The first we heard of sickness back home was mid-November 2021. My wife’s youngest brother, Anthony, an associate English professor at Robert Morris University, was having GI issues. Persistent diarrhea to be exact. Then the entire family still living in our hometown of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania had what seemed to be bad colds, then fevers. 

Bernadette is one of eight siblings: four brothers and four sisters. We’re in Los Angeles. Another sister is in Florida. The other six, along with her youngest sister’s husband and 26-year-old son, lived in three households in the Pittsburgh area. That makes eight close family members in all living in western PA. 

Like a pair of California cliches, we got on Amazon and ordered for Anthony a Chinese herb we’ve taken in the past for digestive problems. He’d been the one relaying information to us here in LA and it wasn’t long before updates on the three brothers living together under one roof in the Plan 12 section of Aliquippa became less frequent but increasingly worrisome. My wife came back to LA in late March 2022 after her first trip home to Pittsburgh since COVID struck her family. She brought back the Chinese herb we’d ordered on Amazon four months earlier. It was unopened.

Throughout the pandemic, most Americans were confused about what exactly to do should they fall ill with COVID. From the first large wave of outbreaks in the US in the late spring of 2020, when hospitals were at or near their capacities due to emergency rooms being flooded with people sick from the novel coronavirus, the official stance centered largely on folks contacting their personal physicians. It seemed from there the advice of doctors was mostly to isolate at home and to not go to a hospital until the onset of significant difficulty breathing.

Of course, many Americans don’t have a family doctor. This inconvenient wrinkle in the American healthcare system would only compound the potential missteps for so many who happened to be suffering a sudden and potentially deadly illness. This certainly played a role in what happened to my wife’s family. So for them, and I’m sure so many others, the confusion about what to do should someone fall ill with COVID, something that persists to this day I would suggest, combined with the realities of the tenuous relationships so many Americans have with their own nation’s health care systems, all but guaranteed countless unnecessarily bad outcomes. 

The part of Pennsylvania where we come from, sitting near the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, is in the heart of what was once America’s rust belt. Despite being just west of Pittsburgh, with its great universities and thriving downtown, Aliquippa and the surrounding communities, like most of the areas outside of the city, have never really recovered from the decline of the American steel industry. 

So take that national confusion about what to do in the event that you or someone you know should come down with COVID and drop it deep into what’s left of a tough industrial working-class mindset. People are stubborn and apprehensive of even generating an ambulance bill, let alone what might come later in the mail from a trip to the ER. Mistakes will be made. None of the five living in our hometown had a primary care physician and there was a real resistance to dialing 911 in all three households.

When we were able to get through to Anthony, he was often barely able to speak. One evening he told us his next oldest brother, John, was lying half off his bed, semi-conscious. Anthony himself was too weak to check on his oldest brother, “Winnie,” a tough 73-year-old Vietnam vet who was now bedridden in another part of the house. 

Across town from Anthony and his two older brothers, in the DiMattia section of Aliquippa, Mickey, the oldest sister at 70, was sick but able to move around her house and answer the phone. But her younger brother, Jay, 67, who’d moved in with her about a dozen years earlier, hadn’t been out of bed in more than a week.   

Anthony and John are 58 and 60 years old respectively. They are referred to in the family as “the boys.” I’m 65 and I’ve known them since they were 10 and 12 years old. By now everyone fully suspects that this is COVID. Text messages from Anthony told us that things were only getting worse where he was in Plan 12 with his two older brothers. So the day after Thanksgiving we called my wife’s youngest sister, Basie, who lives about 25 miles away on the outskirts of Pittsburgh and told her that the two youngest boys needed to go to the hospital. 

This led to a moment when the unforgiving biological realities of the coronavirus would collide with the uncertainty and suspicions of strong-willed people who had been, up to that very moment, able to live most of their long lives virtually outside of the American healthcare system.  

Basie and her husband Keith were going to make the half-hour drive down to Aliquippa. So the conversation from here in LA went something like this:

Don’t go into the house. Call 911 and watch the EMTs put the boys in the ambulances and then go home. The hospital will admit them. Whatever you do, don’t go into that house and don’t drive the boys to the hospital yourselves. Call 911. 

And this is how we left it. The boys would be getting proper medical care, and that’s all we needed to happen at that time.

But Basie was sure she’d already had COVID back in the spring of 2020. She’d had some minor symptoms consistent with COVID and had lost her sense of smell and taste for weeks. She felt that she had immunity to the virus. Keith also thought that he’d been exposed to COVID at work and could count on having some immunity. And there was that hesitancy to call 911 and incur likely hefty ambulance bills. So the pair did go into the house in Plan 12 and proceeded to drive Anthony and John themselves to the ER at UPMC-Heritage in Beaver, Pa.

This was Friday evening, November 26. 

It’s stunning for us to think about it now, but until this very moment in November of 2021, with the US death toll slowly nearing 800K, neither of us here in California had known a single person who’d had COVID. And after what had been a merciful respite from the many waves of coronavirus here in LA throughout the summer, we felt safe enough in November, with about 60K other people, to go to a Sunday Night Steelers-Chargers football game at SoFi Stadium. 

There’s not a personal story about someone’s tragic experience with COVID that’s likely to hold the average American’s attention for long at this point. We’re all just so over this horrific era in human history. And yet the politicization of the pandemic, on all of its many fronts, from masking and lockdowns to the wars over vaccine mandates and harmful side effects of the jab, seems to grow more passionately divisive every day and will likely be with us long after the last COVID variant disappears over the horizon. 

In the ER the boys sat waiting for hours before being taken back to an examination room where they tested positive for COVID. They were told that their vital signs were good and that it was too many days into their infection for them to receive colloidal antibody treatment. They were given Tylenol and sent home. During the long wait at the ER, Keith had taken Basie home. He then drove the boys back to their house in Aliquippa. 

When we learned that the boys had been sent home from the hospital we were devastated. The family was well into their second week of what we now knew to be COVID and were only getting sicker. By that time, in late 2021, we thought Delta was the most likely variant the family was suffering with and so we knew the danger they were in. These were days of agony for my wife. 

A week after the boys were sent home from the ER, Bernadette walked into our apartment from work with her cell phone to her ear. She was talking with Mickey, her oldest sister. The pitch of Bernadette’s voice froze me in my seat and on the other end Mickey was speaking so loudly I could hear every word she was saying from across the room. Jay’s car hadn’t been started in weeks and he’d gotten out of bed, dressed, and gone outside to move it from the street into the driveway. But that was 45 minutes ago and now, Mickey said, he was just sitting there, behind the wheel. 

I’d experienced something like this before in my life. What I always remember about that time is that it didn’t really seem like what it was. And if it wasn’t for what I knew was happening back in Pennsylvania at this moment, and the stress in my wife’s voice when she came through the front door, I honestly wouldn’t have been paying much attention to what was being said between these two sisters. 

“Tell her to go outside and check on him.” I remember how my words startled my wife. It was as if me simply telling her to tell Mickey to go out and do this most obvious thing had pushed a button that instantly brought Bernadette’s worst fears to the surface. The reality was a most devastating realization of those fears. 

Jay had passed away sitting in the driver’s seat of his car. You never forget these moments in your life. The details of a family tragedy will always burn themselves into your memory. For me it was my wife shouting into the phone over and over again, “He’s dead?” clearly begging for it not to be true. And then her wailing.

This was a family of eight siblings who’d reached, on average, their mid-sixties without ever having lost anyone. Jay’s death was simply unbelievable to all of us. 

Jay had possessed such a brilliant mind that when we were young I remember always being intimidated in his presence. I will never, in all my life, read as many books as Jay consumed in any one single year of his. He was incredibly soft-spoken but he was the kind of person you stepped up to with your own intelligence. What I remember most about every conversation I ever had with him was the questions which so often stumped me but also what an intense and respectful listener he was. I so wish now that I’d spent more of the last 37 years I’ve been in LA back home talking with him and learning from him. 

But we could hardly focus on grieving for Jay. We couldn’t simply do what families do when a loved one passes and try to process our loss. This was COVID-19 and our eyes were wide open. Jay was 67 years old but he was in solid physical condition. He took vitamins by the handful. He walked every day, was a frequent hiker and, for most of his life, a weightlifter. Other than Anthony, he was certainly the next most physically fit member of the family. He had no comorbidities and no health issues at all that the family was aware of and yet COVID had killed him in a little over two weeks. Across town, Anthony, John, and Winnie were likewise three weeks into a virus that so often only begins to do its worst to the human body as infections move beyond the second week. Bernadette was now terrified that she would lose even more family to the virus. 

My wife, her sisters, Keith, and I discussed whether we should tell the boys that Jay had passed. We all agreed that it wasn’t the right time, as we believed that the three were themselves still very much in a fight for their lives. So when Bernadette talked with Anthony the next day and he asked how Jay was doing, she told him that Jay was in the hospital. His response will stay with her always, “That’s where I should be.” 

The next day, Basie and Keith had just left the boys in Aliquippa and called us on their way home. We were told it was a beautiful Saturday in Pittsburgh. I remember my wife and I were driving somewhere in Santa Monica to get dinner and we four were on speaker phone in the car. As far as they could tell the three brothers’ conditions hadn’t worsened and we all took that as good news. I think after such a terrible loss we needed one moment and just one phone conversation that could be characterized as hopeful. But at the end of our conversation Basie added that she had a scratchy throat and felt like she was catching a cold. 

So, if you’re wondering, by now, as everyone reading this must surely be, was anyone in this family vaccinated? The answer is no. No one was vaccinated. There was a very strong anti-vaccine sentiment among the girls in the family that, believe it or not, persists to this day. The boys, however, were far less political and had seemed more or less ambivalent about getting vaccinated against COVID. But, ultimately, none of the four brothers were vaccinated. 

Three Ambulances, Three Hospitals 

The next day Keith drove down to Aliquippa alone to check on the boys as Basie had gotten sicker overnight. Moments after stepping into the house in Plan 12 and without even looking in on the other two brothers, Keith was on the phone with 911. Anthony, a marvelously fit bicyclist and hiker, and a notoriously healthy eater, was unresponsive, apparently conscious but staring blankly and unable to move or speak. Keith immediately suspected that he’d had a stroke. 

Each of the three brothers were taken to different hospitals. Winnie, the Vietnam vet, was taken to the VA hospital in Pittsburgh. He would be there for almost a month as he was treated for a blood clot on his lung. John, who’d been so weak that he was unable to speak on the phone since the entire ordeal began, was taken to UPMC Sewickley Valley Hospital with COVID pneumonia where he would stay for three weeks before being transferred to an extended care facility for an extra month to recover his strength. 

Anthony was life-flighted to Presbyterian, the stellar University of Pittsburgh adjacent medical center in the Oakland section of the city. The main threat to his survival those first weeks he was at Presby was still very much COVID-19. His oxygen levels were so low that the next step would have been putting him on a ventilator. My wife and I here in California were now the family contacts making medical decisions for Anthony. There was a conversation with one of the incredibly kind doctors taking care of him. I remember he used the word devastating to describe the stroke Anthony had suffered. He said it three times. 

The takeaway from the discussion was that given the severity of Anthony’s stroke and the difficulties he would have simply recovering from that level of brain injury, putting him on a ventilator for an indeterminable period of time was something that neither the family nor the doctor felt would have been the best decision for Anthony. 

Fortunately, it never came to that. Slowly, the grip that COVID-19 had on Anthony’s respiratory system eased. Within a month, he would be transferred to UPMC Montefiore which specializes in rehabilitation. But Anthony’s condition was not suitable for the level of rehabilitation therapies offered there so we were immediately tasked with finding a skilled nursing facility that had room for him and, it was hoped, one with a good track record for rehabilitating stroke victims. 

Deciding on where Anthony should go led to one of those cards-on-the-table moments that no family ever wants to face. My wife and I were out walking on Canon Drive on a bright January morning. Her cell phone rings. It’s a patient relations rep at Montefiore following up on what extended care facilities in the Pittsburgh area might work best for Anthony. We step into the doorway of a closed shop and put her on speaker phone. But in order to give informed input on where we would like Anthony to be sent, we now have to have, finally, that no-illusions discussion establishing exactly what his condition is, what it really means, and what his prospects are. 

There’s not much talk about sending Anthony somewhere where he’s going to get specialized physical rehab, he’s far from being a candidate for that. He’s paralyzed, of course, on his right side but they have to keep him restrained because he’s not mentally aware enough to avoid interfering with the IV and feeding tube with the mobility he still has on his left side. These graphic realities of her youngest brother’s condition move across my wife’s face like a shadow. She would tell me later that until that moment, she’d had hope. She’d really thought Anthony was going to get better. 

While all of this was happening, back in Oakdale, just outside of Pittsburgh, Basie had continued to worsen. At one point her son would find her unresponsive in the bathroom. When the ambulance took her away, her husband was too sick himself to accompany his wife to the hospital. Basie would spend the better part of three weeks in the hospital but would ultimately pull through without any long-term complications. Keith would quickly recover from his COVID infection. 

Their slim 26-year-old son, however, would also come down with the virus, and he would develop a blood clot, something that by all accounts was very rare in younger COVID patients. But thankfully, he too would recover within a few weeks. 

Jay’s official cause of death was recorded as a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in the lung, that came as he and his three brothers were into their third week of being bedridden with COVID. But COVID isn’t mentioned on his death certificate. Anthony’s stroke was caused by a blood clot in the brain. Winnie had a blood clot in his lung. Basie’s biological son developed a blood clot. All within one month’s time. None of these people had been vaccinated. All had COVID. None had received any COVID treatments before presenting with blood clots or the devastating effects of blood clots. None of them were ever placed on a ventilator.

We know that what happened to my wife’s family was unusual. Eight sick with COVID. Six of those eight, very ill. Total time spent in hospital by the family was close to four months. Four blood clots. One devastating stroke that ruined a 58-year-old’s life forever. And one tragic death. Yes, this was unusual. But it wasn’t unheard of during COVID. And it wasn’t anywhere close to being the worst outcome suffered by an American family during the pandemic. 

A Call For Justice

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we were told repeatedly to trust the science. And more than anyone on the face of the earth, the person most representative of the science that Americans were being told to trust was Dr. Anthony Fauci. But now we see that Dr. Fauci may have knowingly circumvented the 2014 directive of former President Barack Obama to pause any further gain of function research on harmful viruses within the American scientific research community. 

We have also recently learned that Dr. Fauci may have influenced the creation of a paper entitled The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2 that sought to divert attention away from the idea that the novel coronavirus had been engineered by research scientists in the Wuhan Institute of Virology working off a grant that had come from Fauci’s own National Institute of Health.

If this is true it likely led to a scenario never before seen in human history: A pandemic, actively killing millions around the world, caused by a virus that was created in a laboratory through research that was both outlawed by the government of the United States, while at the same time it was being sanctioned and funded by decision makers at the highest levels of that very same government’s public health apparatus. And the highest-ranking health official of all, someone we now know to have been administratively connected to the risky research itself as well as the deadly lab-leaked pathogen it created, was the most prominently displayed figure on our television screens as the representative of the science that we were being told to trust. 

People have called for something akin to the Nuremberg trials to pursue justice in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Certainly, some form of international world court would be justified and appropriate in the wake of the global death and societal destruction caused by what appears now to have been scientific research gone terribly wrong. Families and victims of what happened over the last four years should be far more than simply present at any such proceedings as mere voices on the sidelines. People who have lost loved ones must have the most prominent of voices in any official proceeding that seeks justice for this most disastrous course of human events in any of our lifetimes.

The court must be unimpeachable in the eyes of the public the world over and the punishments it hands down must be commensurate with the unprecedented loss of life that resulted from both the failures of scientific negligence as well as the intentional bureaucratic acts that paved the way for this human catastrophe. Justice must be served for the tens of millions whose lives were taken if we are to ever trust science again.

Likewise, anyone who participated in a cover up of evidence pointing to a scientifically engineered super-virus and the potential of that virus escaping from the Wuhan Institute of Virology must also face the most severe of punishments.

Just think of what could have been done had we known precisely where and how the virus originated back in the early days of the pandemic. We could have had the most pinpoint focused contact tracing possible enabling us to quarantine only those who had actually been in direct contact with the virus instead of locking down the entire human race for nearly two years. And it is entirely possible that we could have isolated SARS-CoV-2 in one region of the world and avoided completely the deadliest global pandemic in over 100 years.

Aftermath

My wife has lived in LA for 35 years and almost every one of those years, with the exception of 2020, she’s flown home at least three times a year to be with her brothers and sisters. Her love for her family is so strong that it would surely be seen as irrational by those who suggest severing ties with family members who refused to be vaccinated. 

In the 16 months since her first trip back after COVID struck her family she’s gone home to Pittsburgh ten times. She spends most of her time there now with her brother Anthony in the skilled nursing facility where he has been for the last year and a half. Bernadette always believed that Anthony would get better, and at the end of the day nothing she could have been told by those attending to her brother would have changed her mind.

Anthony was a physical specimen throughout his pre-COVID life. He was naturally muscular even as a teenager and was devoted to keeping himself fit. Many years ago, I pointed out to Bernadette how similar in physique, facial appearance and mannerisms her youngest brother was to a young Lebron James. (Except for Anthony being 5’9” and Italian.) And just like that, a lifelong Lebron James fan was born. We all believe that had Anthony not been in the condition he was in he would not have survived COVID. 

My wife’s love and devotion to her brother has lifted his spirits and the many hours she’s spent with him has made a pronounced impact on his progress. Her familial instincts and her faith that Anthony would get better have been proven correct. He has gotten better. He smiles, laughs, and tells us that he’s happy. He can now even stand up on his own and walk short distances. 

But gone is the person he used to be. 

Yes, Anthony can speak. And his mind will sometimes latch onto a big word. But they are only shards of thoughts that don’t really make much sense and are, to his family, only faint reminders of the fierce intelligence that Anthony once possessed. He cannot read. He cannot answer questions. He cannot seem to formulate his thoughts. Gone is the person who spoke and wrote Russian and spoke French and Kazakh fluently. Gone is the person who taught English for 15 years in Moscow and Kazakhstan for the United States Information Service and Georgetown University as a Senior English Teaching Fellow. Gone is the intellectual that Anthony once was. 

I speak now for him and Jay and for my wife and her family and I suspect millions of families around the world when I say that someone has to pay for this. 

A most sincere and deeply felt thank you goes out to all of the independent media voices and journalists for helping, by way of their relentless hard work and dogged professionalism, to provide an appropriate and long-awaited resolution to this piece which was started over a year and half ago. Those journalists have kept this story alive and brought us to this point where we have never been closer to finding out the truth about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. But let this moment be only the beginning of a global effort by humanity to achieve justice for what has occurred over the last four years.