The President of the Portuguese Parliament said today that the Portuguese Medical Association does not have the power to open a disciplinary inquiry into Socialist MP Lacerda Sales for acts he carried out while Secretary of State for Health.
This position was conveyed by Augusto Santos Silva at the end of the ceremony to award the Council of Europe 2023 North-South Prize, which took place in the Senate Chamber and was closed by the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
Asked about the case of the Portuguese-Brazilian twins who received treatment with the drug Zolgensma for spinal muscular atrophy at Santa Maria Hospital in 2019, at a total cost of four million euros, Augusto Santos Silva commented on one of the developments in this case.
“As president of the Assembly of the Republic, the only thing I have to say on the subject is that I don’t think the Portuguese Medical Association can open a disciplinary inquiry into [PS] deputy Lacerda Sales for acts he may have committed, not in his capacity as a doctor, but as a government official. As president of the Assembly of the Republic, and therefore president of all the deputies, that’s the only thing I have to say,” he said.
Augusto Santos Silva then stressed that the Portuguese Medical Association “has no statutory power to do anything about acts that doctors commit, not as doctors, but in other responsibilities”.
On Tuesday, the President of the Portuguese Medical Association, Carlos Cortes, announced that he had asked the Southern Region Disciplinary Board to evaluate the behavior of all the doctors involved in the case of the Portuguese-Brazilian twins, including the former Secretary of State for Health António Lacerda Sales, to see if there are any disciplinary matters in which he could intervene.
Carlos Cortes told the Lusa news agency that, “given all the information” obtained, he had asked the Disciplinary Board “to evaluate this case, to evaluate all the doctors, their behavior, their decisions, under ethical and deontological parameters”.
“In other words, in this specific case, both the Secretary of State and the management of the hospital itself, the clinical management, as well as the doctors directly involved in the hospital service or in other places where there may have been medical intervention here,” he said.
His request to the Disciplinary Council of the Southern Region of the Portuguese Medical Association was to “carry out this evaluation, this process of investigation, this process of inquiry to try to understand if there is a disciplinary matter here that the Portuguese Medical Association can intervene in,” he added.
When asked about the internal audit of this case carried out by the Centro Hospitalar Universitário de Lisboa Norte, the President of the Assembly of the Republic claimed to be unaware of its content.
“I know that at least one parliamentary group has already requested it [from the PS]. And so it will be delivered to parliament. It’s very important that the processes that are underway, not only the internal audit, but also the one opened by the General Inspectorate for Health Activities (IGAS), and the one that the Attorney General’s Office said it had opened, are concluded so that we have information. Until then, based on partial information or unconfirmed allegations, I obviously won’t comment,” he replied.
The case of two twin children living in Brazil who have since acquired Portuguese nationality and came to Portugal in 2019 to receive the drug Zolgensma for spinal muscular atrophy, at a total cost of four million euros, was reported by TVI in November.
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who has already submitted documentation to the PGR on the matter and confirmed that his son Nuno Rebelo de Sousa had contacted him about the need to treat the children, denied having any involvement in the process.
