TVI yesterday showed a letter reportedly signed by the mother of the Portuguese-Brazilian twins who received treatment worth four million euros in 2020, indicating that the treatment was the children’s “only hope for recovery”. According to the television channel, the existence of the document has so far been denied by the head of the Civil House of the President.
According to the channel, the same message was then forwarded to the Prime Minister, as required by the Code of Administrative Jurisdiction.
The letter, as revealed, is limited to “three paragraphs written in Brazilian Portuguese” stating that the drug Zolgensma (the most expensive in the world) was “the only hope of cure” for the children. In the TVI report, several doctors interviewed by journalists refute this statement, stating that the drug “adds nothing in terms of effectiveness” to the treatment that the girls were already undergoing at the time.
Also according to the TVI report, the letter sent from Belém to São Bento was accompanied by medical reports – these were recognized from the beginning by the Civil House of the Presidency.
The treatment procedure is not in itself an illegal act, as TVI emphasizes, but what is at stake is the differentiated treatment given to these children, suffering from spinal muscular atrophy, which also involved four electric wheelchairs. In other words, according to the research of journalist Sandra Felgueiras, what matters is not whether “they had access to treatment on the SNS or not [Serviço Nacional de Saúde]”, but the “abnormal circumstances” in which they had access to a treatment that cost two million euros – in this case multiplied by two.
Sandra Felgueiras also emphasized that one of the questions that remains to be answered is the “lightning approval of Infarmed” – the Portuguese Medicines Authority – for the administration of this drug, which indicates a superior interference.
Source: DN
