Walk in Integrity - An interview with Warner Mendehall and Deborah Conrad

Deborah Conrad was a Physician Assistant (PA) working in the Rochester, New York area, with 21 years experience. On Oct 6, 2021, she was fired by Rochester Regional Health for reporting COVID-19 vaccine adverse events to VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) at the hospital where she worked, UMMC (United Memorial Medical Center).

Deborah is sueing RRH and UMMC, as the relator, in a qui tam lawsuit for violation of the federal False Claims Act.

Warner Mendenhall is an attorney representing Deborah Conrad. He has a law firm in Ohio. He also represented Brook Jackson in another False Claims Act case and the family of Grace Schara.

On June 11, 2025, Judge Sinatra denied the hospital's motion to dismiss the core claims in Deborah's False Claims Act lawsuit, letting her case go to discovery.

In this episode we discuss the following:

- Deborah describes her role as a PA at UMMC. She was the inpatient hospitalist and she also had a leadership role. The inpatient hospitalist is the first person the patient sees after triage in admissions. She usually follows the patient through to discharge.

- When the Covid vaccine rolled out, Deborah started to see patients coming in with conditions she had never seen before. Something was strange. It was the patients themselves that were highlighting that they got ill after the vaccine.

- With the Johnson & Johson vaccine, which was the first vaccine used in her area, she was seeing patients coming in with clotting issues, and heart attacks and strokes. In patients without history, or already on blood thinners. So not expected. And admissions for covid infection after the vaccine rollout. (in the vaccinated).

- Deborah had never used VAERS before and had not been provided with any education on how to use it. She had to teach herself. Then she became the main reporter for her hospital system. She educated the hospital staff, as none of them were aware of VAERS, either.

-The VAERS system was very clunky. It would timeout regularly. It would take an hour to enter one report.

-The consultants did not have the time to enter the VAERS reports. They were too busy. Some of them could see the injuries, but couldn’t afford the time. And they were not taught how to do it.
So some began to give the reports to Deborah to raise.

- Deborah comments on the fact that the Covid vaccines have more VAERS reports then any vaccine in history. But the under reporting factor is huge. So the number of injured people out there is scary.

- Deborah successfully managed to raise close to 200 VAERS reports. She thinks she has raised more then anyone else in the USA. She raised one , just the other day, and noted that the system still has the same issues, and is still timing out.

- There was a statement in Deborah’s legal complaint that she was stopped from raising 170 VAERS reports. What happened was;
She had told her local leadership that she needed help, she couldn’t be the only one in RRH raising VAERS reports, it was too time consuming. They audited her reports. And they decided she was over reporting, So they said she can no longer report any patients she was not directly involved with.

-Deborah’s colleagues also did not want to be interrogated, like she was, regarding VAERS, so they gave the reports to her to raise, in secret.

- Initially Deborah received a lot of emails regarding her VAERS reports. Comments along the line of, no one else is seeing what you are seeing. Why is she pressing this issue. She was called to the chief medical officer’s office to be reprimanded. She was threatened to be reported to the NY state PA licencing board for spreading misinformation. She was also told she had patient complaints. In her entire career she had never had patient complaints.

- An example of a patient complaint, was in fact a complaint from a patient’s daughter because Deborah had filed a VAERS report for her injured mother. (the patient had actually requested that Deborah file the report). But her daughter was angry, because this meant her mum would not get another covid vaccine, and reported Deborah.

- Deborah went public and did a NY Times interview and an interview with Del Bigtree on The Highwire. She talked about the vaccine side effects and the fact that the hospital was blocking staff from reporting the vaccine side effects.

- On Oct 6, 2021, she was suddenly surrounded by 3 HR people and was told to grab her things and go with them. It was calculated, everybody on her floor could see what they were doing to the dissenter, Deborah Conrad. She was taken to a room, they asked about the NY times and the Highwire, and then escorted her out of the hospital. The next day she received a letter ending her employment and her health insurance was cancelled.

- There was a vaccine mandate enforced for the staff who had a religious exemption at the end of the next month. Deborah was not fired for that reason.

- Deborah was nominated for a seat on the NY state PA board. She was also nominated for the PA excellence award, in April 2021. So they loved her till she starting raising VAERS reports.

- Rochestor Regional Health System is a large health care system;
It includes; 9 Hospitals, including United Memorial Medical Center UMMC (which is where Deb worked). (UMMC = 131 beds) Employees: 19,400+ Nurses: 3,900+ Medical Providers: 2,100+ Ambulatory Facilities: Over 500 Population Served: 1.6 million.

- Deborah filed her legal case in 2023. It’s a qui tam case, similar to the Brook Jackson case.

- Warner explains what a qui tam case is. Basically, anyone who knows that federal money is being misspent, misused or stolen, can bring the information forward through one of these federal false claims act cases. With VAERS they are not allowed to be paid, for the shots, if they are not reporting the mandatory reporting events. There are a subset of events that must be reported, for example, if you had the shot and you got Covid, mandatory reporting event. Myocarditis, mandatory reporting event. There are many more adverse events that should be reported. We want to see that someone has had a shot within the RRH system and then came back to RRH for treatment. We know that over 10 000 people returned for services. So only 200 have been reported, the rest are in violation of federal law.

- There’s never been a prior case holding anyone responsible for VAERS reporting.

As part of the EUA, there is a program provider agreement, and it says in there, they are liable under the federal false claims act if they fail to make this VAERS report.

- Warner puts the analogy with sexual abuse of children which has mandatory reporting. This is medical abuse. It must be reported to the government.

- RRH gets an administrative fee for every injection they give. The penalty for each failure to report to VAERS, is $13,000 - $27,000.

- The government had the option to join Deborah’s case, but they opted not to join, under Biden’s administration, in Feb 2024.

- The new Trump administration could join the case at any time.

- Warner wants to make sure that the message is sent to HHS that he would welcome the government to join this case.

- Warner notes, this is one system, RRH. There are 2800 others. Other systems have approached Warner. He doesn’t know of a single health system in the USA that has met the requirements of the law.

- The RRH has tried to dismiss this case twice now. On June 11, 2025, Judge Sinatra denied the hospital's motion to dismiss the core claims in Deborah's False Claims Act lawsuit, letting her case go to discovery.

- The vaccine injured of another health system in the USA could together act as the relator and bring the same case as Deborah.

- We raised the concern that arose in the Brook Jackson case, where Pfizer mounted the defence, that they did not commit fraud, because they delivered what the government ordered. This has not happened so far in the Conrad v RRH case.

- Warner points out that if RRH is held responsible for 10s of Millions of dollars in penalties, it will wake up 2800 other hospital systems.

- Warner tells us his team will get discovery on all the 10s of 1000s of injuries in RRH. Each case will need to have been vaccinated anywhere in the RRH system to qualify for the case. They just need to match the list of everyone vaccinated in the RRH system, with the list of hospital admissions.

-Warned and Deborah tell us that Pfizer reached out to Deborah.

- Warner tells us that the facts of the case will be tested on the motion for summary judgement. They have to have enough facts to survive. Warner thinks they do. He believes they will pass that. They also need to link Deborah’s firing with her whistle blowing activity.

- Warner said his team will have access to the RRH email server too. He wants to see what they were talking about behind the scenes about Deborah. Was there government communication? Communication with Pfizer, Moderna or J &J?

- Warner suggests a couple of important policy changes.
1. All vaccines, not just those under EUA, should come under the False Claims Act
2. Staff should be paid for the time they spend making VAERS reports. A billing code for the reporting effort. And train the personnel on how to use VAERS.

- Warner points out that the USA has destroyed private practitioners over the last couple of decades.
It was 80% private 20% hospital systems, to now the reverse. 80% of all doctors and nurses are now in these big systems, following these policies and dangerous protocols.

- Deborah told us about a patient who had been given 2 shots at once at a local pharmacy and then presented at her hospital shortly after with heart arrythmia. Deborah rang the pharmacy and told them they must raise the VAERS report for that patient. They laughed at her and refused.

- We discuss the fact that pharmacists should be informed by the hospital when their patients are injured, and that they also have signed the program provider agreement. They must raise the VAERS reports.

Papers and Websites referenced in the Interview;

- Deborah Conrad Website. (includes all the filings of this legal case.)
www.iamdebconrad.com

- Warner Mendenhall Substack. “Court rules in favour of Healthcare Whistleblower.
https://www.covidlawcast.com/p/covid-accountability-victory-court

- Freedom Counsel website.
https://freedomcounsel.org/