A doctor from northern Italy was accused of distributing lethal doses of medication to elderly patients with coronavirus in order to clear hospital beds during the first wave of the pandemic in March.
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 his medical records.
Prosecutors in Italy claimed that Mosca administered lethal doses of anesthetics and neuromuscular blockers to older patients, leading to the death of Natale Bassi, 61, and Angelo Paletti, 80.
The two patients were exhumed last month and determined to have doses of the drugs succinylcholine and propofol in their system, The Daily Beast reported.
Both drugs are commonly used when patients are placed on a ventilator, but the researchers found in the medical files that none of the patients were intubated while they were in the hospital. The use of drugs in non-intubated patients causes suffocation, according to the records informed by the publication.
Prosecutors also presented evidence that lethal injections were carried out from text messages among nurses who worked for Mosca.
“Did he ask you to administer the medications without intubating them?” a nurse wrote in a message. “I am not killing patients just because he wants to free the beds. This is crazy,” another would have written.
When nurses started to refuse Mosca’s orders to inject drugs into patients, he reportedly started doing it himself. According The Daily Beast, prosecutors say he wrote false terminal diagnoses on patients’ charts to make their deaths appear more credible.
The investigation into the Fly would have started after the statistical analysis of deaths in the Motichiari emergency room stood out compared to other hospitals in the region. The Jerusalem Post reported.
Records show that several deaths occurred shortly after patients were admitted to the hospital, and several patients were recorded as having died of a sudden worsening of health conditions. Authorities are now searching all records of Mosca’s deceased patients for additional anomalies in their treatments and deaths.
The case investigating judge suggested that Mosca was the “victim of extreme stress for having to face the growing flow of COVID cases,” according to The Daily Beast.
“The replication of the extreme conditions that led to his crimes made it likely that he would decide to administer banned drugs to the most serious patients to speed up their death, thereby falsifying the data contained in their medical records,” added the statement.
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Mosca’s crimes were allegedly committed at a time when the Italian region of Lombardy, where his hospital was located, was devastated by the virus.
In an interview with Italian media in June, Mosca said his hospital was flooded with so many patients that they had to turn the canteen into a 30-bed ward.
“Each change was a battle to save as many lives as possible,” he said at the time.
Mosca has already been discharged from the hospital and is under house arrest before her first hearing on Friday.
In response to the allegations, the doctor stated that he is “absolutely innocent” and that he did not administer the drugs and “cannot understand why” he is being accused of doing so, The Jerusalem Post reported.