PULMONARY NURSE SPEAKS OUT HOW COVID POLICY WAS KILLING PATIENTS | SC MEDICAL AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
15th September, 2021 – This is Albert Spence, a 31-year pulmonary nurse veteran, now no longer working as a practising nurse due in large part to the changes in the hospitals’ Covid policy. It is chilling to watch how Albert Spence came to realise that he was aiding and abetting the demise of patients under his care, due to the change in Covid policy – specifically the PCR Test.
Original Source : https://video.scstatehouse.gov/mp4/20210915SMedicalAffairsSenateSubcommittee11529_1.mp4 ( @ 02:44:50 )
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE: The video posted to YouTube on September 15, 2021 of the testimony by Albert Spence, a pulmonary nurse with 31 years of experience, before the South Carolina State Senate Medical Affairs Committee, was almost immediately removed by YouTube “for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.”
TRANSCRIPT
ALBERT SPENCE: Thank you, guys, for taking the time to hear us. My name is Albert Spence. I’ve been a nurse for 31 years, until approximately April 1st, after cardiac surgery, I’m done. After what I experienced as a traveling covid nurse, bedside nurse, between January 20th and approximately April 1st, I had told my wife, “I’m not going back if they paid me a lot more than the 120 dollars an hour I was making.” I’ve turned down 156 dollars an hour. I ain’t going back. Not after what happened to me on January the 20th of this year.
In my 18 years as a bedside pulmonary nurse in Anderson, South Carolina, and it was pulmonary telemetry, but a heavy lean on the pulmonary, if it was anything respiratory in our community, we got it on our floor, because we were like the only floor in the hospital that had negative pressure rooms. We got the TB patients, TB rule out usually, but we got everything, whether it was Flu A, RSV, HCAP, Community Acquired Pneumonia, COPD, exacerbation that turns into pneumonia, all of this, and all of the physicians that I worked with that put me to work, and I just did what they told me to, I’m not a doctor, I’m not an expert, but I have watched what they did over 18 years, and it always revolved around “Get your patient up in the chair, Albert.”
They gave antibiotics, breathing treatments, and steroids, for 18 years, for bacterial pneumonia, no matter what brought them in, inflammation was the enemy, they explained to me. Inflammation is the enemy. Antibiotics and steroids and breathing treatments, which was steroidal breathing treatments.
And they said, you have got to mobilize these patients. If they don’t get up in the chair, and you don’t get them up on the bedside commode chair and you don’t start walking the bathroom, if you just let them them lay in the bed, the horse that lays down, stays down. You got to get your patient moving.
So nursing, PTOT, we got them patients up. Our nurses assistants, we got them patients up, we got them moving, which they could much more readily clear their secretions, they ate better, they felt better, they did better, they used their [inaudible] and we would get them out of there 7 – 10 days. No matter what brought them in, bacterial or viral, we got our patients out.
Patients would say, “Am I going to be alright?” I’m sticking them with IVs and loading them up and asking questions, get them in there, I’d say, “You’re going to be alright. We get our patients out of here.” Ninety nine percent of the time, we got them out, I mean home back to the nursing home, to rehab, or home. We were successful.
And so, when all this covid stuff started, I was the biggest covid believer there ever was, how bad it was, how virulent it was. This is serious stuff! I had an elderly mother at the time who was end stage lung and kidney, and she didn’t need this stuff. I didn’t want to bring it home to myself or my wife. I had a covid unit set up in my garage so I could isolate myself, when I caught covid, from my family. I took this very seriously. I believed in all the scientists. And I believed that we did, that what we were doing, was helping.
And the few days that we had covid on our unit, when half of it was designated covid, I worked with a few covid patients. When I got floated to other units, I worked on covid patients there, and saw what they did, and I was asking all the nurses, “Have y’all caught it? How bad is it? What’s the symptoms?” I wanted to know for me and my family, too. And, “Are you going to take the vaccine?” We talked about nothing but covid all day every day, forever, covid, covid, covid. Because I wanted to know. I believe in self-preservation, too. And I also love my patients. And love all of them. We want them to get out of there, and we did.
So, I’m on a covid unit in Anderson, I gave Remdesivir to this guy, and he was hispanic. They don’t complain. They’re very stoic. So this guy, within an hour, he starts crackling. I could hear him from the doorway. I knew that was flash pulmonary edema. I can’t say that, I’m a nurse, but I can go to the nurse practitioner in this case and say, “You might want to look at him. He’s looking bad.” And she got to the doorway and could hear it, and she came out, and she said, “[inaudible] stat, and push him to the ICU.”
I didn’t know why. I’d just given him Remdesvir. It’s a anti-viral, it’s supposed to make him better. I just thought, well, he’s just turning bad. I didn’t understand what Remdesivir could do as far as flash pulmonary edema, increasing your inflammation, and your response to inflammation. I didn’t connect the dots. I’m still new at this. But I can tell you, whether it’s lawnmower dust, whether it’s anything you inhaled that would irritate your lungs, they’re going to swell up. Any reaction that your lungs are feeling, whether it’s viral or bacterial or environmental, it’s going to be an injury to your lungs, your body’s natural response is to swell up. That’s all the fluid, and it’s the perfect breeding ground for bacteria.
Antibiotics, breathing treatments, and steroids, here we go. But everybody was treated the same because it all goes to bacterial pneumonia. That’s why when you go in the hospital and see what the covid patients are getting, it is not anti-virals but for the first five days, after that it’s all antibiotics. We give them steroids, yes, we give them zinc and vitamin D— or did. And early on, we gave convalescent plasma. That’s the blood transfusion of people that had covid and got over it. And I was really hopeful that was going to make a big deal. But before I left Anderson Hospital on December 26th, I asked a full-time covid nurse, I said: “So that plasma you’re giving, that’s truly helping?”
She said, she didn’t tell me why, she said, “Give it slow. No more than 100 ccs an hour.”
Typically, we give plasma, it’s 200, 250, we slam it in there, no big deal, normally, for different reasons.
But she said, “For covid patients, you better not go over 100.”
I said, “Noted.”
So I took three weeks off, did all my paperwork, went travel nursing, covid nursing, full time covid nursing, Lexington Hospital. When I got there, we’re going to do the convalescent plasma.
She said, manager, she said, “No, they’ve quit doing that.”
I said, “Why?!”
She said, “They’s dead in two days. Average.”
I was, like, “Wow. I’m glad y’all are seeing the light, recognizing what’s not working, and making the difference for our patients. Thank goodness y’all saw the light and quit doing that. You tried it, it don’t work, I get it. Now what do we do?”
And they said, “Get to it.”
So my first week there, I had some really, really bad covid patients on high-flow oxygen. They said they’d been there three to four weeks.
I said, “Can you get up? Can you sit up?” My reflex is, get you up!
They said, “I can’t even take the mask off long enough to put a spoon up to my face for a second, and my stats go down to seventy.”
These people are end stage. Yes, they’re not on the ventilator, but I’m telling you, their white counts were good. Their bacteria was over. But their lungs are shot. From three, four weeks of bacterial pneumonia that just eats their lungs up, there’s no available lung surface left for oxygen exchange, no CO2 can go on through scar tissue. That’s why they can’t get off the high-flow, that’s why they get on the ventilator and can’t get off, because their diaphragms are weak, they’re laying there, they got a tube in everywhere and they [inaudible] a couple extra.
The ventilator is a death-spiral down. So once you get on, you’re bad, you’re probably not going to get off that ventilator. But the high-flow people couldn’t come off either, even though they were stabilized on a high-flow, they couldn’t come off all that stuff. And if you move them, when they’ve been there three weeks laying in the bed.
And I asked them, “Have you been getting up?”
They said, “You’re the first person that tried to get me up. You’re the first person that’s tried to get me up.”
Yes, PT and OT was ordered, but they go in there and the patients would whine and say, I feel bad. “OK, mark you down for refuse, we’ll do some bed mobility, but we’re not going to mobilize you, because you feel bad.” So it’s partly the patient’s fault, they want to roll in there, lay in the bed, and get better. You can’t do that!
As a pulmonary nurse, I would really, we would all really push these patients up and get them going. But for covid patients, we were encouraged to limit our exposure, we were encouraged to group our care. I talked to one covid nurse, not this last hospital, but another covid nurse, they said yes, the pharmacists will work with you and they will schedule all the meds around breakfast, lunch and dinner, to limit the times you have to go in there.
Oh, that’s a great idea, I won’t catch it, I thought. That’s great. And so my first week in Columbia I was, had my head down doing my thing, IVs, pills, in and out of the room, putting all the stuff on [inaudible] etcetera, following the protocol, I didn’t want to catch it. When I got off of work I stripped down to my underwear and crocs and went home. OK?
Second week, there. Well, instead of 38 patients, we have 30. Hmm!
Next week, 24, 25.
Next week, 15, 16.
I said, “Wow, where’s covid going?”
They said, “Oh, well, it’s just.”
So, are we going to stay empty, 15 beds out of 38? And this is a covid unit.
All rooms were negative pressure, the hallways were built negative pressure. They didn’t convert it, it was built that way. So if covids are going to come into this hospital, this is probably the best place to put them.
I said, “But, what are y’all going to do with all these 15 empty rooms?”
“Well, we’re going to take all the covids and put them on one end, and this whole other end of the hall, we’re going to designate that regular patients.”
I said, “All regular patients not in covid”?
They said, “We’re going to hold seven just in case covid comes back.”
I said, “Cool.”
I got an easier job now, I got three covids today.
So the next week we dropped to like 7 or 8 covids. I said, “Wow. Out of 38, we’re down to 7.” I said, “Where did covid go? This is great!”
And they said, “Yeah, you’re going to have more regular patients, cardiac, GI bleeders, stuff like that.”
I said, “Great.”
So next week, we dropped down to 2 or 3. I said, “You got to be kidding me, something is going on.”
That’s when I found out that on January the 20th, roughly, the CDC guidelines recommended that we roll the PCR cycling from the high 30s to 28. Like it was originally designed to do.
And then it hit me. And I lost sleep over it. I was having chest pain over it. And I, it woke me up in the middle of the night. Hit me hard. I could not sleep. I tossed and turned because my first week or two there, I didn’t do it, I didn’t lead them to the gate, but I’m the guy that euthanized people. They call it “comfort care.”
But when you get to the point you can’t get [inaudible] walk, you get so upset you ain’t seen your family except maybe on an iPad in weeks, and you’re never going to come off the high-flow, and the doctor says, “You’ve done your best. You’ve done your best. But this is going to be it for you.” And so the patients get all teary-eyed and upset, and they call in the palliative team, and they all hold their hand and cry, and they said, “But we can keep you comfortable.” Here comes Albert. He’s got the morphine and Adavan. And I load them up, take off the high-flow and they gasp themselves to death. And I’m the guy that’s pushing the button, like in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. No, I didn’t lead them there, and innocently, I didn’t know what I was doing, I just do what I’m told. It’s not my fault.
But after January the 20th, and then on into February 1st or so, I saw what change in the PCR did on my floor. And then I saw what I had not done for my covid patients.
And then I was also greatly encouraged, “Don’t move them unless their stats are above 90. Don’t move them!”
I was, “But, but, I’ve always been told, get ’em up and get ’em going!”
“No! Wait till their stats are high 90s to move them.”
I’m like, “No, they can tolerate a minute or two down in the low 80s. Get them up, make them move, make them sit up, and then they will learn to breathe deeper, and we can wean them off the oxygen.”
No, their focus was, “Put them on more oxygen. Let them lay in the bed.”
I said, OK. Then I realized where our mistake is. Yes, early treatments, the HCQ, the Ivermectin, real smart, man, give them at least Tamiflu! But when the PCR cycling changed, I’m telling you, it was a big change on my floor.
According to the CDC, according to DHEC [Department of Health and Environmental Control], on their webpage it says by January 20th 1.6% of South Carolinians had been vaccinated. One point six. Go forward a month, February 20th, according to the CDC, they said 7- 9%, according to DHEC, they got the number exactly, it’s 8% of South Carolinians who had been vaccinated. But we on our floor saw a 67%, in South Carolina we saw a 67% decrease in covid cases from January 15th to February 15th. Actually, it said Feb 3rd was vaccinated, but you’re not fully considered vaccinated until that vaccine has been in your body two weeks. So that’s January 15th to February 15th, 8%, and we had a 67% drop in covid cases.
Yes, covid’s real. But so is Flu A. How many of these covid cases were really flu? With this fake, false, faulty PCR cycling? Cranked up to I don’t know what. Fauci even said back in July of 2020 in this Virology Weekly podcast, live, he said, “A PCR over 35 is absolute false, you’re not going to get correct data, you’re going to be giving out misinformation.” He said that back in July of 2020.
The CDC said, crank that PCR up to 40. That’s what they did all of 2020 to generate all this giant pandemic and fear that kept me afraid of going into my rooms and doing anything but grouping my care. That’s what brought us all this fear. This pandemic is the PCR cycling. I’m telling you, it’s the PCR is the elephant in the room.
Yes, covid’s real. But we’ve got to jump on this like we’ve always jumped on upper respiratory infections. And yes, early treatments with Ivermectin and HCQ.
Let me just tell you guys, if I get sick, I am not going to the hospital! Yes, I trust science. I just had open heart surgery, triple bypass, April 5th. But I thought, I’m home, I’m sitting in a recliner, I’m thinking, it’s over, it’s done, no big deal. Few people die because of their dumbness and determination to make us go down this path to get a shot. I’m out of it, though. It’s over, it don’t matter anymore.
And then, here comes Delta. The same PCR that was giving us a pandemic in 2020, falsely, is the same PCR that took it away when they took the cycling down to 28, on the 20th, per the CDC guidelines.
Now the same PCR, this is going to be change that for a multiplex whatever, at the end of this year, this same PCR is now giving us Delta, Zeta, Lamba, whatever. I don’t think so. I don’t trust them because I know they can’t let it go away because Pfizer’s got a million doses they want to stick to us, a billion doses they want to stick to us. For what reason? What’s their motive? And what’s there any connection between the CDC, CEOs and Pfizer? They’re switching CEOs back and forth like it’s commonplace, and there’s no conflict of interest there between the CDC and the FDA and Pfizer or any other big drug companies? And I also know first hand, second hand, sorry, information that, why did Pfizer get FDA approved? Not JJ, not Moderna? Come to find out, I know somebody on the inside, indirectly, they said, Pfizer gave the most money to the lobbyists. And what do the lobbyists do with that money? They gave the money to the lobbyists, and the lobbyists lobby their case to the FDA. What they’re doing with that money, I have no idea, but it’s awful suspicious to me that Pfizer gave the most money and the lobbyists make it happen.
And these covid death shots, I know at least a couple people’s paralyzed waist down, hope they’re getting better, and paresthesia. Look at Senator Ron Johnson’s video where he interviews people that have been hurt by the shot.
It’s happening, people are dying from the shot. I got covid nurse friends that say, “Yep, they took the shot two days ago and they’ve had heart attack, stroke, they have thrombocytopenia, and they get all kind of nerve weird stuff going on. And they die. And a lot just, you know, it’s reported to VAERS, I get it, but a lot of people don’t report to VAERS. It’s not right politics.
And I’ll tell you something else that was big going on between the covid I took care of versus my 18 years, our patients, if they weren’t getting better, meaning, their oxygen’s demand wasn’t going down, we weren’t winging their oxygen down because they were resistant to what we was doing, or, if we started going up on their oxygen, something’s not going the right way, we consulted Pulmonology. Pulmonology would go in there and order a slew more tests, usually repeat blood gases, chest x-rays, CTs, and they’d do a bronchoscopy.
I was told back in 2020, when I was at my old hospital, “We don’t do broncs on covid patients.”
I said, “Why?” We do so many broncs here, they tried to do a bronc on me. Everybody gets a bronc. Just hold your hand up, they’ll do a bronc on you.
No broncs for covid, why?
“Oh, it’ll aeorsolize it in the bronc lab.”
I said, OK. Well, I got to Columbia, and yeah, sure enough, I’d never heard of anybody getting a bronc. Ever.
What does a bronc do? It sucks out some junk, they get a culture, to make sure they’re on the right antibiotic, which sometimes resulted in the doctors going, “Yeah, it’s not staff, it’s not strep, it’s in this case fungal. Switch the antibiotics altogether.” But at least cleaning them out give the antibiotic a foothold chance to get them going, and then, what do you know, we’re winging their oxygen down. It always helped them, these broncs.
We can’t do bedside broncs anymore? We can’t do broncs in the bedside with negative pressure even? With disposable bronc tubes?
Nope. No one gets a bronc when you have covid.
That, to me, is— the way we used to treat respiratory patients, the way we’re treating now— that is murder. Withholding care is murder. When you know better. I didn’t know better, I just aided and abetted. I ain’t going back.
SENATOR SHANE MARTIN: Mr. Spence, can I ask you a question please? And help me. I’m going to ask two questions. One: Help me understand when you talk about the PCR cycling. Can you explain?
ALBERT SPENCE: Amplification.
SENATOR SHANE MARTIN: One, explain PCR for the committee, so it’s on video and any other members any watching at home, can you explain PCR and what you meant by the cycling and the 28 versus the 35 of the 40.
ALBERT SPENCE: The PCR, Polymer Chain Assay [Reaction], it is a, it’s like the DNA testing, they want to find out who killed somebody, right? It’s like a DNA test, it amplifies this biological material, bigger and bigger and bigger until you can see it and go, “Oh, there it is. I get the picture now. I see what it is.” Well, when you amplify—
SENATOR SHANE MARTIN: Is that a test for covid, is that what you’re talking about?
ALBERT SPENCE: PCR swab up the nose.
SENATOR SHANE MARTIN: Swab up the nose, that’s what you’re calling a PCR.
ALBERT PENCE: That is correct.
SENATOR SHANE MARTIN: And then when you go to analyze that, that’s where you, the 28 versus the 40, is how much you magnify? Please clear that up.
ALBERT SPENCE: Sure. It’s like an overhead projector, you blow things up. OK, you blow it up bigger, a little bit bigger, they cycle it over and over and over so that they expand it out so they can see what they have.
SENATOR MARTIN: OK. And before January 20th what, explain that?
ALBERT SPENCE: The CDC had the cycling, encouraged the cycling to be up to 40. The original inventor of the thing, OK, the developers, he come out and interviewed before he passed, before covid come out, and he said, Fauci is going to, and his people are going to exploit this. He said, anything above 28 cycles is horrible. It, they’re going to exploit it to their own—
SENATOR MARTIN: But help me understand what it means by, what makes it horrible? Is it telling, is it giving a false positive? I’m trying to bring this down to laymen’s terms for everybody on the committee and people watching.
ALBERT SPENCE: False positives.
SENATOR MARTIN: OK, so now, before January 20th it’s 40 cycles and it’s giving more false positives.
ALBERT SPENCE: Totally distorts. Even Fauci said that in July of 2020. He said, anything above 35. Fauci said this. Anything above 35 is complete bogus false positive worthless. And the CDC had it set at 40.
SENATOR MARTIN: So that being set at 40, let’s say we’re getting more false positives. What happens to the person with the false positive? They get a false positive, are they going to the hospital?
ALBERT SPENCE: If a person is sick, OK, they go, “I don’t feel good, I’m going to the doctor.” Well, let’s see what’s going on with you. Well, early on, and I have some family members that are doctors, early on, they would say, “OK, you’re covid positive.” They’d go, “Well, I feel good.” They’d say, “You need to go to the hospital so they can evaluate you and watch you, monitor you just in case you take a turn.” So a lot of people initially went to the hospital to get monitored, and etcetera, and they’re hospitalized. And so, what do they do when they go to the hospital? They put them in the bed. They shut the door, lock the door, essentially. They lay in the bed. The horse that lays down, stays down. They get to where they do need oxygen, they do get to the point where they do need oxygen. They develop hospital acquired pneumonia. Hospital acquired, health care acquired pneumonia. HCAP.
And so, yeah, now you do have pneumonia after you’ve been there a week laying in the bed with the door shut, you can’t see your family, and eating yuck food. Duh. Anybody would get pneumonia.
So you just develop, everybody’s got bacteria. So that’s how these people initially, a lot of them in my opinion, would develop pneumonia. They’re laying in the bed. And they can’t get out.
But later on, now, a lot of my doctor friends, they’re saying, “Go home. Go home on Musinex, maybe a Z-Pack. Go home. And if you get bad, then come back in.” But if they ask for Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, some doctors are starting to give it, even these I’m speaking of.
SENATOR SHANE MARTIN: OK, and then, help me understand now when you were talking about the decline in covid patients, is that coinciding with when the cycling was dropping from 40 down to 28? Is that what you’re telling the committee?
ALBERT PENCE: The cycling dropped from 40s down to 28. My sick patients were sick, except, we worked with them a lot more. We were in there a lot more. We weren’t scared to go there and feed them, we weren’t scared to go in there and get them up in the chair. We worked with them a lot more and they got out of there. But it’s a fear thing. You know, people don’t want to go in and die. They don’t want go in and take it home and kill their family members.
So they really are backing off a lot. And then you add to it, no bronchoscopies for these people. It’s horrible.
SENATOR SHANE MARTIN: My second line of question is going to fall, you mentioned RSCV. My son had RSV when he was a baby, and we used to have to, my wife and I, even though he went to the hospital, we would give him breathing treatments. Can you explain some of the differences between RSV and a covid patient, a real covid patient, not a false positive? Just for, what would be difference of those two, as far as the lungs would go?
ALBERT SPENCE: If there’s swelled up, whatever it is, OK, whether it’s RSV, Flu A, anything, bacteria even, everything that’s on your lungs, it’s irritating your lungs, smoke inhalation from burning leaves, everything or everything will make your lungs be irritated, they’re going to swell up. It’s a natural body reaction. Covid patients, get this virus, it is an inflammatory response in your lungs, they swell up, and that swelling is the perfect breeding ground for bacteria. You need dark, you need warm, you need food, and you need water to grow bacteria. That extra swelling is the water, that’s the breeding ground that RSV would be treated, yes with breathing treatments, yes with steroids. And antibiotics because every doctor knows, that’s the perfect breeding ground for pneumonia to get started, so they nip it early. So when you come in for covid, you get treated the same way, you get antibiotics, breathing treatments and steroids. But the difference is, with covid patients, you get a locked door, you get an iPad maybe, and you don’t get patients up in the chair as much. You’re not giving them no real physical therapy in that, yes, therapy is a lot ordered, but they’re just not working with them.
SENATOR SHANE MARTIN: Thank you for that. Senator Verdin has a question.
SENATOR DANIEL VERDIN: What position in the bed or chair, you’re saying
you’re not getting them up and moving, not getting any physical activity. What percentage in the 24 hour period are they on, can you tell me whether they’re prone, what degree are they, I don’t know the terms, back to stomach?
ALBERT SPENCE: Most people when they lay in the bed, they lay flat on their back. Unless we as nursing, who are encouraged to go in there and turn them and position them every two hours, by the time we schedule that one to turn and position in case that they had incontinent care, we’d go and check them for that, and that’s when we would turn them while, after doing personal care. Now, in the units they have beds that are on auto-tilt, and they may go in there even less frequently. They typically manage those patients from the hallway, and the IV tubing goes across the floor, sandwiched between the glass plates, across the room, and up into their bed. So they manage all the IV fluids out here and wear a simple flu mask and don’t go in there.
SENATOR DANIEL VERDIN: What prompted you to leave the hospital setting and go to the home treatment setting?
ALBERT SPENCE I left AnMed which was my home base for 18 years because I saw at least 14 on my unit, covid, not covid, regular pulmonary telemetry nurses, get covid. They said, “Oh, I was positive, I was positive, I was positive. I had it, I took my 10 days at home.” We did not retest our employees when they come back. They did their 10 days at home of quarantining, after being covid positive, they all come back and they said, “I had the sniffles, I had a cough, I had a upper respiratory infection—”
SENATOR DANIEL VERDIN: So you left the hospital to end care for, to try to stay safe, try to get away from the virus?
ALBERT SPENCE: I left the hospital because I wasn’t afraid of covid no more.
SENATOR DANIEL VERDIN: Oh, OK.
ALBERT SPENCE: I wanted to do travel nursing and make the big bucks.
SENATOR DANIEL VERDIN: Had you ever, OK. So quite a bit of pay increase.
ALBERT SPENCE: Yeah, 150 bucks an hour? Compared to 40?
SENATOR DANIEL VERDIN: What’s your introduction to the committee? How were you made aware of this hearing today? Do you follow the work of the committee?
ALBERT SPENCE: First let me say, when I was on the floor at Anderson—
SENATOR DANIEL VERDIN: I’m looking for real short answers because I’m trying my chairman’s patience. Just.
ALBERT SPENCE: I left the hospital because I wasn’t afraid of covid no more, I saw so many people get over it. So I went covid nursing. But after covid nursing, I realized that I cannot go back. I cannot go back. I saw too much, and so much I disagree with. I just can’t go back.
SENATOR DANIEL VERDIN: How were you made aware of your opportunity to testify today?
ALBERT SPENCE: Oh, I’m sorry. I was sitting on the couch, and my wife said, you know, Delta’s here, Delta’s back. And Delta’s, I was like, they can’t bring it back. They can’t bring covid back. They got the same PCR, they can’t bring it back like it was in 2020, not that big pandemic thing. This is, somebody’s monkeying with the PCR machine again. And I said—
SENATOR DANIEL VERDIN: So there was a notice on this meeting about 4 or 5 days ago. What was your—
ALBERT SPENCE: My wife saw something on FaceBook about a freedom rally
at Prisma Hospital in Greenville, people wanting to not take the shot, be mandated to take the shot, nursing staff. And I said, Oh, I got to go stand out there with them. And just standing out there with them, even though I’m out of it, even though I’m done, I went out there and said, I’ve got to stand there and support these people. This is wrong, making people take a shot or lose your job, which makes you lose your house, etcetera. You can’t nurse anymore.
SENATOR DANIEL VERDIN: But you’re insulated because you’re retired.
ALBERT SPENCE Yes, that’s so. I’m not that noble, I’m not going to lose anything. So when I went to that thing—
SENATOR DANIEL VERDIN: Thank you.
ALBERT SPENCE: I met a couple people that said, please come to our next rally, and then they invited me to come here and begged me to come here. So that’s how and why. I didn’t plan on speaking out, I’m not a public speaker. I’m the bump on a log that never says anything, honestly. And I’m sorry to take up so much of your time.
SENATOR SHANE MARTIN: Well, we actually enjoyed hearing from the heart, and just something that you’ve actually done, and I really appreciate you being here.
ALBERT SPENCE: And I got a lot of covid nurses and friends that are saying the same thing but they can’t speak out because they still have a house payment. And they’re really upset about this. Thank you.
SENATOR SHANE MARTIN: Thank you.
[END]
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