This series documents stories from the Herman Cain Awards subreddit, tracking the COVID mis- and disinformation on Facebook that is leading to so many deaths. Today’s cautionary tale lives in a world without any resemblance to reality. And some poor hospital has to deal with it. 

“Our government is known for putting reality in fiction films.” It is? 

So, the theory goes, Stranger Things is actually not science fiction, but a government-controlled plot to reveal a covert government effort to inject octopus-like creatures into vaccines? 

Government: Haha, we got the octopus creatures into the vaccine, and no one will ever know!

Government: But just in case, let’s drop hints in a popular Netflix show.

Carrie Madej is some wildly popular anti-vaxxer doctor who has all sorts of crazy … ideas. 

This “luciferase” ingredient will play a big role in this unfolding saga. 

Australia. Austria. Same thing, amirite? 

And no one mocked her and called her crazy for saying, in well-reasoned tones, “Hmmm, with the rising incidence of COVID, new government shutdowns are on the horizon.” 

Chloroquine is an anti-malarial compound, and also is used for rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. It was tested for COVID, but trials were halted after they failed to show any efficacy. 

Quercetin has nothing to do with hydroxychloroquine. Quercetin is found in many fruits and vegetables, and is quite common in a healthy diet. It is a potent antioxidant.

I actually use this supplement myself, along with zinc and magnesium (for sleep), Vitamin D, a B complex, and vegan Omega-3 fatty acids (from algae instead of fish). There’s nothing wrong with these (and several other) supplements. What’s wrong is thinking that they can treat or prevent COVID. 

Zinc keeps COVID-19 from replicating? Nope. OMG no. “Using fear as a weapon”? Um, she’s the one running around town spending big bucks on drugs because she didn’t want to get her or her husband a free jab. 

$500! FIVE HUNDRED! 

“Big Pharma is making billions so I won’t take a free jab, but hey, I’ll spend FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS on stuff that Dr. Facebook told me works!”

She literally says above that Big Pharma doesn’t like ivermectin because it’s a “cheap alternative,” then spends FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS on ivermectin and supplements! 

Hold on while I pick up pieces of my just-exploded head….

You know what might’ve prevented her “annual chest infection”? People around her masking, social distancing, and limiting large gatherings. Weird, I know, how limiting activities that help with disease transmission actually helps limit disease transmission. 

Meanwhile, her husband is experiencing the typical ups and downs of a COVID-19 infection, and she smugly declares that it was this shit that cured him. She is so “informed.” And honestly, most people pull through their COVID infections, and supplements like these are irrelevant. Had her husband survived, she’d go around telling everyone how quercetin cured him, and people would believe it because there are other people walking around saying the same thing. The blessing of this disease—that it kills relatively few of its hosts—is also one of its curses. Too many people survive and ascribe irresponsible actions as the reason for getting better. Meanwhile, in reality, they’re just literally pissing dollars away on fake cures. 

Luciferase is from the same Latin root as Lucifer. And what does “lucifer” mean? No, it doesn’t mean Satan, hellspawn. It means “lightbearer.” Lux is light, and ferry is to carry or bear. If you want to know how the Biblical devil took this name, the Wikipedia entry is good. (The name is also commonly translated to “morning star.”)

Good luck explaining that to this woman.

Luciferase is named as such because it is a bioluminescent enzyme. It produces light. No, vaccines do not contain luciferase. Luciferase was only used in the development of the vaccine.

To be honest, I’m surprised luciferase doesn’t make more frequent appearances in this series, given how easy it is for fundamentalist Evangelicals to see that word and nearly die of the vapors. 

“Four boosters in less than a year.” Nope. Just one. But heck, I’d take a monthly booster if it kept me safe from COVID. Not sure why the idea of boosters is suddenly so offensive to them. 

“ZOMG, you’re eating again? You just ate! That’s like four eatings in one day! And what’s with exercising again, didn’t you just exercise? Having to do more exercises proves how worthless exercise is!”

Like I said, beyond stupid. 

And this “God-given immune system” shit. This woman’s argument: 

God gave us a functioning immune system. 
So why vaccinate? The immune system is perfect, like God intended!
Oh, let me take zinc for my immune system.

Make up your fucking mind! Is it perfect? If so, then don’t take anything. God made it, after all! Or if it’s not perfect, and could use some, er, boosting, then take the damn vaccine already! AAAAARRRRRGHHHH!

Not gonna lie. This one is breaking me.  

Breathe, Markos, breathe….

Okay, I’m back. Let me look up that patent number: 

Holy shit this is funny. The patent itself is ridiculous, 

The patent number along with some incomprehensibly stupid idea of using body movement to mine crypto was all it took to create an entire new conspiracy theory!

OMG so much more in that wall of text!

“They’re using fear to control us!” 

Also…

“Scary times.”

Also…

“Many won’t survive.”

Also…

“Satan is building his army.” 

DOES SHE NOT HEAR HERSELF?

Note that the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the vaccines had long expired by the time she wrote this. She’s not even moving the goalposts, as most have, to argue “the vaccine approval was rushed!” Nope, she’s still pretending vaccines are under EUA, and that somehow that allows a state of emergency, legal immunity, and whatever other nonsense she blabs about. 

Also, she’s back to how ivermectin is cheaper than vaccines, even though she spent five hundred dollars on bullshit Facebook cures rather than get simple, free jabs. 

Yeah, I’ll never get over spending $500 on shit because it’s cheaper than the free jab. Never.

Ah good. Everyone is saved! Good thing she was so well informed. 

TWO DAYS LATER: 

So zinc … didn’t prevent COVID from replicating? 

So quercetin …. didn’t perform that hydroxychloroquine magic and heal his infection? 

So ivermectin … didn’t cure his intestinal worms? 

Well, maybe that last one happened. Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with COVID. 

Your tinfoil hat landed your husband in the hospital, with nurses telling you he ain’t gonna make it. 

“NO VACCINE AND ROBOTIC PARTICLES MARK OF THE BEAST IN MY HUSBAND.” 

“But a metallic filter is totally fine.”

I mean, if the government is hell-bent on installing tracking devices in us, why not use hospital stays as a convenient place to tag holdouts? Your typical COVID-19 patient has one of those coat hanger things next to their bed, packed with all sorts of drugs delivered via IV drips. It would be even easier to pack nanorobots into one of those than into a vaccine delivered via thin syringe. 

Meanwhile, up above she talked shit about hospitals, and why she was getting her own ivermectin, and saying that hospitals isolated their patients so they could deny them those supposed life-saving drugs. Yet, here we are. In a hospital. 

As if hospitals don’t have enough shit to deal with. 

If you really believe a hospital is so deadly, why go there? Why not stay at home with your previously adequate—perhaps even superior?—ivermectin and quercetin and zinc? Oh, and soup. She bought soup during that $500 shopping spree. Probably because she saw that stupid meme about how “back in the day, the flu was treated with soup.” Problem is, none of that shit works. 

Yup, she’s breaking me. I may already be broken. 

“Where do folks hear of people dying of COVID? Home or in hospitals? Think on that.” 

Why would that be the case? WHYYYYYY?

Maybe because she tried her quack treatments on her husband, and none of them worked, so she had no choice but to take her husband to the hospital when he was already too far gone to treat effectively? 

Had she not taken her husband to the hospital, where would he have died? 

No real doctor would love to give her husband ivermectin. Not a single one. If they said it, it was a lie to get her off their back. 

Oh my god, this is beyond words. How does this woman get by in daily life? “People who recover at home don’t die, BOOM THINK ABOUT THAT BET YOU WON’T SHARE!” Yes. People who aren’t sick enough to be hospitalized are probably not going to die, while those requiring medical intervention are in graver danger. And if you are so lost to Dr. Facebook that you think ivermectin and quercetin are proper treatments, then odds are good that you’re going to wait an extra-long time to go to the hospital, making any prognosis that much worse. 

And did you catch how her husband didn’t actually have COVID when he went to the hospital? He only had pneumonia. It was only after getting to the hospital that it became COVID pneumonia, because the hospitals wanted that sweet, sweet, COVID cash. Yet there she is, up above, talking about all the treatments she had gotten for COVID. 

Would a little internal logic kill her? 

Can someone please explain to her the difference between Australia and Austria, for the love of god. 

Ah good, she’s taking a break from shit-posting about COVID while her husband dies in the hospital of COVID. 

Not so good, she’s going to harass the hospital staff. 

Liar. She took her husband to the hospital. If she really believed that, she would’ve taken him to a church. 

Nice fantasy joust. No doctor would agree that the vaccines weren’t approved, and would know that Remdesivir is approved. All she forgot was to add the slow clap from everyone witnessing the scene, growing to a rousing crescendo of cheers. 

Likely went more like this: 

Wife: YOU ARE KILLING MY HUSBAND

Doctor, thinking “oh shit, it’s one of these”: We are doing everything we can.

Wife: IVERMECTIN GARBLE BARGLE

Doctor: Ma’am, ivermectin isn’t approved for treating COVID-19.

Wife: MY HUSBAND’S BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS

Doctor: SECURITY! 

Incidentally, NIH does not recommend ivermectin: “There is insufficient evidence for the COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel (the Panel) to recommend either for or against the use of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19.” 

She wanted to raise $40,000. She got $6,000. So, not much room to “move the goalposts.”

These moments of humanity slip through. Her pain is real, and one I hope never to have to suffer. It is sad and tragic. And then she tamps that shit down by accusing the hospital and doctors of being evil and trying to murder her husband. 

She brought him to the hospital too late, on Dec. 3. The nurses immediately said he wasn’t going to make it. Yet they kept him alive for 40 days, looking for that rare miracle. It wasn’t to be. Thanks to Dr. Facebook, his chances were severely reduced and limited. But his wife isn’t going to look at her own actions, or to her all-powerful unbeatable god. Apparently, god’s will can be thwarted by the medical profession. Maybe that god isn’t so powerful after all, maybe it’s even … beatable?

In her GoFundMe she writes: 

So believable. Especially since she tells the story up above, using totally different quotes: 

You don’t need to be a genius to spot the difference in the stories, and the way it’s been embellished on the GoFundMe page. She probably embellished the first time! He probably wanted her off his back, so said something like, “I’d love to do what you want, but I can’t go against treatment protocol.” That would be believable, and everyone would know his intent. But once she decided that hospitals and doctors had financial incentives to kill their COVID-19 patients, every telling of the story had to include that motive element.

Husband was only 41.