Physicians in Brazil, severely affected, resorted to tying COVID-19 patients to their hospital beds before pushing their ventilators down their necks because they no longer had enough sedatives, according to doctors in Rio de Janeiro. “I never thought I would live like this after 20 years of intensive care,” Aureo do Carmo Filho told Reuters. “Using mechanical restraint systems without sedatives is a bad practice … the patient is subjected to some form of torture.”
In hospitals that still have sedatives, health workers have used them to dilute them to make supplies move on or to use muscle relaxants to calm patients while they are being intubated. “They are awake, without sedatives and appear, with their hands tied to the bed and beg us not to let them die,” said a nurse.
The horrific admissions follow the path of Doctors Without Borders, who called Brazil’s response to the pandemic a “humanitarian catastrophe” that is likely to worsen in the coming weeks. “I must be very clear in this regard: the negligence of the Brazilian authorities costs lives,” MSF International President Christos Christou said on Thursday after the death toll in Brazil rose to 362,000.
MSF Director-General Meinie Nicolai directly blamed Brazil’s right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro, who, like former US President Donald Trump, downplayed the pandemic and his own attack with COVID-19, prompting many to takes deadly risks, not believing that the virus is as dangerous or as contagious as science would prove.
“There is no coordination in response. There is no real recognition of the severity of the disease. Science is set aside. False news is distributed and health workers are left alone, “said Nicolai. “The government is failing the Brazilian people. All Brazilians can tell you that they have people around them who have been buried or intubated in places where there are no drugs or oxygen. This is unacceptable. ”
The lack of medical supplies is associated with the resistance of government officials to recognize the seriousness of the problem. The P1 variant first identified in Brazil has caused international concern and is now believed to be mutant. France has blocked all flights in the country, and other countries are now advising against all travel, except essential ones, to the besieged South American nation.
The lack of adequate medical supplies is now coupled with a disastrous launch of vaccines, based on both denial and corruption. Only 12 percent of Brazil’s population has received a first dose of the Chinese Coronavac vaccine, which Chinese officials have recently acknowledged is not very effective in preventing people from getting seriously ill.
Earlier this week, federal prosecutors in the Brazilian state of Roraima opened an investigation after reports emerged that dishonest health workers were changing doses of the less effective Chinese vaccine, which is primarily what is currently offered in the country for gold illegality. extras. A lawyer for the indigenous tribes that own the gold mine said that health workers were vaccinating clandestine miners under cover of nightfall, according to Reuters. “Yanomami has long complained that indigenous health materials and medicines are being redirected to wild cat miners,” the local leader said in a letter seen by Reuters.
More Brazilians die every day than anywhere else in the world, with the country recording 3,560 deaths on Thursday alone. The Brazilian Ministry of Health is currently in talks with Spain and other countries to try to obtain the necessary supplies for the overwhelmed hospitals. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro continues to fight regional governments that have tried to mandate masks or blockades.