Academician Alexander Rumyantsev, First Vice President of the Union of the Medical Community of the National Medical Chamber, made a special statement in connection with the fact that the official distributor of the German company Miltenyi Biotec announced its intention to suspend the supply of equipment and component materials for cell technologies to Russia, which are necessary for treatment of children with cancer.
According to the first vice-president of the NMP, the information is confirmed by Professor Mikhail Maschan, head of the cell therapy program of the Federal State Budgetary Institution National Research Center for Pediatric Hematology, Oncology and Immunology. Dmitry Rogachev”, saying that the Center has a stock of previously delivered materials for only three patients, after which “everything will stop”.
“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, for more than 30 years, together with German specialists, we have been working effectively for the benefit of children,” notes Alexander Rumyantsev. - We, using the state healthcare system, have achieved the same results of treatment as in Germany, and all the children of the country from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok receive this treatment according to uniform standard protocols. Over the past years, our specialists have tested and trained the equipment of this company in the field of cell therapy used for haploidentical transplantations with the purification of transplant material from graft-versus-host lymphocytes and for genetically engineered transplantations with an altered T-lymphocyte receptor. Thanks to this work, hundreds of sick children were saved, whose treatment with standard therapy was not effective.
Are we being shut down now? Cut off terminally ill children from the opportunity to help them? Not a word in response about a decision that is incompatible with medical ethics and common sense. Is a doctor refusing a sick child whose condition threatens death on the basis of online disinformation and political opposition from those in power? Is political consciousness higher than medical duty?
Our child patients and their parents teach us doctors not to do this, not to follow the lead of those who prevent us from doing our duty. In our relations with foreign colleagues, we have never discussed our attitude to what is happening around us. It is up to us personally to make the decision to help the suffering patient. We cannot afford to be mean to a patient by refusing or cutting him off from help. It is important that the impression of life does not obscure life itself.
We acutely feel that a total disconnection from money, planes, cars, household appliances, gadgets, etc. entailed disconnection from medicines, consumables, prostheses and medical equipment. This entails the separation of medical communities, disconnection from medical journals, congresses, symposiums. Moreover, we are witnessing the slogan of unprecedented persecution of Russians being thrown into the net and even the abolition of the concept of “Russian” as a symbol of a vile, obscene people demanding the eradication. What is it? Who needs the isolation of the people inhabiting our country? Why are they trying to isolate us, the inhabitants of a country with a thousand-year history, culture and intellect, to push back, to deprive us of the future?
The conscious disconnection from medicine of our patients by the hands of doctors and the medical community, in whatever country they are, will go down in history as genocide and will be condemned by posterity. For us, this is a challenge for the birth of a new world, new conditions for organizing care for our patients”.