Consider This from NPR - How COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories Led To A Family Matriarch's Preventable Death

Episode Date: April 26, 2022

Stephanie is one of nearly one million Americans who have died of COVID-19. Her family says Stephanie's death was avoidable, but in recent years, she had been drawn into conspiracy theories.She believed that the coronavirus was a hoax and refused to get vaccinated. When she got COVID-19 last winter, Stephanie refused treatments and eventually died just a few days after Christmas. While there is no way to know exactly how many people like Stephanie have died because they believed conspiracy theories, the Kaiser Family Foundation recently found that more than 200,000 Americans would be alive today, had they had been vaccinated. NPR's Geoff Brumfiel reports. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

One thing everyone agrees on is that Stephanie didn't have to die of COVID. It's something I can't understand, still. And months after she did, her family is still struggling to understand why. There is no perfect puzzle piece for this. I literally go through this all the time. That's Stephanie's adult daughter, Lori. We're keeping it to first names to give her and the rest of her family privacy as they continue to grieve. Stephanie was 75. She had two children, and they say she was a pretty great mom growing up. Here's her other daughter, Vicky.

You know, she just believed we could do anything. And I think that's really powerful as a parent, you know? But in recent years, she had begun to change. She was drawn into a world of conspiracy theories and paranoia. She thought COVID was a hoax. She refused to get vaccinated, in part because of a far-fetched belief that the vaccines contained secret technology. Chips. If you take the vaccine, you'll get a chip. They've been planting chips in us. Yeah, yeah, we'll have chips. When she fell ill this past winter, she refused treatments that could have helped. She grew sicker and eventually died a few days after Christmas.

Stephanie's family was left with grief, anger, and questions. And Lori says she believes they're not the only ones. I know we're not alone. I know this is happening all over the place. There's no way to know exactly how many people like Stephanie have died because they believed conspiracy theories, but there's evidence to suggest it's happening a lot. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation,

more than 200,000 Americans would be alive today if they had been vaccinated. Consider this. More than two years into the coronavirus pandemic, America is approaching one million deaths from COVID-19. And conspiracy theories are one reason that number is so high. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Tuesday, April 26th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com.

T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. America is rife with conspiracy theories, that a secret network of elites controls the world, that the 2020 election was rigged. Don't panic. What's happening in Ukraine is nothing to do with Russia and Ukraine. It's all to do with bringing to an end the one world agenda by the deep state and the cabal. This is all... A new analysis of mail-in ballots in Pima County.

Arizona means the election was rigged and stolen from the Republican Party in 2020. And in particular... Experts who study this stuff say people who believe in one conspiracy theory are far more likely to believe in others. Sander van der Linden studies conspiracy theories at Cambridge University in the UK. It tends to be the case that belief in one conspiracy theory

actually motivates belief in other conspiracy theories, and they kind of support each other in a self-enclosed worldview. That's been a problem in the pandemic, because social media has been inundated with new theories about COVID and about the life-saving vaccines that can protect people. Dr. Artis came out and was talking about snake venom in these clot shots. And, you know, that's all they wanted to do. I'm talking about the deep state. They needed the pandemic to be everywhere. Remember, it's about depopulation, keeping people sick,

and making sure they can't reproduce. Today, the CDC estimates that roughly 29 million American adults are unvaccinated. Obviously, not everybody who remains unvaccinated believes in elaborate conspiracy theories like the ones in these videos. But Stephanie, whose family we heard from earlier, did buy into them. Stephanie didn't always believe bad information. Her husband Arnold remembers her as wise. When it came to human interaction, human emotions, she just had a wisdom about her. NPR's Jeff Brumfield brings us this story. Stephanie was always the spiritual and intuitive one in the marriage. And when the kids were in high school, she got into astrology. She did tarot readings to advise people about houses, kids, jobs.

It was quirky, outside the mainstream to be sure, but Arnold says that Stephanie brought a lot of positivity to her sessions. When people came, she just was looking to help them, to give them whatever they needed. At the same time, Stephanie was pretty practical about health care. She went to the doctor regularly, and she was a big believer in vaccines. She made sure I took the flu shots. We took the shingle shot.

We took the pneumonia shot. I mean, I was like a pincushion. They were happily married for nearly 55 years. Raised Lori and Vicki, retired, traveled. It was a good life. Then, a few years back, the family noticed a change in Stephanie. Part of it was physical. Throughout her life, she played tennis, but it had taken a toll on her knees. She was finding it hard to walk and had to have a stairlift installed in her house. Forced to spend more time sitting and in pain, she started watching strange videos and sending them to the rest of the family.

Vicki says it was Lori who was really the first to notice. And she called me up one day and she's like, all right, have you been watching these videos that mom is sending us? And I said, no, I haven't. I just never watched them. I had no time. She I said, no, I haven't. I just never watched them. I had no time. She's like, well, I started watching some of them. She's like, and I think that something is not right. The videos covered a wide range of far-fetched conspiracy theories.

JFK Jr. is still alive. Reptilian aliens control the government. Arnold says he wouldn't even look at them. Watching them, from my way of thinking, would have only reinforced that they were valid. Even if I tried to argue against them, she wouldn't have accepted my argument. Stephanie's fringe ideas were troubling, but the family still hung out. Lori says sometimes they fought over her beliefs, but often they kept the conversation on things like grandkids or redecorating. Then came the pandemic

and everything changed. Stephanie's videos told her COVID was a hoax, but Lori and Vicki took it seriously. They were worried about giving their parents the virus, so they stayed away trying to keep them safe. We just stopped seeing each other as a family. We didn't do Thanksgiving that first year. And, you know, I do feel that that was a big problem, actually, that we weren't all getting together. Because while the family stayed away, others did not. Through her astrology, Stephanie had formed a spiritual group that met weekly at her house. And like Stephanie, other members of that group didn't believe the virus was real. The more time they spent together, the more Stephanie became invested in her beliefs. It was sort of like, I don't know if you want to say like tribal, staying within the same clique, reinforcing each other.

When the COVID vaccines came along, Stephanie absolutely refused to get one. And she started avoiding her daughters, who had gotten the shot. Arnold didn't get vaccinated to try and keep the peace. The family felt stuck. They didn't know how to shake Stephanie out of her beliefs. Diane Benskoda runs a nonprofit called Antidote, which seeks to help families whose loved ones have been taken over by cults and conspiratorial thinking. She says Stephanie's family is one of many. My inbox, it's horrible. It's so many people and so much pain.

And she thinks the pandemic has played a big part in what's happening. The pandemic increases fear, and fear is a really hard emotion. And isolation is a really hard place to be. Ben Skoder herself is a former cult member. She understands why wild stories can take hold. The narratives, however strange, provide reassurance. The world is less chaotic and unpredictable than it appears. Even if the facts in these theories seem crazy, emotionally they can provide stability.

Speaking of her own past, she says these kinds of false tales gave a sense of clarity. It feels so good. I've never felt so secure. I mean, I knew what was right and wrong. There was no question. Stephanie's daughter said she suffered from a lot of anxiety throughout her life. The pandemic had been hard and left her surrounded mainly by people who thought as she did. Someone whose sense of security and community hinges on conspiracies isn't likely to be helped by a fact sheet. Ben Skoder and other experts told me it takes a lot of careful conversations and convincing to try and turn a person like that around. It's almost like a drug addiction. Unfortunately for Stephanie, she did not have time.

It was November of 2021, just before Thanksgiving. Arnold and Stephanie met friends for dinner. Afterwards, she started developing symptoms. But she refused to get tested. Instead, she ordered drugs from a natural healer in Florida. Two of the drugs, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, are ineffective against COVID, but many people believe they work. Stephanie waited for the pills to come.

All the while, she was getting sicker and sicker. The daughters got her device to check her blood oxygen level. It was at just 77%. Vicki called a friend who was a nurse. And she said, 77? She said, you need to get your mom

to the hospital. Like, she can die. And I said, really? Stephanie still didn't want to go, but after hearing she could die, she eventually gave in. Arnold drove her to the hospital. Even after she got there, she turned down some of the most effective treatments. One drug called remdesivir has been proven to reduce the severity of COVID, but Stephanie believed conspiracy theories claiming the drug was actually being used to kill COVID patients. Lori remembers how one doctor responded when he heard that Stephanie had refused key drugs. He's like, why didn't you take any of the treatments, Stephanie? And she found every little piece of

energy in her and yelled back at him, because it'll kill me. Meanwhile, Arnold had developed symptoms and was getting sicker and weaker. He eventually asked his daughters for help. Within days, he was admitted to the same hospital Stephanie was staying in. Unlike his wife, Arnold accepted every treatment. I don't remember. They were sticking me in needles all the time. He said yes to everything. He said yes to every treatment they were willing to give him. My mom said no.

Because I figured that if she came home, I had to be healthy for her. So. He was discharged after just five days. I felt hopeful because I told her I was going home. I waved to her. I said, I'll be waiting for you. And then everything started deteriorating. She was like fighting a fight without any defenses.

Parihan Elshanawani is a doctor at Northwell Health, who is part of the team that cared for Stephanie. Without vaccination or the best treatments, Stephanie got sicker. She started to develop blood clots on her lungs. Dr. Elshanawani knew that as things progressed, Stephanie would only suffer more. Patients at that point feel like they're suffocating, they're drowning, and it's a horrible way to die. The only option Stephanie had left was to go on a ventilator. So the doctor sat down with her and asked her, what do you want to do? She did say that she has had enough. That's her words. I've had enough. This is not a life. I can't live like this anymore. I'm done. I just want to go. Let me go. I just want to die.

During a video call, Lori heard her mother's wishes. She'd been urging Stephanie to fight. She knew it wasn't her time. But hearing those words, I can't live like this anymore, something changed. For years, they'd been battling over the lies and the conspiracies. Lori knew it was time to make peace with the mother she loved. And that meant helping Stephanie to die. My whole mission after hearing that was to help her get her wishes. Because she's ready to die, help her.

I wrote little notes to myself. Stephanie passed away a few days after Christmas. At the funeral, Arnold heard from dozens of people who Stephanie had helped over the years through her astrology and just heard advice and friendship. They all said she changed my life. In the months since Stephanie died, the family has tried to move on. Arnold's gotten the COVID vaccine. Lori says she's slowly making her peace. I'm a lot less angry.

I think I was very angry in the beginning. But she says she still thinks about the people who make the paranoia-laced videos that her mother consumed day after day. Whoever is creating all this content is on some level waging a war here in America inside of every family. She wants more people to wake up to the damage these folks are doing and to help their loved ones if they can.

That was NPR's Jeff Brumfield. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.