In Brazil, doctors accused a hospital group in Senate testimony of giving patients dodgy Covid-19 treatments touted by President Jair Bolsonaro.
Whistleblowing doctors, through their lawyer, testified at a Senate hearing that a hospital group forced doctors to toe the line on prescribing unproven drugs touted by President Jair Bolsonaro as part of a “COVID kit.”
They later saw a nurse administering flutamide; she told them it had been prescribed despite their objection. Whistleblowing doctors, through their lawyer, testified at the Senate last week that Prevent Senior enlisted participants to test unproven drugs without proper consent and forced doctors to toe the line on prescribing unproven drugs touted by President Jair Bolsonaro as part of a “COVID kit.”
In response to more than a dozen questions from the AP, Prevent Senior denied all wrongdoing, irregularities at its facilities or having conducted unapproved trials. It said all patients or family members consented before receiving treatment.Brazil has a public health care system, though service is often subpar. Many middle-class Brazilians have private plans, but costs for the elderly are high.
The antimalarial has been given glowing endorsements by Bolsonaro and his allies, who are among few remaining global champions for the drug. While a few studies at the pandemic’s onset suggested it might be promising, they were largely conducted in lab dishes, not people. Extensive worldwide research has long since found it to be ineffective and potentially dangerous for COVID-19.
They include messages sent by Benedito Júnior and another executive, two current clinic directors, one former clinic director, and an unnamed physician. In polarized Brazil, perspectives on COVID-19 have assumed ideological contours, particularly as Bolsonaro repeatedly downplayed the disease’s severity and undermined governors’ and mayors’ measures to control its spread.
“Rafael told me prescription of the COVID kit is obligatory, but I don’t feel comfortable with that. I’d like to know how I should proceed,” the doctor wrote to a recipient who was not identified. The message was one of those shared with Senate investigators.Luiz Cesar Pereira said he had initially resisted a doctor urging him to use the drug for his mother after he researched on the internet and found it wasn’t scientifically proven.
Prevent Senior told the AP that it wasn’t formally testing flutamide, but said doctors were allowed to administer it. The company maintained that the drug can be helpful in treating COVID-19. “They published a pre-print with the results of the research, with 636 patients, which is impossible; there’s no way to do that,” Venâncio said. “Even if it were observational research, as they’re saying now, it would have to be registered.”But the research council gave that information to prosecutors in Sao Paulo who are investigating the healthcare provider, and who have received complaints from doctors and patients. The Senate committee is also sharing information with prosecutors.
It remains unclear whether that means patients’ deaths were omitted from state and national tallies of COVID-19 deaths. Neither Sao Paulo state’s health secretariat nor Brazil’s Health Ministry confirmed whether patients who died from COVID-19 at Prevent Senior facilities factored into the nation’s death toll, which is the world’s second highest at more than 600,000.
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