Charles, thanks for reposting the CNN video. It’s obviously a much better version than the one that was posted on YouTube, and this time I managed to screen-grab a high-quality version, to go along with the one I got from Channel 4’s version.

This was the first time I got good enough audio quality to notice the snippet of audio in which Dr. Gilbert and the infamous chest tickler speak with one another, in English. The tickler asks, with an Arabic accent, “he died?” Gilbert nods, and says, “yeah.” Somebody off-camera says, also with an Arabic accent, “look at the [something — maybe ‘line’].” Gilbert turns to the monitor screen behind him and points to one of the tracings on it. The tickler says “flatline.” And then Gilbert says “extreme bradycardia.”

No additional proof that this is all fake is needed at this point, but the conversation is pretty strange. For one thing, it’s unlikely that anyone with any experience in performing resuscitations in a hospital would ask “he died?” That’s because it’s not as if a patient is alive one moment, and then something happens to make him dead the next moment.

The whole reason you call a code and start doing chest compressions is because the patient has no pulse. You keep doing the chest compressions for as long as the patient has no pulse without them, and meanwhile you keep injecting drugs and/or administering shocks until the heart (hopefully) starts pumping again. The tracing on the monitor is your clue to what needs to be done next, but it doesn’t indicate whether the patient is “dead” or not. If a long enough while has elapsed without a pulse, the doctor in charge officially declares that he or she is giving up, that the heart is never going to start pumping again, and that the patient is dead. So he or she “calls it” — pronouncing the patient dead, and noting the official time of death. It’s pretty much as depicted on “ER”, which actually gets this part quite accurately. If there were any question about what was taking place, a participant in the code might ask “are you calling it?” or “are we giving up” or something like that. I.e., are you declaring the code over. But not “he died?”

Maybe I’m reading more into this than is warranted. The chest tickler is apparently not a native English speaker, and maybe he just isn’t posing the question the way a native English speaker would. But it does suggest that maybe the man isn’t actually a health care provider at all, but just some sort of production assistant who’s helping to make the video. So maybe he’s not being more convincing not because the boy is alive and he doesn’t want to hurt the boy, but just because he has no idea how to do convincing chest compressions. Maybe that actually is a corpse that he’s pretending to do chest compressions on.