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In September 2021, Georgia native Briana MacDowell Ross was preparing to celebrate her first wedding anniversary with her husband, Jason Christopher Ross, a military combat veteran with whom she was raising three young children.
But later that month, Briana, Jason and their children became sick. The family followed the America’s Frontline Doctors COVID-19 protocol, but while Briana and the children quickly recovered, Jason did not.
Jason’s worsening illness soon led to a positive COVID-19 diagnosis and his admission to Piedmont Fayette Hospital in Fayetteville, Georgia, on Oct. 7, 2021.
By Oct. 25, Jason was dead at age 36 — a victim, Briana says, of COVID-19 hospital protocols that included administration of remdesivir and fentanyl and placement on a ventilator.
Briana, who is now raising her three children as a single mother, spoke to The Defender about Jason’s experience in the hospital and her difficulties in obtaining his medical records. She shared medical records with The Defender to corroborate her story.
After positive COVID diagnosis, ‘that was it’
According to Briana, while Jason qualified for veteran’s benefits, because they didn’t live close to a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital they went to their local hospital.
At Piedmont, Briana said that medical staff “were aware” from the start that Jason was not vaccinated for COVID-19, which she believes led to the poor treatment he received.
With Jason’s oxygen levels very low, they initially sought treatment at local urgent care facilities but were turned away. According to Briana, one facility told her they would not accept her husband’s VA insurance — but also would not accept cash payment, because he was insured.
That left them with their local hospital.
Briana said:
“I had heard things, stories about the hospitals [but] I didn’t know anyone personally that had anything happen to them at the hospital. I was just praying and looking at him, and he just looked like he was struggling to breathe. And so, I kind of freaked out and said, ‘We’ve got to go to the hospital.’”
She said she assumed if she were there, and could tell hospital staff what not to do, everything would be okay. She told medical staff she needed to know what treatment Jason would receive before approving it, and insisted that he not be placed on a ventilator.
A nurse reassured her, saying, “We’re just going to get him some oxygen and just check his vitals.”
But after Jason tested positive for COVID-19, “that was it,” Briana said. “They took him back and I couldn’t see him or be with him, even though we had slept in the same bed the night before and every night,” she said.
Briana was told to leave the hospital, but “called during every shift.” However, during her first phone call, a nurse told her that her husband wouldn’t be returning home that evening, “with some attitude,” as Brianna recalled.
“I kept calling the shifts to get updates,” Briana said. “I have all these notes, but it really doesn’t matter, because they lied and withheld a lot of information every single time.”
The morning after Jason was admitted, Briana received a call from one of the doctors at the hospital, “screaming into the phone” that Jason was “going to die if he doesn’t get on the ventilator.” Briana again refused, but in the coming days, doctors “kept insisting on the ventilator.”
By Jason’s third day at the hospital, which coincided with the couple’s first wedding anniversary, they allowed Briana a short visit. But at the hospital, Brianna said she saw her husband inside a “glass room,” while a nurse warned her that “if you try to go through that door, I’m going to call security.”
“I was just kind of standing there watching him, talking to him through the glass, and it just really disturbed me, what I watched,” Briana said.
Noting that she has family members who are nurses and is familiar with some nursing practices, Briana said that when she asked the nurses on duty if they were, for instance, “slipping him to prone position and then back,” the nurses were dismissive.
She also recalled seeing Jason’s oxygen levels drop precipitously after the nurses’ interventions, but nurses and doctors were again dismissive. Instead, a pulmonologist told her, “He’s not going on the ventilator because of you.”
Briana asked the doctor about other treatments, including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, but was told those treatments were “no good.” When Briana continued to press the pulmonologist for answers, he “started getting very frustrated with me” and showed her a ventilator machine in the hallway.
“He was like, ‘it’s ready for him to go,’ and was just trying to talk me into it,” Briana said. When she refused once more, “he took his gloves off and bunched them up, rolled them into a ball, and threw them right over my head and they hit the wall and fell into the trash can. It was very aggressive … and then he just walked away angry,” she recalled.
Following this, Briana said the nurse who had previously warned her about entering her husband’s glass room told her it was “time to leave.”
“I think now, I wish I would’ve gone through that door,” Briana said. “But when I left, I just started working on getting him out of there.”
Hospital staff would ‘bully him’
Briana’s efforts to get Jason discharged were unsuccessful, however, especially because all the options required paperwork that had to be signed by hospital staff — and that was an insurmountable obstacle.
Briana said:
“They would send their team of nurses and doctors to go in there and bully him. They had already been drugging him up for a couple of days. They had given him Xanax by this time and had started him on remdesivir … he was just so weak and tired, and they just kept doing that to him. He was alone. … They literally imprisoned him to where he couldn’t really fight back.”
She said one nurse told her that if Jason were to leave the hospital, they wouldn’t be able to help him. This meant “we would have to unhook all the machines [ourselves] and then he would have to get up, get himself dressed … he’d have to walk down this quarter-of-a-mile hallway to the elevator and come to meet me in the front lobby and walk down another hallway first.”
“I wouldn’t be able to go up and help him,” Briana added. “I wouldn’t be able to get a wheelchair. They wouldn’t be able to wheelchair him down or help him. Nobody would … And so, they made it impossible for us to get him out unless we did something ‘illegal’ or ‘against the rules.’”
‘They tried to turn us against each other’
By the next day, Jason appeared to be recovering, but the hospital said he needed to stay for “one more night.” However, the next day, Briana said they called her at 6 a.m. insisting he was weak and needed to be put on a ventilator.
Briana said she saved lots of text messages from Jason, telling her he was “starving,” and thirsty, but the hospital staff wouldn’t let him eat because they didn’t want him to aspirate.
He’d barely had anything to eat or drink, she said. “And they were loading him up on drugs, as I came to find out later in the medical records.”
This treatment was accompanied by what Briana described as “gaslighting,” as she found out that hospital staff were telling Jason not to listen to her, telling him that Briana was a “conspiracy theorist” with “no medical degree.”
“They tried to turn us against each other,” Briana said.
This treatment wore so heavily on Jason, that he finally agreed to go on the ventilator, telling Briana “I’m just so exhausted.”
According to Briana, doctors told her Jason was “working so hard to try to breathe … and his heart is tired and his body’s tired.” They claimed the ventilator would “give his lungs a rest and give him a rest so his body can heal, and then he could wake up and come off the ventilator healthy and healed.”
Briana said she finally relented, recalling that her “hands were tied because nobody was working with me,” including the patient advocate at the hospital and local attorneys, who she said, “weren’t even doing anything COVID-related.”
‘Creepy and scary and disgusting horror show’
Jason initially appeared to improve, and by the third day, was being weaned off the ventilator, Briana said. But then, she said hospital staff told her they’d have to stop weaning him off because something was wrong. He was subsequently diagnosed with pseudomonas, a hospital-acquired infection.
Two days later, Jason again appeared to be on the mend after being given antibiotics. “They were weaning him off the ventilator again,” Briana said. “Then, this new doctor came on and said ‘Nope, we’ve got to start over, he’s trying to breathe over the vent.’”
Briana resisted the hospital’s efforts to have Jason fully ventilated again, and once more brought up ivermectin, but the new doctor “screeched” and “laughed” at her.
That night, Briana received a call from the hospital informing her that Jason had “coded” — but was not given further details. When arrived at the hospital in the morning, the pulmonologist told her “There is no hope,” she said.
“I was asking them, ‘If you keep telling me I can’t do any of my interventions this whole time, but you’re saying yours aren’t working, then can we use mine?’” referring to the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. But they still refused to treat Jason with ivermectin or anything else Briana suggested.
One doctor told Briana, in response to a question about ivermectin, that it “causes kidney failure.”
A kidney doctor Briana spoke to offered the use of a dialysis machine, but then withdrew that offer because Jason’s “blood pressure got too low.” According to Briana, when she asked what could be done to raise his blood pressure again, another doctor told her, “It’s not looking good for your husband.”
Later, Briana says a nurse told her “Your husband’s not going to survive the night.”
Briana said this experience felt, to her, like she “was in a movie or a TV show — a horror — really creepy and scary and disgusting horror show.”
She said she’d previously refused to sign a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order, but reached an agreement — or believed she had — that her husband would be “flipped” if his pulse fell below a certain threshold. That’s when the hospital staff told her that Jason could be placed on dialysis, after all, Briana said.
But something didn’t seem right, she said, claiming the nurse who told her this “looked a little too happy.” She now believes that “it was the way that they could get me to sign a DNR without signing a DNR, because I had to agree that they had to flip him to stick something in his neck to do this process, and then they were going to flip him right back.”
“When they flipped him,” Briana continued, “he coded, and that was that.”
Briana was subsequently called into her husband’s room. “They had him naked without a sheet cover, in the middle with all this medical staff doing CPR … It was just so horrible, and I actually feel like they were trying to punish me in a way … they insisted upon me coming in.”
Staff told Briana they would not perform CPR for more than 15 minutes, despite her insistence that they continue. After 15 minutes, they stopped and “announced his time of death before I could even say anything.”
Administered remdesivir despite diagnosis of acute kidney injury
The end of Jason’s life marked the beginning of still another battle for Briana, as she fought the hospital for his medical records. It took multiple visits to the hospital to get the full records.
“The thing that’s really helped me the most is the itemized list of drugs” in those records, Briana said.
According to the COVID-19 Humanity Betrayal Memory Project (CHBMP), the medications included remdesivir, adrenaline, anxiety medications, blood thinner, blood pressure medication, diuretics, fentanyl, insulin, Lasix, midazolam, painkillers, paralytic drugs, precede, propofol, sedatives and Xanax.
“One huge thing I found out was that he was diagnosed with acute kidney injury on admission, and no one ever told me that,” Briana said. “The physician in the ER at the time of admission wrote in the records … ‘Patient is not a candidate for remdesivir due to the acute kidney injury.’ And they started him on it the next day in the ICU.”
“I also found out that [Jason received] the same drugs as a lethal injection in his protocol towards the end.” The hospital administered the most fentanyl “at the highest possible dosages,” she said. “It was sick … It’s literally like they euthanized my husband.”
Briana said that she subsequently learned of the COVID-19 hospital protocols and now blames them for her husband’s death.
“I know more about it than I wish I knew,” she said. “That was all the COVID Hospital Protocol, and it was a one-size-fits-all model.”
‘Taking action is very, very healing’
Raising three children as a single mother is “so hard and it’s exhausting,” Briana said. “You don’t have that other person to give you a break.”
She said she is experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder “from everything I saw and what happened at the hospital. It was straight-up abuse of him and me,” Briana said.
One way in which Briana is attempting to cope is through involvement with CHBMP and the FormerFeds Freedom Foundation, for which she is now Georgia’s state chair.
“These are the people I need,” Briana said. “They get it.”
As Georgia state chair, she is actively working on legislative issues and local initiatives in addition to blogging for the FormerFeds Substack page and working on the group’s social media presence. She is also participating in a class-action lawsuit FormerFeds filed against Gilead, distributor of remdesivir.
“I try to educate people through social media every day,” Briana said, adding that she is drawing upon her degree in marketing to craft content that resonates with the public.
Briana encourages victims and their family members to join FormerFeds and CHBMP.
“Everyone will understand you. You’ve all been through the same thing. You can learn so much. You can find your people, people that believe you. It’s an amazing feeling just to have that support … taking action is very, very healing.”
