, well, i have totally changed my mind.”
her experience also shifted her perspective on the vaccine. “i say to myself that if (the vaccine) can help people not to have such bad symptoms, so much the better because it’s far from being fun,” she wrote.
however, a contingent of quebecers remains opposed to vaccines. many of those people have consumed false information on vaccines, believing that the shot is somehow connected to 5g technology, that vaccine side-effects are more dangerous than covid-19 or, in extreme cases, that the jab is part of some sort of globalist, satanist plot.
disinformation “is a huge factor in people hesitating or refusing vaccines and it has a lot to do with the internet and how algorithms function,” said eve dubé, a researcher in the scientific group on immunization of the institut national de la santé publique du québec (inspq). “people who tend to look at websites that share disinformation are receiving more information like that and are getting into echo chambers where everyone is opposed to vaccines and then are exposed to more disinformation.”
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on jan. 10 of this year, gisèle beaudoin, a 70-year-old country music singer from drummondville, posted a meme on facebook. “the reality on the vaccine,” the post read.
the “reality,” as touted by the meme, was misleading and false. a lebanese naturopath — who was neither a doctor nor a medical expert — posted the image and it subsequently spread online, eventually ending up on beaudoin’s wall.
“does the vaccine protect against the virus?” the post asks. “no.” it goes on to ask more questions about the virus and provides misleading or outright false answers to each question. “so,” the post concludes, “what is it good for?”
many of beaudoin’s friends commented their agreement on the post. “the vaccine is used to depopulate a large number of the people on earth,” one friend wrote, “and you don’t have to look too long to find the answer if you don’t always listen to the media crap!”
five months later, beaudoin’s sister, monic, informed her facebook followers that gisèle had covid and was battling for her life.
“my sister gisèle is fighting against covid-19,” she wrote. “she asked me to tell you to make sure you all get vaccinated because she did not believe. like some of you, she was a complotiste and anti-masker.”
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gisèle lost her battle with covid-19 on may 1, the same day thousands marched in montreal’s streets against the health measures.
her sister later told lcn that gisèle’s belief — or, rather, her lack of belief in the virus — had driven a wedge between them.
“there was nothing to do,” she told the network. “she was constantly feeding off videos on the internet. she would send them to us. i kind of stopped engaging with her about three months ago. i was no longer able to be immersed in the negativity and the nonsense.”
the lure of internet conspiracy theories has strained relationships across the province. concerned family members are watching loved ones spending more time online, falling deeper into rabbit holes and, sometimes, withdrawing from reality. these beliefs tear families apart and are the source of great pain and anguish.
mike kropveld has seen people of every stripe, social strata and education level become wrapped up in conspiracy theories. kropveld is the founder and executive director of info-cult, an organization that offers support to those who have fallen into cultic phenomenon and to their loved ones.
most of the calls info-cult has received since the start of the pandemic involved “complotistes.”
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“people are mentioning that their loved one is spending hours in front of their computer screen,” kropveld said. “we’re dealing with family crises and problems. the people who are calling us are, for example, husbands calling about their wives and the difficulty of living together, wives about their husbands. in some cases, this has led to breakups because communication has gotten so extreme and difficult.”
isolation, so prevalent during the pandemic, has aggravated the problem.
“right now we have people who are entirely alone,” said margaux bennardi, support and community engagement co-ordinator at the centre for the prevention of radicalization leading to violence, a montreal-based institution. “maybe they lost their job and the only thing they have to do is to go on the internet.”
in rare cases, people who have become engrossed in their beliefs can turn to violence.
in february, border agents intercepted a package containing a silencer. it was addressed to karl maheux, a 47-year-old living in a quebec city suburb. at his home, rcmp found firearms and enough homemade explosives to spur them to evacuate neighbours for fear of an explosion, they said in a press release.
investigators believe maheux planned to act against the health measures using his arsenal, according to the journal de québec. he is to appear in court later this month, charged with possession of prohibited devices and careless storage of a firearm.
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“it’s okay to say ‘i don’t agree with the vaccine, i think it’s just a way of making money.’ that’s an opinion,” bennardi said. “but you have another (person) who might be saying the same thing but at the end they’re ready to take actions — and their actions can be to protect, but their actions can also be to act violently.”
there is a link between beliefs in conspiracy theories and mental health. in a may 2020 study, ecuadorian researchers foundthat distressed and anxious health-care workers were more likely to believe conspiracy theories. people who lack control over a situation — be it the stock market or the path of a pandemic — are also more likely to see patterns that aren’t there and engage in superstitious thinking, according to another study conducted by researchers from the university of texas and northwestern university.
ian vaive, a 31-year-old human resources professional, has seen those effects first-hand. before the pandemic, vaive watched as a good friend of his became totally absorbed in conspiracy theories. “i was trying to get him to understand that his beliefs didn’t make sense,” vaive said, “and, unfortunately, that was the last thing i said to him.” his friend died by suicide shortly afterward.
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motivated by that event, vaive decided to found cons’aide, a quebec group that helps people living with those prone to conspiracy beliefs find resources and a space where they can share their experiences.
“conspiracy theories were there well before the pandemic,” vaive said. “it’s not something new. they will be there for a long time afterward. i think conspiracy theories and disinformation are something that we will have to learn to live with.”
the group typically receives five to 10 messages per week from people asking for help. but they have also been attacked by conspiracy theorists who accuse them of being in the pocket of the government — or bill gates.
the scale of the disinformation and misinformation problem is such that it presents an obstacle to public health authorities.
“belief in covid-related conspiracy theories predicts resistance to both preventive behaviours and future vaccination for the virus,” university of pennsylvania researchers wrote in an october paper, one of many published over the past year that has concluded that people who consume disinformation or believe conspiracy theories are less likely to social distance or take other precautions to prevent covid-19 from spreading.
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this happens because people who believe disinformation and spread it are more likely to be distrustful of the government and other authority figures, said dubé, the inspq researcher.
“that’s really difficult in terms of public health to tackle by mass communication campaigns because these people don’t look to public health for information,” she added.
though no studies state with precision how much disinformation may have contributed to the spread of the virus, warshawsky, the intensive care doctor, is sure it has.
it takes only one person who catches the virus, disregards its danger and sparks an outbreak for tens or even hundreds of people to become infected down the line. some of those people end up in warshawsky’s care, where tired health-care workers who know too well that the virus is real and deadly will have to tend to them.
“somewhere down the line one of those people died,” warshawsky said. the person who disregarded the virus “killed somebody. they’ll never know it, but they did.”
“i assume that what goes on in people’s minds is that the truth is just so painful that you’ll just find any explanation other than the truth,” he added. “the obvious truth is there’s a terrible virus out there that can kill you.”
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but how does it feel to treat those who caught the virus but continue to deny its existence?
“you can’t feel anger,” warshawsky said. “they didn’t deliberately go out and get sick. i just wish that they would have listened to the messages before and avoided needing my care.”
in warshawsky’s intensive care unit, these two worlds collide. here, amid oxygen tanks and bustling nurses, doctors and respiratory therapists, covid-19 is an everyday reality. here, sick patients stricken with a virus they didn’t believe in end up needing care from experts who have spent the past year grappling with it. if they survive, it will be thanks to science they didn’t trust, and lessons learned treating patients who didn’t make it.
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