Which killed more patients: ventilators, or the Covid-19 virus? Tesla CEO and social media mogul Elon Musk seems to blame the former. In a recent episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” he suggested that the ventilators were far more damaging to people’s lungs.
During their conversation, Rogan mentioned, “Well, 80 percent of people they put on ventilators died.” This was Musk’s response:
Yeah. So, in fact, I actually posted about that, because I called doctors in Wuhan and said, “What are the biggest mistakes that you made on the first wave?” This was early on. And they said, “We put far too many people on intubated ventilators.” So I actually posted on Twitter at the time and said, “Hey, what I’m hearing from Wuhan is that they made a big mistake in putting people on intubated ventilators for an extended period. And that this is actually what is damaging the lungs, not COVID. It’s the treatment. The cure is worse than the disease.” And people yelled at me and said, I’m not a doctor. I’m like, “Yeah, but I do make spaceships with life support systems. What do you do?”
Plenty of research backs up his claim.
In fact, mortality rates were even worse than Rogan’s citation, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in April 2020. It noted a frighteningly high death rate of 88 percent among Covid-19 patients in New York City who had been placed on mechanical ventilation.
Musk had tried to sound the alarm early in the Covid debacle. In 2020 he tweeted: “When I talked to doctors in Wuhan, they recommended against invasive ventilators & in favor of non-invasive.” And in a subsequent post he wrote, “Numbers I was told from Wuhan were 80% and 90% mortality rate for invasive ventilators. Those are not good odds.”
You can watch the Musk/Rogan exchange here.
