Keep the case of the suspended Gom doctors on the table in Reggio. «During the extensive interrogations given to the judge by doctors Pierpaolo Correale and Rocco Rocco Giannicola, both provided all the documentary elements to demonstrate the absolute correctness of their medical work and above all the fact that the use of that therapeutic protocol was correct and fruitful of numerous scientific studies which confirmed its therapeutic value, which however the judge decided not to share”. This is what the lawyers Rosario Infantino and Francesco Albanese wrote in a note, defenders of the former head of the Oncology department of the Gom of Reggio Calabria Pierpaolo Correale and his deputy Rocco Giannicola banned from activity in the days by the investigating judge Karin Catalano upon request of the Reggio Prosecutor’s Office led by Giovanni Bombardieri.
Both doctors are accused of administering imperfect drugs, material and ideological falsehood, abuse of office and fraud. According to the lawyers, the Oncology department was not “a sort of concentration camp in which cancer patients were used for fraudulent therapeutic trials which would have had harmful consequences for them”.
«It seems essential to clarify – we read in the note – that: these ‘fraudulent’ therapies were administered only in the period between March 2017 and May 2018; compared to a number of patients equal to approximately 900 treated in the department, the cases of alleged administration of ‘imperfect drugs’ are only 13; the reference to ‘imperfect medicines’ does not equate to a faulty or expired medicine. Rather, the prosecution’s hypothesis is that for those 13 patients out of 900 the therapeutic protocol was administered for ‘unforeseen therapeutic indications or with a dosage different from the authorization to place them on the market'”.
«Obviously – write Infantino and Albanese – the defense will propose an appeal to the Court of Freedom in order to demonstrate the validity of the defense thesis which essentially believes it is able to demonstrate documentaryly that the reasons for the use of that therapy deemed ‘imperfect ‘ were due to the fact that those 13 patients were unfortunately very advanced and extensively pre-treated according to guidelines, who spontaneously gave consent to undergo, in the terminal phase, a life-saving therapy which involved the combined use of drugs, all approved and therefore not experimental, nor personally developed by Correale or Giannicola, under an ‘off label’ regime, so the therapeutic alternative for those poor patients and their families remained not to treat in the absence of alternatives. During the interrogations, as well as through a substantial defense brief, Correale and Giannicola demonstrated that as a result of the administration of that therapy those patients achieved a certain clinical benefit in terms of survival”.