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 their loving father, whose hospital in Brescia, northern Italy, was one of the hardest hit during the first wave of the pandemic last March.
Something clearly changed in Moscow as the pandemic began to suffer. The 47-year-old was arrested this week on double charges of murder, accused of killing weak patients with COVID and documenting his medical records to make beds for other patients. Moscow describes the allegations as “unfounded”, claiming that the overwhelmed health care system is the reason why the patients died.
In the first months of the pandemic, Italian doctors faced terrible decisions when deciding who to give them respirators and other supplies, often deciding who lived or died based on their chances of survival, essentially leaving the weak to die from lack of treatment. But what Moscow is accused of is taking a step further and killing the patients himself.
Two patients who died under Moscow’s care, Natale Bassi, 61, and Angelo Paletti, 80, were exhumed last month while the prosecution built the case against the primary care physician using text messages. among the nurses who watched the former loving doctor transform from Dr. Jekyll into a sinister Mr. Hyde — though one most likely overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the human tragedy around him.
The investigating magistrate in the case suggested that Moscow was “the victim of the extreme stress caused by the need to cope with the growing influx of COVID cases,” according to court documents. “Replication of the extreme conditions that led to his crimes probably made him decide to administer drugs banned to the most serious patients in order to speed up their death, thus falsifying the data contained in the relative medical records.” By simply stopping treatment, patients could linger for weeks or months. By injecting them, the prosecutor wrote, he could release the much-needed beds faster.
Authorities are now examining the files of all Moscow’s dead patients for treatment abnormalities and deaths. They do not rule out the exhumation of other bodies, although most of the people who died during the first wave of the pandemic were cremated.
As Moscow Hospital became overwhelmed and more than 600 patients with COVID were suddenly under his care, nurses say he began instructing them to inject lethal doses of succinylcholine and propofol, which are often used to intubate patients, into patients with COVID. COVIDs that were never meant to be intubated. . The use of drugs on unintubated patients causes them to suffocate, according to court documents. In March and April, before a nurse confronted Moscow and threatened to report him, orders for both drugs rose by 70 percent, according to court documents seen by The Daily Beast.
As things got more hectic, the nurses began to exchange worrying messages that now form the case of the prosecution and at least one confronted him about his mood. “Did he ask you to take the drugs without intubating them?” wrote a nurse. “I don’t kill patients just because they want to clear their beds. It’s crazy, “wrote another.
When the nurses began to reject Moscow’s orders, he allegedly began injecting patients personally, asking the nurses to leave him alone with the patients. Prosecutors say he also wrote false terminal diagnoses on patients’ maps, giving them a more credible cause of death.
Moscow, who has been on leave from his hospital, is under house arrest until his trial begins this spring.