We kept wondering: where has the new health minister gone? On TV it’s Golikova, Skvortsova, Popova. But the minister? Where are his achievements and new approaches? A government of technocrats and all that.
Will he really be remembered only for being implicated in a criminal case over tomograph purchases, despite the fact that now is the best possible time to prove himself?
And he did prove himself. A feat worthy of Murashko-Hercules.
He personally filed a police complaint against the head of the medical workers’ union. Over an unacceptable criminal video with the terrifying title “Help the Doctors”:
The reason is this video, in which the union demands that the authorities provide doctors with protective equipment:
Minister Murashko is a bit late. The “bury it, hide it, and cover it up” strategy can no longer work, even if they simply throw every member of the “Alliance” in jail across all forty regions of the country.
The largest hospital in Bashkortostan has already turned into a center of contagion. The internet is flooded with video appeals from doctors about the lack of protective equipment, with no help at all from the “Alliance.”
And it’s not just doctors—even regional governors are now publicly saying there are no ventilators and no oxygen.
It was precisely the Doctors’ Alliance that was the first organization to raise the alarm over the fact that, given the current lack of resources, doctors would become carriers and spreaders of COVID. That is exactly what happened in Italy. And it could have been avoided here if any measures had been taken two months ago, when the union first started talking about it.
But instead: obstruction, surveillance, pressure, intimidation.
It’s infuriating, frankly. It feels like they’re cutting off their nose to spite their face. They won’t buy protective equipment just to spite the union. The Moscow authorities—the only region with at least some money for healthcare—have already said that medical capacity is running out.
In two weeks, COVID will reach the country’s largest cities. If doctors still do not have protective equipment and, as this article very accurately noted, medicine is replaced by PR, then nothing good awaits us.