An anti-vaccine activist and QAnon advocate whose demands to be treated with deworming drug ivermectin sparked a right-wing harassment campaign against the Chicago hospital where she was being treated has died from complications due to Covid-19, the hospital confirmed to Forbes on Monday.
Veronica Wolski, an Illinois woman who gained fame in QAnon circles for her demonstrations on bridges, died “early this morning,” Olga Solares, a spokesperson for AMITA Resurrection Hospital, said in an email to Forbes.
The hospital said last week it had received “hundreds” of phone calls about Wolski, who was admitted three weeks ago after contracting Covid-19, after she claimed she was refused the controversial medication.
Prominent QAnon influencers Michael Flynn and Lin Wood both helped fuel the crusade against AMITA, calling on their social media followers to harass the hospital’s staff about giving Wolski ivermectin.
A video posted to Twitter by Reuters reporter Jan Wolfe showed Wood calling the hospital on Sunday, saying its staff would be “guilty of murder” if Wolski wasn’t released immediately.
The hospital responded to the attacks by highlighting that its physician and clinicians follow “the full guidance of the FDA and the CDC in the treatment of Covid-19” (ivermectin has not been recommended by either agency).
Wood, who was the first to announce Wolski’s death in a Telegram post on Monday, falsely claimed that she had been murdered by the hospital. “It is our responsibility to ensure that these medical murders stop NOW and the perpetrators be brought to justice,” he wrote to his hundreds of thousands of followers on the platform. “As my brother in Christ, Jarrin Jackson, says, ‘Now go to war.’”