The TCU (Union Court of Auditors) determined the suspension of the Ministry of Health’s stock secrecy.
The decision cites reports from the Sheet which revealed that the Jair Bolsonaro (PL) government accumulated, last year, R$ 243 million in expired products, and that the director of Health Logistics, General Ridauto Ribeiro, decided, in April 2022, to increase confidentiality on the inventory.
The rapporteur of the process, Minister Vital do Rêgo, stated in the decision that secrecy “sets prejudice to social control, to the transparency of public administration acts and to the right to information”.
“Information on the stock of medicines and health supplies, with the identification of those whose expiration date has already expired, in principle, as they are of public interest and essential to social control, should not be considered confidential, unless some just cause that would prevent its wide access”, said Minister Vital do Rêgo, rapporteur of the case.
The suspension was made on a precautionary basis, signed on the 3rd, and should be ratified by the rest of the court at this Wednesday’s session (8th). The determination meets a demand made by Senator Alessandro Vieira (PSDB-SE) and by deputies Felipe Rigoni (União Brasil-ES) and Tabata Amaral (PSB-SP).
The minister also determined that Health should send the TCU monthly data on all products that were incinerated because they expired.
He also demanded that the company VTCLog, which manages the Saúde distribution center, located in Guarulhos, in Greater São Paulo, sends data on the incinerated products since 2019.
Sought, VTClog said that “it has no interference with the incineration of medicines, since this procedure is determined solely and exclusively by the Ministry of Health”.
The Ministry of Health has not yet commented on the court’s decision.
as revealed to Sheetthe secrecy of the entire stock of the Ministry of Health would fall next year, but General Fernandes signed a new term for classifying the information on April 20th.
With this, there is no longer a date for the entire stock to be revealed. Information will be protected for two years from when it is produced.
Fernandes told Sheet that one of the ideas is to prevent the industry from using inventory data to charge more.
“If the person who is going to sell me knows that I am desperate to buy, for example, because the product is running out, the price goes there in the cloud”, said the general of the reserve.
The TCU’s technical area said that “there is a lack of plausibility” in the argument presented by Fernandes.
The rapporteur of the case also stated that Health was unable to justify secrecy to the court.
In the classification term, Saúde cites excerpts from an article from the Access to Information Law (12,527/2011) on data “essential for the security of society or the State” to justify secrecy.
The points cited state that stock data can put the life, safety or health of the population at risk; offer a high risk to the country’s financial, economic or monetary stability; and jeopardize the safety of institutions or high national or foreign authorities and their families.
The minister also determined that health managers explain the “alleged risks that justified the decision to impose confidentiality on the stock data of strategic health inputs”.
The rapporteur also states that the analysis of auditors has already verified that the management of health stocks is “inefficient”, “which has contributed to the expiration of the validity period of health products”.
The Ministry of Health used this new classification term on April 11 to reject a request made by the Sheet via the Access to Information Law on the total expired stock of pulp.
Data on these products is easily obtained from the Ministry of Health’s internal systems, used only by authorized servers.
Health had 3.7 million items with no validity in 2021. The data was obtained from internal reports of the folder.
The list of expired products included, for example, 820 thousand insulin pens, purchased for R$ 10 million and sufficient for 235 thousand patients with diabetes for a month.
The Bolsonaro government also lost vials for the application of 12 million vaccines for flu, BCG, hepatitis B (almost 6 million doses), chickenpox, among other diseases.
The list revealed by Sheet it also pointed out expired products that could serve SUS patients with hepatitis C, cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, tuberculosis, rare diseases, schizophrenia, rheumatoid arthritis, transplant recipients and people with kidney problems, among other situations.
Expired products must be incinerated, according to sanitary rules in Brazil. Health also has expenses in this process, carried out by a private company.
In some cases, such as when the product fails or when it is supplied with a short shelf life, the government is able to replace the stock expired by contractual agreements with the manufacturers.
This operation, however, can delay treatments. In addition, there are situations of damage to public coffers and patients.
In the case of insulin pens, data for 2021 indicated that Saúde did not deliver around 20% of the debut purchase of this product in the SUS, made in 2018.
In May, the director of Health Logistics told Sheet that the department is preparing an ordinance with guidelines on how to avoid the loss of products at the end of their shelf life.
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