A new study has found that many ventilator-dependent COVID-19 patients acquired secondary bacterial pneumonia, and that pneumonia killed more people than COVID-19.

According to the study, reported by Northwestern Medicine, COVID-19 may have placed these people in the hospital, but a mechanical ventilator infection that didn’t respond to therapy was more likely to kill them. (“Secondary Bacterial Pneumonia Drove Many COVID-19 Deaths,” 5 May 2023.)

The study, titled “Machine learning links unresolving secondary pneumonia to mortality in patients with severe pneumonia, including COVID-19,” which looked at 585 severe COVID cases, has been published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Senior researcher Benjamin Singer, MD, noted that nearly half of patients studied who had COVID-19, developed a secondary ventilator-associated bacterial pneumonia.

The Lawrence Hicks Professor of Pulmonary Medicine in the Department of Medicine and Northwestern Medicine pulmonary and critical care physician commented:

“Our study highlights the importance of preventing, looking for, and aggressively treating secondary bacterial pneumonia in critically ill patients with severe pneumonia, including those with COVID-19.”

He added:

“The term ‘cytokine storm’ means an overwhelming inflammation that drives organ failure in your lungs, your kidneys, your brain, and other organs. If that were true, if cytokine storm were underlying the long length of stay we see in patients with COVID-19, we would expect to see frequent transitions to states that are characterized by multi-organ failure. That’s not what we saw.”

In February of 2021, The Trends Journal published an article outlining a likely serious relationship between COVID and development of bacterial pneumonia, which many mainline doctors at the time were discounting as a serious COVID co-factor risk. (See “BACTERIAL PNEUMONIA & COVID: WHAT THE CDC SAYS,” 16 Feb 2021.)

In fact, some doctors were discouraging use of antibiotics commonly used to treat bacterial pneumonia, telling patients such antibiotic medications “didn’t work” against COVID.

The new study points to the lockstep intransigence of many mainline medical institutions, which pushed controversial mRNA experimental treatments marketed as no different than traditional vaccines, while arguing against other possible regimens and medicines which frontline doctors were finding effective.

Some of those protocols included treating patients with antibiotics.

[Journalist note: I personally was told by a doctor that an antibiotic would not help my severe case of COVID around Christmas of 2021. After a miserable in-person clinic visit, I was finally prescribed an antibiotic by another doctor, and it marked the beginning of my recovery. For more on my story there, see “MY COVID EXPERIENCE,” 25 Jan 2022—JD.]