She hasn’t hesitated to be the first in when an emergency hits and medical professionals are needed. She’s lost count of the number of times she’s woken up on a cot in the middle of nowhere, boots still strapped to her feet, and ready to go.
But in tears during an interview with The Epoch Times, she detailed her ordeal with harassment and doxing over the past year and how she’s contemplated suicide due to crippling anxiety and depression.
“It took such a toll on my mental health. I wasn’t sleeping and wasn’t eating,” Sirotek said.
To regain her mental health, she decided to step back from the group she started. But even that decision brought pain.
“I said after I left New York, I'd do everything that I can to make sure it didn’t happen again,” Sirotek said, recalling the death she witnessed when she volunteered in New York as a nurse at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I mean, for me to step back and take a break just makes me feel like I failed!”
Sirotek is the victim of ongoing harassment. She’s received pictures of her children posed in slaughterhouses and hanging from a noose, drive-by photos of her house, and letters with white powder that exploded upon opening.
The Nevada State Board of Nursing was inundated with calls for Sirotek’s professional demise and flooded with anonymous complaints.
In response, Sirotek filed a police report. Her lawyer sent a cease-and-desist letter. The Epoch Times reviewed the documents.
The Harassment Begins
In February 2022, Sirotek, as the face of AFLN, a patient advocacy network that boasts 22,000 nurses, appeared before Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and testified about the harm patients were experiencing when they sought treatment for COVID-19.She said she didn’t witness patients dying from the novel virus when she volunteered to work the front lines in New York at the start of the pandemic.
Sirotek detailed the withholding by higher-ups of steroids and Ibuprofen and the prescribing of remdesivir. Additionally, there was zero willingness to consider possible early intervention treatments like ivermectin.
As the pandemic continued, such practices only escalated, Sirotek said.
Sirotek’s testimony resulted in cheers, widespread attention, and a target on her back.
“[The harassment] all started the day we got back from DC,” Sirotek said.
At first, the attacks started with the typical “you’re transphobic, you’re anti-LGBTQ. I mean, they even called me racist,” Sirotek, who is Hispanic, recalled.
And as more patients sought AFLN’s help, the attacks increased in frequency and force.
“[@thatsassynp] just kept on saying how I was spreading misinformation, [that] ivermectin doesn’t work,” Sirotek said. “He kept targeting the Nevada State Board of Nursing because I was on the Practice Act Committee, and he did not feel like that was acceptable.”
Craig Perry, a lawyer representing nurses, including Sirotek, before the Nevada State Board of Nursing, confirmed Sirotek’s account. The executive director of the Nevada State Board of Nursing, Cathy Dinauer, declined to provide details on complaints or investigations, stating to The Epoch Times via email that they are “confidential.”
Sirotek said the complaints overwhelmed her ability to defend her nursing license.
Attacks Transition to Threats
Whenever Sirotek, or AFLN, tried to set up a community outreach webinar, hateful comments flooded their videos.Julia McCabe, a registered nurse and the director of advocacy services for AFLN, told The Epoch Times that initially, they tried kicking the trolls out of the outreach videos. But they couldn’t keep up with the overwhelming numbers and had to shut the videos down, usually after only 10 minutes, she said.
To address the swarms, as McCabe labeled them, AFLN started charging an entrance fee for their webinars. But, McCabe said, they'd send out an email with a free access code to all of their subscribers before the webinar started. It helped, but not enough. The swarms kept coming. And the attacks escalated.
Jess and Tyler Kuhk of @thatsassynp have “teamed up” on several occasions, targeting healthcare workers who question the COVID-19 narrative. Team Halo doesn’t officially list Kuhk on its site, but Kuhk posts with the #teamhalo.
@jess2019 removed all of the above videos after The Epoch Times sought comment. The Epoch Times retains copies.
Sirotek says she received the first death threat against herself and her children around the same time, in June 2022.
“They cut off the pictures of my children’s faces from our family photos, where we take them every year on our front porch—we’ve got 11 years of those photos—and they cut them out and put them on the bodies of those little boys that have been sexually abused. And that’s what would get sent to my house. And I gave the police that,” Sirotek said.
In response to a request for comment from The Epoch Times, Sen. Johnson defended Sirotek.
“The COVID Cartel continues to frighten and silence those who tell the truth and challenge their failed response to COVID,” Johnson said. “It is simply wrong for Ms. Sirotek to be smeared and attacked like so many others who have had the courage and compassion to successfully treat COVID patients.”
As the threats continued and escalated, Sirotek also asked Perry to send a cease-and-desist letter to Tyler Kuhk on Aug. 1, 2022.
Kuhk, a nurse practitioner, is the person posting on TikTok under the pseudonym @thatsassynp.
The letter sent to Kuhk alleges that on at least 10 different occasions, @thatsassynp encouraged a “public uprising” against Sirotek. It also details that his videos attacking Sirotek garnered over 400,000 views.
It also warned that any attempt to deter Kuhk from his chosen path would “backfire” and could result in a “negative financial impact.” Neither Kuhk nor McLetchie Law responded to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.
Unable to confirm the real name behind the TikTok account @jesss2019, and thus, unable to send her a legal letter, Sirotek posted some of the threats she’d received on Facebook, pleading for @jesss2019 to cease targeting her, and recognize the possible real-world harm.
In desperation, Sirotek asked Perry to file a legal name change, which he did on Sep. 15, 2022, hoping that would thwart people’s ability to look up Sirotek’s information. Perry told The Epoch Times, “Usually, when you do a name change, it’s a public record. But under extenuating circumstances, you can have that sealed.”
Sirotek, at the behest of Perry, filed a police report detailing the harassment on Oct. 17, 2022.
Team Halo and Social Media
On Dec. 17, 2020, Theo Bertram, a director at TikTok; Iain Bundred, the head of public policy at YouTube; and Rebecca Stimson, the UK head of public policy for Facebook, appeared before the UK’s House of Commons to explain what their social media sites were doing to combat “anti-vaccination disinformation.”All three stated their companies employed a “two-pronged approach.” Specifically, “tackle disinformation and promote trusted content.”
Bundred stated that from the beginning of the year to November 2020, YouTube had removed 750,000 videos that promoted “Covid disinformation.”
Stimson stated that between March and October 2020, “12 million pieces of content were removed from [Facebook],” and it had labeled 167 million pieces with a warning.
Bertram stated that for the first six months of 2020, TikTok removed 1,500 accounts for “Covid violation” and had recently increased that activity. “In the last two months, we took action against 1,380 accounts, so you can see the level of action is increasing,” Bertram said.
Team Halo’s Origins
On Sep. 20, 2022, Melissa Fleming, the under-secretary-general for global communications at the United Nations, appeared at the World Economic Forum to discuss how the United Nations was “Tackling Disinformation“ regarding ”health guidance“ as well as the ”safety and efficacy of the vaccine” for COVID-19.“A key strategy that we had was to deploy influencers,” Fleming stated. “Influencers who were really keen, who had huge followings, but really keen to help carry messages that were going to serve their communities.”
Fleming also explained that the United Nations knew its messaging wouldn’t resonate as well as influencers, so they developed Team Halo.
“We had another trusted messenger project, which was called Team Halo, where we trained scientists around the world, and some doctors, on TikTok. We had TikTok working with us,” Fleming said. “It was a layered deployment of ideas and tactics.”
It also states that Team Halo “was established as part of the United Nations Verified initiative in partnership with Purpose and the Vaccine Confidence Project at the University of London’s School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.” And that, among other organizations, support is provided by the Rockefeller Foundation.
Team Halo’s Disinformation Team
Team Halo lists “Jess A” as a registered nurse and guide on its website and says her TikTok name is @jesss2019. It includes a link to her content, which features videos about contacting medical boards and filing complaints against healthcare workers who don’t subscribe to a specific narrative.“Good luck Peter with your ABIM certification—you’re going to need it!” ABIM stands for the American Board of Internal Medicine and is the medical board that certifies internists and sub-specialists.
“In our book, ‘The Courage to Face COVID-19,’ we describe the bio-pharmaceutical complex as a syndicate,” McCullough said. “And at the top, we think, is the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Welcome Trust. And then it spreads out from there. And it’s unsurprising that there would be extensions from this. Private contractors who are working to discredit top scientists in order to advance the false narrative.”
Leake said the idea for the term “bio-pharmaceutical complex” is a play on the “military-industrial complex,” a term coined by President Dwight Eisenhower in a farewell address in 1961.
“That is a private-public partnership with defense contractors, the intelligence agencies, with the U.S. Treasury. Their purported business is to defend the American people from foreign threats but what President Eisenhower, who was himself a military man, warned against is they’ve gotten … so big and so influential, that he was concerned it could threaten our democratic processes,” Leake told The Epoch Times.
“It’s a public-private partnership between state agencies like the Department of Defense, Health and Human Services, the NIH, the NIAID. They have joined forces with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Welcome Trust, the World Economic Forum, an institution called CEPI—the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations—and they’re all on the same page.
“What they apparently aspire to do, is to get all of mankind—every nation in the world, every jurisdiction in the world—on the same public health program. The greatest focus of this international—let’s call it a globalist—public health program, is vaccine development and vaccine deployment across all of mankind, all jurisdictions, people of all nations and age groups from the cradle to the grave,” Leake said.
It further announced, “mRNA-1944 is being developed with financial support from [DARPA], an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense.”
But, Leake said, “If someone like Dr. Peter McCullough comes along and says, ‘Well, wait a minute, you know, we can treat this illness, it’s a risk-stratified illness. Most people will get through it. We can identify high-risk groups of people and treat them. The natural immunity of the healthy human body actually will respond favorably to this.’
“If you have guys like Dr. McCullough saying that, then it, in effect, diffuses the emergency. And if the emergency is diffused, then, you know, how do you justify hundreds of billions of public money being directed to these emergency countermeasures?”
More Questions Than Answers
Team Halo currently lists approximately 117 “healthcare professionals“ on its site. Others targeted by Team Halo members include Dr. Robert Malone, podcaster Joe Rogan, Dr. Scott Johnston, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Dr. Simone Gold, former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, “anti-vaxx” nurses, and numerous others. In the past, Team Halo has had to quietly remove at least one of its “guides” when it was revealed they lied about their credentials.Team Halo did not respond to The Epoch Times’ multiple requests for comment, including on how it verifies the credentials of its members.
