I cannot believe this is still going on. Hospitals must be held accountable for all these deaths.
Nov 2025 and we have had zero accountability and many of the same protocols are still in place.
Michael V. “Mike” Burns was a 67-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran, a husband, and a man who had served his country. In early August 2020, he was admitted to a military base hospital in Okaloosa County, Florida. Eight days later, on August 11, 2020, he was gone.
His death was a “hospital protocol” loss, one more life surrendered inside an institution that his family believed would protect him.
What unfolded in those eight days matches a now-familiar pattern families across America have described. Mike was isolated from his loved ones after admission. Cut off at the very moment when a patient needs advocacy, comfort, and clear eyes on their care. In that separation, the system moved swiftly, not toward individualized treatment, but through a conveyor belt of standardized, high-risk interventions. This pattern, documented by thousands of families, includes forced isolation, refusal to communicate, aggressive oxygen strategies, and a narrow menu of incentivized drugs.
All too often delivered without true informed consent and accompanied by heavy sedation that clouds a patient’s ability to fight or even speak for themselves.
Mike received a cascade of protocol drugs: remdesivir, dexamethasone, tocilizumab, antibiotics (including azithromycin and Rocephin), blood thinners (including Lovenox), vitamin C, convalescent plasma, albuterol, oxygen, and sedatives such as Precedex and morphine. He was never placed on a ventilator, yet powerful sedatives were used, raising the question every family now knows to ask: why so much chemical restraint for a man who was still breathing on his own? In case after case, these combinations have led to rapid decline, secondary complications, and families left with more questions than answers.
Inside that locked-down world, the dehumanizing signals add up: isolation from family, the relentless push toward the protocol’s “standard of care,” the use of drugs with known risks, and a clinical coldness that treats the person as a case to be managed rather than a life to be saved. Families describe phones being removed or ignored, pleas for alternatives brushed aside, and a drumbeat of fear—“he’s very sick”—used to enforce compliance. These were not isolated mistakes; they were systemic choices that turned care into harm.
Mike’s death on a U.S. military base hospital is especially painful. Those who serve expect that the uniform they once wore will mean something when they need help—that the system they defended will defend them. Instead, his final days looked like so many others: a veteran separated from his wife, run through a protocol playbook that prized speed and conformity over caution and consent, and silenced by sedation while the clock ran out. For Sharon, his wife, the loss is not only personal—it is a betrayal by an institution that should have honored his life with careful, compassionate medicine.