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In November 2021, Josh Hardison and his wife, 34-year-old Nicole Charlotte Hardison, were looking at a bright future. The couple, who met in 2018, and married in 2020, had just purchased a home and were expecting their first child.

Then, after experiencing persistent cold symptoms, Nicole tested positive for COVID-19. She was admitted to Forsyth Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina on Dec. 5, 2021.

Less than a month later, on Dec. 22, 2021, Nicole was dead. She died of kidney failure — a direct result, Josh said, of COVID-19 hospital protocols that included the administration of remdesivirand other medications without the couple’s consent.

In an interview with The Defender, Josh Hardinson detailed his wife’s ordeal, during which she gave birth prematurely to her baby via C-section, without ever having the opportunity to see or hold the infant. Josh shared documentation to corroborate his story.

‘It just went from bad to worse’

“We thought we had it all,” Josh Hardinson told The Defender. “We decided to have a child, she got pregnant, everything was going great. And then, when she tested positive for COVID-19, the OB-GYN told her, ‘Don’t do anything, stay inside, lie down,’ all the stuff you shouldn’t do for breathing difficulty.”

“It just went from bad to worse and it was an unbelievable thing,” he said.

Nicole’s test came back positive on Nov. 30, 2021, when she was 30 weeks pregnant and experiencing difficulty breathing due to her pregnancy and small frame. She had not received the COVID-19 vaccine.

According to Josh, her doctor informed her that she could take monoclonal antibodies but “recommended against it.” Due to that negative recommendation, Nicole “didn’t want to get” the antibodies. Her shortness of breath continued to worsen, leading Josh to ask the OB-GYN about the antibodies, but “really got nowhere with him on that.”

By Dec. 5, 2021, Nicole asked to go to the hospital. According to Josh, “I knew better than to take her to the hospital from what I’d read online and from people I’d talked to. But your wife’s pregnant, you really don’t have a choice.”

Josh said the treatment they received at the hospital upon admission was hostile. “They were angry and mad at me that I even got out of the car to drop her off at the hospital,” he said. “They told me somebody would call me. And of course, nobody ever called me, and I sat in the parking lot for hours.”

“They really didn’t want to give her care there,” he continued. “And the main thing that they were concerned about was that she should go on social media and encourage everybody else to get vaccinated … That was all they were concerned about.”

“That was the first thing they wanted to know when she got to the hospital,” Josh said. “And of course, they scolded her” for being unvaccinated. Her doctor told Josh, “The best thing she could have done was get the shot … when he had offered to her.”

Josh said that he and Nicole were aware of the adverse effects the COVID-19 vaccination would have on pregnant women, contributing to her reluctance to get the shot. He said they were aware of “problems for women that were pregnant to take the shot [and] problems for the baby.”

“We also knew that they get money for percentages of people in their clinic getting vaccinated,” Josh added. “The higher the percentages, the more payout they get.”

Remdesivir administered under the guise of administering an ‘antibody infusion’

According to Josh, he wasn’t allowed in the hospital so Nicole had to communicate with him via text. In one message, she was being given an “antibody infusion,” Josh said.

“She told them she didn’t want remdesivir. A couple of days later, I found out that it wasn’t an antibody infusion. They gave her remdesivir.”

Initially, Nicole “was doing better and just on a little bit of oxygen,” but Josh still couldn’t get a doctor to return his calls. He had to tell the hospital about North Carolina’s “No Patient Left Alone Act” before they let him visit, and even then, “The way their lawyer saw it, two hours a day was sufficient.”

During his first visit, Josh said Nicole seemed better. But by the next day, she told him “There was an issue with her kidneys” and that a kidney specialist had seen her. He said that’s when he learned from a nurse that the hospital had given her remdesivir.

“I told her that she had to refuse remdesivir the next time they offered it,” Josh said. “And, of course, their answer was ‘Well, that’s the only thing we have to treat it with.’

Josh said he had to press the hospital to let him talk to her doctor about it, and when he finally had the opportunity, the discussion was far from fruitful.

“That night he came in when my visitation was almost over,” Josh said. “He pointed at my wife and the first thing out of his mouth was, ‘the best thing she could have done is took the shot four or five months ago,’” and compared Josh’s requests to going to an auto mechanic and “telling him what to do.”

In his closing remarks, Josh said, “The doctor pointed at my wife and said, ‘My only job here is to keep the incubator oxygenated until the baby comes,’ and he left.”

The next day, Dec. 8, 2021, Josh was told “they might have to move her to the ICU,” but they wouldn’t answer his questions when he asked why.

Later in the day, he was told Nicole had already been relocated to the ICU. Then finally, a nurse told Josh that when his wife “crashes, they’re going to do a C-section.”

“I was pretty livid,” Josh said. After consulting with other family members, they decided to schedule the C-section. Yet, instead of accommodating his family’s wishes, Josh said he was asked by hospital staff “why we refused remdesivir.”

“I said that she refused it when she got there, but they gave it to her anyway and called it an antibody infusion,” Josh said. Upon inquiring about Nicole’s worsening condition, Josh was told “That’s kind of from the COVID,” before eliciting a — perhaps inadvertent — admission from the hospital that the remdesivir was causing “liver failure.”

‘My world’s been kind of upside down ever since’

Josh said he had “to raise a stink” before the hospital finally scheduled the C-section.

“Everything went great, the baby came out kicking, screaming, grabbing for stuff,” Josh said. But they wouldn’t let Nicole see the baby.  “They cut it out of her, yanked it out … and of course they told me that I needed to go home and isolate for 10 days to be there for my child.”

“I was like, ‘My wife just had a baby, has postpartum depression, she’s sick, she’s in the ICU … I need to be here with my wife,’” Josh said. “The nurses did not like that.” When Josh asked to speak with the doctor he had consulted with earlier in the day, he was “yelled at” and asked to leave.

The next day, Nicole’s condition appeared to be improving, and the hospital was considering returning her to intermediate care, Josh said. Nicole was reluctant, he said, “because she didn’t get really good care down there.”

But Nicole was returned to intermediate care and taken off of oxygen. By the following day,  she appeared to be doing even better and hospital staff were “talking about putting her on a regular floor until she gets out.”

“This whole time, I didn’t know that we could have just left anytime we wanted to or gone anywhere else. I wasn’t aware of that,” Josh said.

Then, within 24 hours, things took a turn for the worse. “I got a text message that said ‘help,’” Josh said. Josh went to the hospital, but they wouldn’t let him in. A nurse told him they gave Nicole Precedex, a sedative produced by Pfizer.

Josh said that his understanding is that Precedex “is used a lot of times for outpatient intubation,” and that “you’re only supposed to give it for about 30 minutes maximum.” He later found out “they had been giving it to her all day.”

“When I got there,” Josh continued, “they basically kicked me out of the ICU and told me they’re going to intubate. They didn’t ask. … they told me to go home, and I refused.”

After Josh got the medical reports, he found out that not only did they have her on Precedex, but “they had her pretty much maxed out on a morphine pump.”

“So, they intubated her, and it just seemed like one thing after another,” Josh said. “And my world’s been kind of upside down ever since.”

‘It seemed surreal, like a bad dream,” Josh said. “I was fighting with the ethics committee, administrators and patient relations … and I was trying to see my wife more before she got on the ventilator.” He was told visitation was restricted because “we have policies.” Josh said, “It was the same scripted answer every single time.”

‘It really seems like it was psychological warfare’

The hospital placed Nicole on a ventilator and gave her propofol and fentanyl. Despite initially appearing to improve, her condition worsened.

During this period, Josh says he observed his wife being administered what he was told were “vitamins and daily medications,” which would be “crushed and put down her feeding tube.” He said he also observed “negative pressure ventilation in the ICU rooms,” controlled by a key, “where it would suck the air out of the room.”

“They didn’t really give you any answers,” Josh said. “So, I felt pretty helpless.”

He said:

“They’d give her medications like albuterol, a breathing treatment, after they took the breathing tube out, and it was weird. It’d make her heart rate go down and her oxygen would go down when it’s supposed to dilate your bronchials [to] make you get more air in, so your oxygen and heart rate should go up. It was doing the complete opposite.”

In one instance, a nurse told Josh, “Your wife’s pretty small, I can’t believe they’ve got her maxed out on all this stuff. I don’t know why they don’t try to back it down.” But they continued with the medications, then reintubated Nicole, he said.

“I honestly felt like some people there knew that what they were doing was not the best for the patient,” Josh said, “but as one traveling nurse told me, everybody’s got a mortgage to pay.”

During his next visit to the hospital, Josh was told that his wife was “doing good” — but his observations suggested otherwise.

“Her blood pressure was in the mid-70s over 30-something,” Josh said. “I was blown away.” He saw several empty IV bags hanging over Nicole’s bed and observed that her skin showed signs of edema, “where there’s just so much fluid under the skin, it looks wrinkly and puckered up. I knew that was from the fluids they gave her.”

They also told Josh they were giving Nicole another medication, Diamox, because “she had an issue with some spinal pressure that ended up affecting her vision.” He said a neurologist at the hospital admitted to him it “was the wrong thing to do.” They then took her off the Diamox.

The next day though, hospital staff told Josh that Nicole was back on a ventilator, that her kidneys were failing and that she had to be placed on a dialysis machine. Later that same day, he was told dialysis had already begun and that “the lines kept clotting up, they would pull out big, huge, long clots out of the machine.”

This continued the next day, when Josh said they told him Nicole would have to go on an ECMO machine, which was unavailable at that hospital and would require a transfer. But instead, they later told him, “There’s nothing else they can do” for Nicole, and “If you need people to see her before she passes, get them in here.”

“Nobody really cared,” Josh said. “They acted like it was just another day at the office.”

It was hours before Josh was able to speak to a doctor, no matter how many times he asked. When he did, “I asked about hyperbaric chambers, about Vitamin C infusion, other vitamin infusions, ivermectin.”

“This doctor told me ‘We don’t give ivermectin here, you have to give a lethal dose of it to work,’” Josh recalled. “I asked him about the Right to Try Act and he said, ‘That’s for the drug companies.’”

The doctor brought him “a printout that was written by a lawyer that was literally written for the physicians on how to distract people from demanding this and giving it to people.” Josh told him that he had “heard through the grapevine that you get terminated if you prescribe Ivermectin.”

“He said, ‘pretty much’ and then he was done with me, and I didn’t see him again,” Josh recalled. “And then he said, ‘Give her one unit of blood instead of two.’”

“When the night shift respiratory therapist came in, she changed some settings on the ventilator and my wife’s oxygen got a lot better,” Josh said. “But my wife’s heart rate kept getting pretty high. It was close to 180, and I know your heart can’t take that for long, along with the lack of real food, only giving her food through a feeding tube.”

Before long, Josh said, he knew it was inevitable. “The night shift nurse came in and asked if I would like to give my wife ‘comforting drugs,’” such as morphine, “so she’s comfortable.”

“I said, ‘You want to euthanize my wife like a dog at the vet?’ That didn’t go over too well,” Josh recalled. He said he was subsequently told that his wife couldn’t be transferred to another hospital with an ECMO machine, that her kidneys were failing and that he was asked to sign a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order.

“Seeing my daughter that night and holding her … it wasn’t a pleasant experience,” Josh recalled. “It really hurt me that my wife never got to see our baby in person or hold her or even touch her. It really seems like it was psychological warfare.”

‘It’s easier to believe a convenient lie than an inconvenient truth’

In all, Nicole spent nine days on a ventilator and was administered remdesivir for three days. Other medications she received included Ativan, heparin, Lasix, Xanax, and anxiety medications, blood thinners, blood pressure medications, diuretics, painkillers, paralytic drugs and steroids.

It was only when Josh received Nicole’s medical records, which he said were “all jumbled together,” that he “learned Nicole was “on morphine before they intubated her.”

Moreover, social workers from the hospital told him they “didn’t understand how a man could take care of a child by himself,” saying he was asked repeated questions about where he lived, his employment and if he owned a crib.

Josh said that he was familiar with the CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act), coming to learn that hospitals had “zero liability because it was a national emergency” and that doctors and hospitals had financial incentives to follow prescribed COVID-19 hospital protocols.

According to Josh, Forsyth Medical Center had, before the COVID-19 pandemic, been in dire straits financially, but “then, all of a sudden, they were buying assets.”

Josh said he considered legal action, but sees it as an “uphill battle” that he “can’t afford to fight.” He’s also connected with the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation, an advocacy group for COVID-19 hospital protocol victims and their families, to share his story.

His main concern right now is “making my daughter’s life good. Now 21 months old, she’s “doing great.” Raising her alone is tough, he said, “but it’s a blessing” that he “wouldn’t trade for anything.”

“It’s not fun sharing this, going back through all these emotions and memories,” Josh said. “But I know there’s other people out there that have been through this, and I want them to know they’re not alone. It’s like the saying, ‘it’s easier to believe a convenient lie than an unpleasant truth,’ and the truth nowadays can be pretty unpleasant.”