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Prevent Senior faces major lawsuit over pandemic wrongdoings

Prevent Senior employees protesting outside São Paulo's city council building in 2021, during an inquiry into the company. Photo: Eduardo Anizelli/Folhapress)

State, federal, and labor prosecutors in São Paulo on Tuesday announced a lawsuit against Prevent Senior, one of Brazil’s largest health insurance providers, demanding BRL 940 million (USD 189 million) in compensation for damages caused during the first two years of the Covid pandemic.

The company’s conduct, according to the prosecutors, included workplace harassment, workplace violations, testing on humans without proper authorization from the National Research Ethics Commission, and violations of medical autonomy, public health, and the rights of patients and health insurance consumers.

The company’s management, the prosecutors said, prohibited doctors and other employees from wearing masks and kept employees who tested positive for Covid on the job. Doctors were also morally harassed into prescribing so-called “Covid kits” to patients, which included drugs that were proven ineffective in treating the virus.

In 2021, Prevent Senior was accused of concealing the Covid deaths of patients in government-sponsored trials of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. Patients were allegedly, in some cases, included in trials without consent.

In the same year, the Senate’s Covid inquiry proposed the indictment of 11 people linked to the company, and the Prevent Senior hearings in the São Paulo City Council called for the indictment of 20 people.

The press office of the Labor Prosecutor’s Office told The Brazilian Report that the full complaint, which was filed on Monday, will be made public after personal information is redacted.

Prevent Senior said in a press statement that it could not respond because it did not have access to the lawsuit.