Last month, one of the whistleblower doctors passed a 10,000-page dossier to investigators with allegations opposing Prevent Senior.
One of Brazil’s largest healthcare providers has been accused of covering up coronavirus deaths, pressuring doctors to prescribe useless treatments, and testing unproven drugs on elderly patients as part of ideologically charged efforts to help the Brazilian government in a Covid lockdown.
Prevent Senior, a fitness organization with a chain of hospitals and more than half a million members, is in the crosshairs of a congressional investigation into Brazil’s coronavirus crisis and President Jair Bolsonaro’s highly questionable response.
Last month, an organization of whistleblower doctors handed investigators a 10,000-page dossier containing a series of inflammatory allegations against the São Paulo-based company that treats seniors.
The dossier contained allegations that elderly patients had been used as “human guinea pigs” to check for unproven Covid “cures” by giving their full consent.
On Tuesday, the lawyer representing those whistleblowers, Bruna Morato, gave the impression before the Covid investigation in Brasilia and made new complaints.
They claim that:
High-level doctors were forced to give patients a cocktail of useless drugs, adding the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine and the antiparasitic ivermectin, in what they called the “Covid kit. “
The decision to tout hydroxychloroquine as a supposedly effective covid remedy was designed in part to help government ideologues who would have wanted to use this information to convince Brazilians that there was no need to stay home from the pandemic. The economy couldn’t stop, so they [the government] had to find a way to give hope to other people coming out of their homes. That hope had a name: hydroxychloroquine,” Morato said.
The use of those unproven drugs was also part of a “cost-cutting strategy” through Prevent Senior. “It’s much less expensive for a health care provider to make sure there are medications instead of admitting those patients,” Morato said.
The coronavirus deaths were concealed to compromise the effects of Prevent Senior tests purportedly designed to show that the drugs in the “Covid kit” were effective against the disease. “This is a fraud,” the vice president of the investigation said. Randolfe Rodrigues.
Senior doctors have reportedly been told to reduce the oxygen source for critical covid patients who have been in intensive care for more than 10 or 14 days. “The word I heard repeated many times was, ‘Deaths also lose beds,'” Morto said.