London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), which is treating the terminally ill child Charlie Gard, has accused the US doctor who offered to treat him of bringing false hope to the baby’s parents.
In a statement the hospital also expressed surprise the doctor had a financial interest in the treatment he was offering.
Yesterday, Chris Gard and Connie Yates gave up their fight to take Charlie to the US to be treated by Dr. Michio Hirano, a professor of neurology at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York.
Hirano said a treatment known as nucleoside bypass therapy (NBT) had a small chance of bringing about significant improvement in Charlie’s form of mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome.
“When the hospital was informed that the Professor had new laboratory findings causing him to believe NBT would be more beneficial to Charlie than he had previously opined, GOSH’s hope for Charlie and his parents was that that optimism would be confirmed,” said the GOSH statement.
“It was, therefore, with increasing surprise and disappointment that the hospital listened to the Professor’s fresh evidence to the Court.”
Hirano’s UK lawyer did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment.
In the latest salvo in the controversial international battle that pitted the authority of the hospital over the rights of the parents, GOSH also accused Hirano of not having read Charlie’s medical or court records before putting forward a treatment.
“On 13 July he stated that not only had he not visited the hospital to examine Charlie but in addition, he had not read Charlie’s contemporaneous medical records or viewed Charlie’s brain imaging or read all of the second opinions about Charlie’s condition … or even read the Judge’s decision made on 11 April,” the hospital said.
“Further, GOSH was concerned to hear the Professor state, for the first time, whilst in the witness box, that he retains a financial interest in some of the NBT compounds he proposed prescribing for Charlie. Devastatingly, the information obtained since 13 July gives no cause for optimism. Rather, it confirms that whilst NBT may well assist others in the future, it cannot and could not have assisted Charlie.
