By Joe Gervais

Today marks five years to the day since I lost my mother and my brother-in-law to the same hospital machine.

My brother-in-law caught COVID and got the full protocol: ventilator, remdesivir, the works. My mom got the Moderna shot and ended up in the same system — same drugs, same vents. It didn’t matter that one was in California and one in New York. My dad, an asthmatic on his regular steroid inhaler, got hit with the shot too, landed in the hospital, got remdesivir, but somehow walked out. I believe the inhaler may have saved his life, and observational data at the time and later reviews suggested that people on regular inhaled corticosteroids for asthma or COPD sometimes had better COVID outcomes. Three family members, same deadly stretch of 2021, same “standard of care.” Two never came home. I wish I could say these were the only impacts of Covid-19, but others have been affected since then.

I’m not here to relitigate their medical charts. I’m here because the thing that still burns is what they did to anyone who dared question the script while my family was dying.

The Censorship Machine Was Real—And It Was Coordinated

Back then, if you suggested the virus might have come from a lab in Wuhan, you were a conspiracy theorist. If you mentioned ivermectin, you were pushing “horse paste.” If you pointed out the shots didn’t stop transmission, you were dangerous.

We now know—from the Twitter Files, the recently settled Missouri v. Biden case, and internal documents that have trickled out—that the federal government, Big Tech, and the pharma giants worked hand-in-glove to shut those voices down. Doctors who spoke up lost licenses, hospital privileges, and reputations. Pierre Kory, Peter McCullough, the FLCCC crew—they weren’t cranks; they were censored while the official line kept shifting.

YouTube yanked Senate testimony. Facebook labeled posts “misinformation” at the direct request of the White House and CDC. Pharmacies were told not to fill ivermectin scripts. All while people like my mom and brother-in-law were being fed into a protocol that, in those early waves, had ventilator mortality rates that still make me sick to think about.

Ivermectin: The “Horse Paste” Smear That Silenced Doctors

The smear campaign was vicious. “Don’t take horse dewormer,” the cable anchors sneered, while ignoring that ivermectin is a Nobel Prize-winning human medicine that’s been safely used for decades.

Early in the pandemic, frontline doctors saw real results with early treatment protocols that included ivermectin. They testified. They published. They got deleted.

Later studies are mixed—some large trials found no benefit in hospitalized patients, others (especially early-use meta-analyses) showed reductions in mortality and progression. The point isn’t that it was a miracle cure. The point is that cheap, available treatments were actively suppressed while we waited for the shiny new mRNA shots. That wasn’t science. That was policy.

The Shots That Were Never “Safe and Effective” the Way They Sold Them

They told us the vaccines were “safe and effective.” They redefined “vaccine” on the fly so the mRNA shots qualified. They promised they’d stop transmission. They didn’t. CDC and FDA eventually admitted it. Breakthrough cases became the norm.

Myocarditis and pericarditis? Rare, they said—until the warnings kept getting updated, especially for young males. Excess deaths? We’re still arguing about the numbers, but the pattern is hard to ignore. Natural immunity? Dismissed as conspiracy until studies quietly confirmed it was robust. Unfortunately, we are still struggling to find the truth as lawfare still rages today. Just two weeks ago a Massachusetts federal judge issued a preliminary injunction staying the new appointments to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and blocking recent changes to the vaccine schedule.

My family lived the other side of the slogan. My mom got the shot and never should have been in that hospital bed. The protocol did the rest.

What “Conspiracy Theory” Means in 2026

Five years later, the lab-leak theory is no longer fringe. Vaccine side-effect signals that got people banned are now in FDA labels. The censorship enterprise has been dragged into court and exposed in congressional hearings.

Yet the same people who ran the playbook still insist they were right and we were the danger.

I don’t write this to score points. I write it because my mom and brother-in-law deserved better than a one-size-fits-all protocol and a gag order on doctors who saw something different. My dad deserved better than watching his wife die through an exterior window of the hospital because he was no longer a patient and banned from the hospital until the day we made the decision to end life support. My wife was on the opposite coast watching her brother die from the same protocol.

While my mother and my wife’s brother both died that day, what didn’t die was my faith in Jesus. My wife called me around midnight my time, 3 a.m. her time, to say she was taking her nieces and sister-in-law to the hospital, since my brother-in-law wasn’t expected to make it through the night. Immediately after the call, a friend from Fiji messaged me to say they were going to a prayer meeting—did I need prayer? Boy, did I. In the hospital later that morning, I got into a conversation about my faith and my missions work with Mom’s nurse. That nurse would later bend protocol so my dad and I could be in the room while Mom took her last breath. Shortly after, when I went back to my Dad’s house, a pastor from Papua New Guinea messaged to say the Holy Spirit said I needed prayer. Sometimes I need neon lights to see God working in my life. Five years ago, God showed up with all the lights turned on during a day I desperately needed Him.

If you lost someone in those years, you know the ache doesn’t fade on the anniversary. It sharpens.

The least we can do now is refuse to let them memory-hole what really happened: the censorship, the suppressed treatments, the over-promised shots, and the human cost of blind trust in “the science” when it was really just the narrative.

We were never the conspiracy theorists.

We were just the ones paying attention.