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, northern Italy, was one of the hardest hit in the first wave of the pandemic last March.
Clearly, something changed in Mosca as the pandemic raged on. The 47-year-old was arrested this week on double homicide charges, charged with killing frail COVID patients and improving their medical records to free up beds for other patients. Mosca describes the allegations as “baseless” and claims that the overwhelming health care system is the reason the patients died.
During the early months of the pandemic, Italian doctors faced horrific decisions when deciding who to give breathing equipment and other supplies to, often deciding who lives or dies based on their survival rate, essentially letting the weak die due to lack of treatment. But what Mosca is accused of is going one step further and killing the patients themselves.
Two patients who died in the care of Mosca, Natale Bassi, 61, and Angelo Paletti, 80, were exhumed last month when the prosecution filed a case against the GP using text messages among nurses who watched the once-loving doctor transformed from Dr. Jekyll to a sinister Mr. Hyde – though most likely overwhelmed by the enormity of the human tragedy surrounding him.
The investigating judge in the case has suggested that Mosca was “the victim of extreme stress due to the increasing influx of COVID cases,” the court documents said. “The repetition of the extreme circumstances that led to his crimes made it likely that he decided to administer banned drugs to the most serious patients to hasten their deaths, falsifying the data in the relative medical records.” By simply forgoing treatment, the patients could linger for weeks or months. Injecting them, the prosecutor wrote, allowed him to free up much-needed beds more quickly.
Authorities are now searching the records of all of Mosca’s deceased patients to look for abnormalities in their treatment and death. They don’t rule out the exhumation of even more bodies, although the majority of people who died during the height of the first wave of the pandemic were cremated.
As Mosca’s hospital became overwhelmed and more than 600 COVID patients were suddenly under its care, nurses say he began instructing them to inject lethal doses of succinylcholine and propofol, which are often used in intubating patients, into COVID patients that were never intended to be intubated. . Using the drugs in non-intubated patients causes them to choke, according to court documents. In the months of March and April, before a nurse confronted Mosca with threatening to report him, orders for both drugs were up 70 percent, according to court documents seen by The Daily Beast.
As things got more hectic, the nurses began exchanging troubling messages that are now the prosecution’s case and at least one confronted him about his state of mind. “Did he ask you to administer the drugs without intubating them?” wrote a nurse. “I don’t kill patients just because he wants to free the beds. This is crazy, ”wrote another.
When nurses began to refuse Mosca’s orders, he reportedly began injecting the patients personally and asking 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 credible cause of death.
Mosca, who is on leave from hospital, is under house arrest until his trial begins this spring.