Good morning! Today, the financial links between under-fire HMO Hapvida and political parties. Congress working on suggestions to lower fuel prices. Peace between the Supreme Court and Bolsonaro to be tested this week.
🥇 We are happy to announce that The Brazilian Report has won the World Association of News Publishers’ 2021 LATAM Digital Media Award for “Best Paid Content Strategy” in a medium-sized or small newsroom. We must thank you, our subscriber, for allowing us to explain Brazil as best we can over our four years of existence!
Exclusive: The Hapvida connections
Today, the Senate’s Covid hearings committee will question Paulo Rebello, chairman of health insurance regulator ANS, on the agency’s role in overseeing how HMOs used Covid patients for tests with unproven treatments — such as antimalarial drug chloroquine.
- Prevent Senior and Hapvida, two of the fastest-growing health operators in Brazil, essentially used their patients as guinea pigs during chloroquine trials held in 2020.
- Investigations by the Senate inquiry show that patients were often unaware of the drugs doctors were prescribing them, and results were tampered with to conceal deaths of trial subjects.
- Doctors from both HMOs complain they were forced to give chloroquine to patients,...