In 2021, Deborah Conrad, a physician assistant from Rochester, New York, was fired from her role at Rochester Regional Health’s United Memorial Medical Center.

Deborah’s crime?

Doing her job.

When she noticed adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination in her patients, she reported it to VAERS — the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Federal regulations, including Emergency Use Authorization requirements for COVID-19 vaccines like Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, mandate that health care providers report specific adverse events to VAERS.

But when Deborah fulfilled her lawful duty, she was terminated.

Today, she is neck-deep in a landmark False Claims Act lawsuit against her former employer, challenging institutional suppression of reporting. Her case has thankfully reached the discovery phase, where evidence will be gathered to expose potential violations and seek justice for her retaliatory dismissal.

On a recent episode of “Back to the People,” Nicole Shanahan sat down with Deborah to hear a story that demands national attention.

In December 2020, the first COVID-19 vaccines hit the market, but they were initially reserved for high-risk individuals, especially the elderly, as that was considered the most vulnerable group.

Deborah immediately began noticing that several of her geriatric patients experienced deadly falls shortly after receiving the vaccine. “They would pass out and fall, hit their head, develop brain bleeds, strokes, acute mental status changes, heart attacks, sudden heart failure. I mean, the list just goes on and on, and the proximity to which they received the vaccine and then the onset of these symptoms often was within sometimes minutes to overnight,” she tells Nicole.

She explains that she and the staff at United Memorial Medical Center “did not receive any education about any possible side effects or what to do if [they] saw them happening,” nor were they trained to use the VAERS system, despite it being a legal requirement. Even their formal training ignored vaccine side effects.

“We are basically told they are safe and effective and to memorize the childhood vaccine schedule and that's it. And so it's ingrained in us from our training to never look at vaccines in any negative light,” she says.

Not knowing what to do about the obvious issues she was seeing in her patients, Deborah set out to find answers. “I went online and found the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and read all about it and taught myself how to file reports. … I then went and volunteered to be the reporting liaison and the educator for our system,” she says.

Initially, Deborah was rewarded for her above-and-beyond efforts. She was even “nominated by the New York State Society of Physician Assistance to sit on the board for professional misconduct for the state.”

But then things took a sharp turn.

Even though it required hours of her time to dig into medical records, take calls back from the CDC, and fill out pages of information for each case, Deborah continued to faithfully file VAERS reports for the sake of her patients and the millions of people across the country taking the vaccine.

“I've probably filed … close to 300 reports. I certainly think I am the person in the country that has filed the most VAERS reports at this point — really,” she says.

Sadly, none of Deborah’s reports have resulted in her patients receiving compensation — even the most well-documented and clear-cut cases.

Over time, Deborah started getting pushback from superiors who accused her of being anti-vaccine. They pelted her with questions, like “How do you know this is due to the COVID vaccine?” even though VAERS requires medical providers to report serious side effects that accompany vaccine administration, even if they think the events are unrelated.

“We're just mandatory reporters, as we are in child abuse situations, right? We're not there to judge who's abusing the child or determine that. That's not our job,” says Deborah.

But even though she explained the legal requirements and stressed the pre-eminence of patient safety to her supervisors, “the gaslighting just kept continuing.” They repeatedly labeled her “an anti-vaxxer” and told her to “toe the company line.”

But Deborah didn’t ease up. Having no support in the hospital, she began filing reports on her days off for both her own patients and the patients of other staff members, all while continuing to pressure supervisors to put a system in place.

One of her supervisors eventually elevated her concerns to higher-ups at Rochester Regional Health. “That's when the suppression really started,” says Deborah. Her VAERS reports were silently audited, and she was reprimanded for “over-reporting,” even though every report she filed matched “the exact criteria on VAERS.”

As a punishment, her supervisors limited the number of reports Deborah could file to just her own patients. When she demanded confirmation that other staff members were filing VAERs reports for their own patients, reminding her supervisors that failing to do so was “committing fraud,” she was met with resistance.

“They basically said, ‘It's not your business,”’ she recounts.

“And I said, ‘No, it is my business. … This is a criminal problem here — like you are billing for these vaccines, you are saying you are completing VAERS reports and you're not, and if I know about it and I do nothing about it, then I'm just as guilty.”’

When it was clear that she would get no support from her supervisors, Deborah contacted the CDC, the FDA, the New York State Department of Health, and the New York State accrediting body and was finally able to get some legal help. She even went public with her concerns.

If anything, this only expedited her termination. After months of being called an anti-vaxxer, accused of spreading vaccine misinformation, and receiving threats to file a petition for her license removal, Deborah was surrounded by HR reps from Rochester Regional Health during the middle of her shift on October 6, 2021, and fired.

“I wasn't allowed to get my things,” she says.

“My health insurance was canceled. I couldn't apply for unemployment. They even fought me in being able to get my benefit time off that they owed me.”

Today, Rochester Regional Health is claiming the corporation fired Deborah for refusing to get the vaccine, which was required for medical staff, but its case is shaky, as she was in the process of obtaining “a valid and approved religious exemption” when she was fired.

Thankfully, with her case now in the discovery phase and strong evidence of institutional suppression, Deborah has a promising chance of proving that her termination was retaliatory for her whistleblowing efforts to uphold patient safety.

To hear the most shocking details and stories from inside Deborah’s hospital, watch the full interview above.

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