A doctor in northern Italy is accused of issuing lethal doses of drugs to elderly coronavirus patients to clear hospital beds during the first wave of the March pandemic.
Dr Carlo Mosca, who was the head of the emergency department at Montichiari Hospital in Brescia, Italy, was arrested this week on charges of killing at least two patients and tampering with their medical records.
Prosecutors in Italy allege that Mosca administered lethal doses of anesthetic and neuromuscular blockers to elderly patients, leading to the deaths of 61-year-old Natale Bassi and 80-year-old Angelo Paletti.
The two patients were excavated last month and found to have doses of the drugs succinylcholine and propofol in their system. The Daily Beast report.
Both medications are commonly used when patients are placed in a ventilator, but investigators discovered from medical files that none of the patients intubated while in the hospital. The use of the drugs on non-intubated patients causes them to suffocate, according to the court documents reported by the publication.
Prosecutors also brought evidence that the deadly injections were done from text messages between nurses working under Mosca.
“Did he ask you to administer the drug without intubating it?” wrote one nurse in a message. “I’m killing patients not just because he wants to open the beds. It’s crazy,” another wrote.
When nurses wanted to refuse Mosca’s orders to inject patients with the drugs, he apparently started doing it himself. According to The Daily Beastprosecutors say he then wrote false terminal diagnoses on the patients’ cards to make their deaths look more credible.
The investigation into Mosca reportedly began after statistical analyzes of deaths in the emergency room in Motichiari stood out compared to other hospitals in the region. The Jerusalem Postt not reported.
Records show that several deaths occurred shortly after patients were admitted to the hospital, and that a number of patients died due to sudden deteriorating health conditions. Authorities are now searching through all of Mosca’s deceased patient records for additional abnormalities in their treatment and deaths.
The investigating magistrate in the case suggested that Mosca was the “victim of the extreme tension due to the increasing influx of COVID cases,” according to The Daily Beast.
“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 information contained in the relative medical records. , “reads the statement. .
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Mosca’s crimes were allegedly committed at a time when Italy’s Lombardy region, where he was hospitalized, was devastated by the virus.
In an interview with the Italian media in June, Mosca stated that his hospital was flooded with so many patients that they had to turn the canteen into a 30-bed ward.
“Every shift was a struggle to save as many lives as possible,” he said at the time.
Mosca has meanwhile been discharged from hospital and is under house arrest before his first trial on Friday.
In response to the allegations, the doctor said that he was ‘absolutely innocent’ and that he did not administer the drugs and ‘could not understand why’ he was accused of it, The Jerusalem Post report.