This article was originally published by Cassie B. at Natural News. 

The rush to put COVID-19 patients on ventilators during the early days of the pandemic caused thousands of needless deaths, according to respiratory therapist Mark Bishofsky, who witnessed this phenomenon firsthand.

Speaking to Good Morning CHD, Bishofsky recounted how he personally saw hospital staff intubating numerous coronavirus patients prematurely while denying them other treatments that could have been effective and came with fewer risks.

“Many, many thousands of patients died because of this rush to early intubation and not allowing early treatment with medications like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine or even vitamin D — they wouldn’t even give these patients vitamin D. They just wanted to intubate them and put them on remdesivir,” he said.

Mechanical ventilators work by pushing oxygen into people with failing lungs. They are first sedated before a tube is placed into their throat, and many people who received this intervention during the pandemic never recovered.

He also claimed that their rush to intubate patients went against typical protocol, with some people being intubated despite needing just a small amount of oxygen. For example, he saw people being intubated for needing just three liters of oxygen, which he said is something he hadn’t seen in 25 years of practice.

He explained: “That’s so little oxygen to the point where if you took the patient off of it, they’re gonna be fine.”

The respiratory therapist conceded that ventilators are a crucial tool for saving lives, but they can also be “extremely dangerous” given their propensity to cause bacterial pneumonia.

He said he spoke out at first, trying to convince doctors they were making a mistake. Intubation was always considered a last resort, he said, and the hospital didn’t seem to have a good explanation for why they were using it so much.

A high percentage of intubated patients passed away during pandemic

Before COVID-19, he said there was already a 25% increase in mortality in patients who were intubated and put on ventilators – a figure that rose dramatically during the pandemic.

“And now we know during COVID it was upwards of 80 to 85% of people that were on ventilators passed away,” he lamented. This unusually high death rate was something that was noted early on in the pandemic, and even mainstream media outlets like NBC News reported on it in April 2020. In one New York hospital system, 88% of the coronavirus patients who were placed on a ventilator died, including 97% of those aged over 65.

Bishofsky also noted that his hospital gave patients hydroxychloroquine in the early days of the pandemic, which is something he said led to “extremely good outcomes.” However, this protocol was eventually scrapped following the release of an “absolutely bogus” study printed by the Lancet journal. He said that he later told his hospital’s medical director that the intubations were “hideous,” and the director agreed but said they did the best they could. He eventually resigned from his position when COVID-19 vaccine mandates were issued.

He doesn’t think we should blame those who were on the front line, however, stating: “I think a lot of healthcare workers are getting a bad rap. Most, if not all, of the nurses that I worked with, wanted to help, and I think they were doing the best they could. But again, under mind control — most of them submitted to the jab — they wouldn’t listen.”