One graph to shut RFK Jr. up.
The best argument against his nonsense is data. Here it is...
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told CNN’s Dana Bash that “There were ICUs that were empty all across the country, including in New York, at the height.”
What a patently false, disgusting statement. It’s actually offensive, given the hell on Earth that my New York colleagues in particular endured in late March and April of 2020.
Dana Bash did her best to push back on this and other nonsense Kennedy peddled. But she’s not a public health expert, and Kennedy excels at the “Gish Gallop,” a strategy in which the offender rapidly fires off so many incorrect claims that it’s impossible to refute them all in the time allotted. Sometimes one single terrible sentence would take paragraphs or pages to refute—and that’s if you had the answers at your fingertips. This is why platforming grifters is always dangerous. In this case, it’s the Secretary of Health and Human Services, which makes this all incredibly serious.
Sometimes, though, all you need is a graph. I sincerely wish Dana Bash had had the above image at her fingertips when she interviewed Kennedy. I made it just now for Inside Medicine using CDC data. It shows monthly all-cause deaths in New York City by place of death. This alone dismantles the both "Covid-19 deaths were overcounted" conspiracy theories and Kennedy’s despicable "hospitals were empty" fever dream.
The graph covers January 2018 through December 2025, making the early Covid-19 peak of April 2020 clear, followed by some smaller (but still terrible) peaks by historical standards—namely, the first winter in 2021, and then the Omicron wave in the winter of 2022.
Separating mortality out by place of death tells the story that my New York colleagues reported, and which RFK Jr. now denies. (Aside: when data and anecdote match, you don’t have to wonder whether the narrative is accurate.) In the 26 months leading up to the first Covid-19 outbreak, around 44% of deaths in New York City occurred in hospitalized patients. (It’s about 53% if you include outpatient and ER locations in hospitals.) You can see that hospital deaths skyrocketed in April 2020—a historic peak exceeded only by the 1918 flu pandemic (as my colleagues and I showed in JAMA Network Open.) That month, around 60% of all New York City deaths occurred in hospitals. Many, if not most, of those deaths occurred in ICUs. The numbers likely understate the strain because hospitals rapidly expanded ICU capacity during this time. (That’s the only reason that our ICUs didn’t overflow here in Boston; New York did the same, expanding ICU capacity by around two to three times during that period, but it often wasn’t even enough because the virus had spread so rapidly in March.)
The numbers are staggering. In April 2020, there were 24,687 deaths in New York City (all places, including hospitals). That’s around 560% of either the April 2018 or 2019 rate. And for a time, things were actually worse than this. (The week ending April 11, 2020, had around 750% of the deaths of a typical early April week in New York City).
Of those 24,687 deaths in New York City, a full 14,720 occurred in hospitalized or ER patients. (That’s where the 60% figure above comes from.) That’s just slightly higher than either 2,366 in April 2018 or 2,275 in April 2019, wouldn’t you say?
Generally, there were around 1,600 ICU beds in New York City prior to the pandemic. On any given week in the pre-pandemic, New York City ICUs were often close to full, if not full. During the pandemic, hospitals scrambled to expand, managing to more than double that capacity to around 3,500. It’s obvious that even that herculean effort was not adequate to keep up with deaths rates that were 560%-750% of normal. (People died in the ER, or on regular medical wards, not just the ICU. It was a nightmare, despite what Kennedy wishes to believe.)
The idea that ICUs were empty during the height—Secretary Kennedy’s preposterous claim on national television—can eff right off.
It was a rough week for the truth. Let’s make this one better.
Last week, misinformation and lies were used to attack heroes like Dr. Anthony Fauci. But that craven nonsense was not only aimed at Dr. Fauci, but at public health and medicine in general. It was very disheartening.
I move that we start this week on a positive note. Let’s celebrate the first responders of New York. It’s worth remembering that the New York City wave was particularly bad because it was the only US city to have spread before mitigation measures went into place (its unique density did not help). Those measures saved lives, flattened the curve, and are now “blamed” wholesale by the Right on Dr. Fauci. (As CNN's Dana Bash pointed out, the shutdowns were state-by-state decisions, and there were many officials involved in the response at every level.)
Regardless, New York’s frontline clinicians in particular encountered a Covid-19 wave like no other. They bravely put themselves in harm’s way, helping countless people. We should be ringing those bells again for them, not listen to Secretary Kennedy tell them that ICUs were empty.
My emergency medicine colleague Dr. Celine Thum, who was on the frontlines in New York City in 2020, has often told me that she regrets not just filming what she experienced in those frightening early days. She recently related that sentiment on Instagram.
“If I could do it all over again, I would have risked my entire career, strapped a GoPro to my chest so that America could also watch as I watched teenagers, moms, dads, people my age silently die. I once counted 7 in an hour during my shift. (I lost 5 in all of residency.) Anyone in NYC experienced firsthand what nonstop sirens sounded like and saw cooling trucks on the streets.
It’s not about Democrats or Republicans. It’s about politics meddling with medicine and a witch hunt meant to distract from the real issues at hand.
I sacrificed my prime years to take care of Americans, and my heart breaks to watch these baseless accusations. It’s not PTSD—the ER is where people go to die. It’s about the moral injury that so many physicians have after putting our patients’ lives before our own and having our profession questioned.”
—Dr. Celine Thum, Emergency Physician, frontline Covid-19 responder in NYC.
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As half of a physician couple in nyc I can confirm 1st hand Montefiore and Presbyterian were so over census that conference rooms and libraries were converted to additional ici beds running vents. My loathing for homicidal rfkJR goes further back. Wife and I taught at the Pacific Basin Medical Officers Training Program in mid-90s. Some of our students then were senior Physicians in American Samoa during rfkJR prolonging measles outbreak. I have so much anger at the homicidal grift.
It’s a better day today already, seeing this evidence-filled essay in the midst of the witch trial/distraction related to an 85-year old scientist who served the world with his expertise. It was also good to include the examples of the NYC professionals who were dropping in their tracks trying to save people. Thank you.