Brazil court rules: Let doctors be doctors

A Brazil court Monday shot down a motion by the Federal Public Defender’s Office (DPU) to prevent doctors from treating COVID-19 patients with cheap, early treatments like chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine (HCQ).

The DPU had filed the complaint against the Federal Council of Medicine (CFM), Brazil’s physicians’ associations, claiming that the drugs are “ineffective” against COVID-19.

The argument has become a popular sleight-of-hand technique used by governments to shut down cheaper, effective treatments for COVID-19 and clear the path for pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer. Doctors who prescribe drugs like HCQ or ivermectin for COVID-19 do so for the early stages of infection, when the drugs are very effective at curing the disease. It is well known that effectiveness wanes in the later stages, which is why officials say the drugs are “ineffective against COVID-19” without mentioning which stage.

In reality, however, HCQ is a safe, effective and cheap treatment which the World Health Organization has called one of the “most efficacious, safe and cost-effective medicines” on the market.

But the DPU pushed for the CFM and its doctors to be penalized for recommending the treatment, including a fine of at least R$60 million for “collective moral damage”.

However, the judge ruled Monday that medical questions should be left up to medical professionals.

“The Federal Council and the Regional Councils of Medicine are the supervising bodies of professional ethics. . . . [I]t is up to them to watch over and ensure by all means at their disposal the perfect ethical performance of medicine and the prestige and good profession and for those to exercise it legally.”

Furthermore, the judge said that doctors must have freedom and autonomy to practice medicine and prescribe medicine they deem necessary for a patient’s health.

“In turn, doctors, despite having their profession duly regulated, have professional freedom and autonomy, which includes prescribing medication to patients based on their scientific knowledge[.]”

The judge also noted that non-physicians should not be telling physicians what to tell their patients.

“It is not up to the Judiciary, which does not have technical qualification in medicine to order the Federal Council of Medicine to guide physicians or the general population about the non-use or ineffectiveness of some medicine, which would represent an undue interference in the technical inspection body of the medical class, by a lay body of the Judiciary, which precludes the granting of injunctive relief,” the judge concluded.

The ruling contrasts with how medicine is practiced in the United States, often granting non-physicians the power to dictate medicine to physicians. California Medical Board President Kristina Lawson, for example, is an attorney with no medical background, but she nevertheless pursues and disciplines physicians who recommend HCQ or ivermectin to treat COVID-19. Lawson also deputizes California residents to tell on physicians who recommend such treatments or advise against Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.

California’s Assembly also passed a law last year which punishes doctors for “misinformation” — a term which the bill suggests means contradicting mainstream media.