Opinion – Atila Iamarino: The doctor and the monster in the pandemic

Covid-19 aroused the respect and fear of doctors.

In the country where the action plan in the pandemic was to send people around, where 33 million recovered cases are celebrated, health professionals were and still are treated like cannon fodder. When combatants are treated by the military or government as expendable and placed in a situation they cannot win. In Brazil, the pandemic was managed based on the number of ICU beds available, at the cost of those who made these beds possible.

Doctors pay with their lives because of the new coronavirus from a very early age. Like Chinese ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, persecuted for warning about Covid when it was still an outbreak of pneumonia with no known cause in Wuhan. He lost his life to the disease itself, like many others.

Even so, much of what we avoid, such as the more than 40 million deaths that could happen in the world, is due to medical action and the construction and sharing of knowledge about Covid. Before she was one year old, we already knew that it was caused by Sars-CoV-2, we revealed its genome, developed tests and vaccines. Thanks a lot to medicine.

Doctors are not necessarily scientists. This is a mantra that unfortunately needs to be repeated. But doctors can be excellent scientists when they do research. It was thanks to his studies that we understood how Covid develops, who are affected, what are the best hospitalization and intubation protocols, which drugs work, how effective and safe vaccines are and much of what alleviated our situation in the pandemic.

On the other hand, this phase also showed professionals that I came to fear. They are the enablers and validators of many recent nightmares. Those who prescribe therapies without function, which have validated and still prescribe early treatment or ozone therapy. Those who conducted research without ethics or competence to claim that these therapies work; or even studies such as proxalutamide, where, according to the National Health Council, “the hypothesis that the control group inadvertently received a drug other than placebo with toxic potential” is not ruled out — that is, where those who were not treated with the experimental drug may have died intoxicated.

There are also those who renege on the Hippocratic Oath by attacking safe and effective vaccines, betraying the trust of us Brazilians, who always rely on their knowledge to vaccinate ourselves like few countries in the world.

For decades, our health system — and the production of knowledge — worked within the hierarchy of ministries and agencies such as Anvisa, managing federal norms, laws and guidelines that dictated how medicine was exercised at the other end, the patients. Over the course of the pandemic, much of this has been dismantled.

We had four health ministers and a period without a minister at the height of the cases in 2020. The National Immunization Program spent months without direction. And as the CPI of the pandemic showed, technical positions in the Ministry of Health were occupied by professionals without health competence, among other achievements.

In this headless federal health management, the responsibility passes to state, municipal agents and societies and associations to give some direction to the area. Which is fertile ground for undermining the knowledge produced by medics and letting the monsters in the area run wild.

It is high time that health professionals evaluate (and criticize) the posture of their colleagues who still violate the ethics of the profession. It’s not just the patients who pay the price for this delay, it’s yourselves, who continue to serve as cannon fodder.