Intensive care units (ICU) in some major cities began to fill up with infected patients experiencing everything from acute heart failure to severe pneumonia, many of whom lost their lives despite the best efforts of health care providers who scrambled to combat a disease they’d never seen before. “It was just crushing,” one critical care physician says his experience during the pandemic. “You knew you were going to show up every single day and try to save somebody, and you knew you were going to watch two to three people die every single day.”
While they were doing their best to save lives, these doctors took the brunt of the public’s frustration during the pandemic, facing accusations that they killed patients with harmful treatments and denied them access to drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which never showed any efficacy against COVID-19. One pulmonary specialist and intensive care physician CoffeeBlackMD (who wishes to remain anonymous) tackled these criticisms in a viral X post, repudiating claims that he and his colleagues were to blame for the pandemic response.
On episode 296 of the Science Facts and Fallacies podcast, CoffeeBlackMD sits down with Dr. Liza Dunn and Cameron English to recount his time in the ICU during the pandemic and break down the controversy that rapidly enveloped the COVID-19 response.
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CoffeeBlackMD is a pulmonary medicine specialist and critical care physician. Follow him on X.
Dr. Liza Dunn is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD
Cameron J. English is the director of bio-sciences at the American Council on Science and Health. Visit his website and follow him on X @camjenglish
