Texas Whistleblower Nurse Claims FBI ‘Threatened’ Her After Exposing Child Sex-Change Operations

Rear view of ill girl sitting on bed. Female child patient is wearing hospital gown. She i
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Olivia Rondeau

A Texas nurse, who blew the whistle on the U.S.’s largest children’s hospital allegedly using Medicaid to offer free sex change operations to children, is now claiming that the FBI turned up at her home to threaten her.

Vanessa Sivadge told investigative journalist Christopher Rufo that she saw a dramatic rise of “transgender children” being treated at Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) starting in 2021 and accused her employer of violating state law by using taxpayer dollars to provide the “gender-affirming care.”

“In the cardiac clinic, we were taking sick kids and making them better,” the nurse told Rufo. “In the transgender clinic, it was the opposite. We were harming these kids.”

Two months after first speaking with him, Sivadge called Rufo “in a panic.”

“The FBI had sent two special agents, Paul Nixon and David McBride, to her home,” the journalist wrote on his blog. “The agents knocked on the door, asked her about ‘some of the things that have been going on at [her] work lately,’ and then asked to enter her home. She was terrified.”

The nurse alleged that Nixon and McBride told her she was a “person of interest” in an investigation targeting the whistleblower who exposed TCH’s transgender child program and notified her that the whistleblower was in violation of federal privacy laws. 

“They threatened me,” Sivadge said. “They promised they would make life difficult for me if I was trying to protect the leaker. They said I was ‘not safe’ at work and claimed that someone at my workplace had given my name to the FBI.” 

The FBI declined to comment when Rufo reached out. 

Sivadge is the second TCH employee to have blown the whistle after Dr. Ethain Haim leaked documents to prove that the hospital had provided children with puberty-blocking drugs and other gender-affirming treatments, “even after hospital officials said they had stopped the procedures in March 2022,” the Daily Mail reported.

Just a month after leaking the documents to Rufo, Haim also claims that the FBI came to his home and notified him that he was a “potential target” in a federal probe. 

“I was given a target letter signed by a federal prosecutor that stated I was being criminally investigated for a case regarding medical records,” the doctor said. 

The FBI agents showing up to his door was a “blatant attempt at political intimidation,” Haim said. 

In an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, the surgeon said he has being targeted because he “told the truth.”

“It’s because I had told the truth, and that’s one of the things — if you counter the dominant political ideology, they’re going to come after you,” Haim said. “At some point, we have to fight against it.”

He also claimed his life savings have been “wiped out” by having to pay lawyers to fight for him. 

Haim was recently indicted for allegedly violating HIPAA medical privacy laws, the Associated Press (AP) reported. 

Federal prosecutors accused the 34-year-old of sharing the documents with Rufo with the “intent to cause malicious harm” to his employer. 

Haim pleaded not guilty on Monday. 

When Rufo raised questions about Medicaid allegedly being used to pay for childhood transition procedures, a spokesman for Texas Health and Human Services claimed the state’s public health program had “never covered ‘gender-affirming’ surgery or prescription drugs for the purpose of ‘gender-affirming’ care.”

Rufo confirmed Wednesday that Texas State Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said he is investigating the claims against TCH.

“There are two possible avenues for this investigation: civil and criminal,” the journalist wrote. 

“If the state pursues a civil case against Texas Children’s, the hospital could lose a significant amount of funding and, in the maximal outcome, even lose access to the state Medicaid program,” Rufo explained. 

“If the state decides to pursue criminal charges, the doctors involved could face significant fines and up to 10 years in prison.”

State Rep. Brian Harrison (R) called for an emergency hearing to look into “federal officials who are harassing whistleblowers and potentially aiding and abetting the child abuse they so bravely exposed.”

“It is absolutely outrageous that [the] DOJ – instead of targeting the medical professionals who were abusing Texas children – is apparently protecting them by silencing those that would stand up against these abusive and illegal practices,” Harrison wrote in a letter to House Speaker Dade Phelan (R).

“The Texas House of Representatives must not sit idly by and allow this federal overreach to occur,” the state representative continued. 

“Texas must lead the nation in the defense of the next generation and state sovereignty.”

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