ROME – Dr. Carlo Mosca’s online patient reviews describe a loving “humanitarian” who saved countless lives before the coronavirus pandemic hit Italy. Patients and their families praised the loving father, whose hospital in Brescia in northern Italy was one of the hardest hit during the first wave of the pandemic in March last year.
Something has clearly changed in Mosca as the pandemic continues. The 47-year-old was arrested this week on a charge of double murder, and is accused of killing weak COVID patients and doctoring their medical records to clear beds for other patients. Mosca describes the allegations as ‘unfounded’ and claims that the overwhelming healthcare system is the reason why the patients died.
During the first months of the pandemic, Italian doctors were faced with appalling decisions to decide who to give their breathing machines and other supplies to, and they often decided who was living or dying based on their chances of survival. But what Mosca is accused of is taking it a step further and killing the patients themselves.
Two patients who died under Mosca’s care, Natale Bassi (61) and Angelo Paletti (80), were exhumed last month when the prosecution filed the case against the primary care physician using text messages among nurses watching the once loving doctor of dr. Jekyll in a sinister Mr. Hyde – though he is most likely overwhelmed by the scale of the human tragedy around him.
The investigating magistrate in the case suggested that Mosca was the ‘victim of the extreme tension that resulted from the increasing influx of COVID cases’, according to the court documents. “The recurrence of the extreme conditions that led to his crimes probably made him decide to administer illicit drugs to the most serious patients to expedite their deaths, thus falsifying the data in the relative medical records. ” By simply withholding treatment, patients can linger for weeks or months. By injecting them, the prosecutor writes, he can loosen the much-needed beds faster.
Authorities are now looking for records of all of Mosca’s deceased patients to look for abnormalities in their treatment and deaths. This does not rule out more bodies being exhumed, although the majority of people who died during the first wave of the pandemic were cremated.
While Mosca’s hospital was overwhelmed and more than 600 COVID patients were suddenly under his care, nurses say he began ordering them to inject lethal doses of Succinylcholine and Propofol, often used during patient intubation, onto COVID. sufferers who were never meant to be intubated. According to court documents, it suffocates the use of drugs on non-intubated patients. During the months of March and April, before a nurse confronted Mosca and threatened to report him, orders for both drugs grew by 70 percent, according to court documents seen by The Daily Beast.
As things got furious, the nurses began exchanging worrying messages that now form the case of the prosecution, and at least one confronted him about his state of mind. “Did he ask you to administer the drugs without intubating them?” wrote one nurse. ‘I’m not killing patients just because he wants to open the beds. It’s crazy, ”wrote another.
When nurses began refusing Mosca’s instructions, he apparently started injecting the patients in person and asked the nurses to leave him alone with the patients. Prosecutors say he also wrote false terminal diagnoses on the patients’ cards, giving them a more plausible cause of death.
Mosca, who has been placed on leave from his hospital, is under house arrest until his trial begins this spring.