An emergency room nurse from Louisiana who spouted discredited anti-vaccine conspiracy theories died of complications from COVID in the same hospital where she worked.
Olivia Guidry 23, a registered nurse in the emergency department at the Ochsner Lafayette General hospital in Louisiana died on Saturday after battling the virus for days in the hospital’s intensive care unit, The Advocate reports.
According to her sister, Guidry was diagnosed with COVID in early July. She ran a high fever and had a seizure. Fluid was later found on her brain and she was placed in a medically induced coma so doctors could attempt to remove it.Â
An MRI later showed brain damage and swelling and her condition worsened. On Sunday, her sister posted on social media that she had died.
“My sweet girl, there are so many things that I could say but my heart simply cannot find the words,” she wrote. I will miss you every day for the rest of my life … A beautiful, smart, kind, and loving girl with so much life left to live and who lived life with such joy and vibrancy”
However, based on her Twitter feed she was a COVID denier and anti-vaxxer who urged people not to take the vaccine.
“This vaccine has been released using recombinant DNA technology faster than any vaccine in the world. It manipulates your DNA at the tiniest molecular level. Do. Not. Get. It. It’s not safe,” she posted in July 2020.
She responded to a tweet the next day day vowing to leave the healthcare field if the vaccine was to be given annually like the flu shot.
She also retweeted a Twitter user that called COVID tests fake and questioned whether efforts to limit the spread of the virus were actually tests “to see how much they can control us.”
Since the start of the pandemic Louisiana has recorded almost 490,000 total cases and more than 10,000 deaths.
The number of cases and hospitalizations in the state are once again on the rise with the Delta variant now the dominant strain and the rate of vaccination slows.
