Here’s how Draghi is tidying up
Italy's shortcomings in managing the pandemic and Draghi's first steps. Alessandra Servidori's post
We still know little, very little about this plague of 2020, and the attempts to understand are difficult because science still fails to frame the genesis of Sars-Cov-2. The large and small newspapers make enormous efforts with very modest results, on the other hand scientific disclosure is complicated when we have some more news on certain pandemics, let alone with this one.
On television very often we see journalists who invite a scientist in this case often a virologist, make him say a few words, then if he just tries to say a few more significant words, they take the word out of his mouth and move on to something else. This is not how they are informed, and even less are people educated to a serious relationship with science.
It is clear that a newspaper, magazine or television program is not a means of dissemination (as there are excellent ones), but it should not be limited to making a facade of reverence for science. Journalists should be more careful when dealing with topics they don't master.
The exciting, paradoxical and somewhat crazy story we are experiencing with a pestilence not yet identified with certainty and the impotence of doctors unable to cure what they do not know the cause of is the pure truth and the recommendation of a life regime isolation and thorough hygiene is essentially wise advice. However, epidemics are often the cause of serious forms of social disintegration and loss of civil solidarity and above all of the loss of political cohesion. Thus we are aware that from physical illness also derives a no less contagious moral evil capable of dissolving the community; it, ours in particular, has become a metaphor for the political crisis and the consequent moral and social disorder.
But Covid as well as death in the worst of its manifestations is the possibility of questioning. So the rebirth after the existential uncertainty that has had and has a great impact on the certainties of this 2020: precariousness introduces new themes and the collapse of old cultural models that are no longer applicable. It is true that in Italy we do not have a single scientific body to refer to, a single voice that prevails over all the others and that has an indisputable authority, based on a scientific background. In other countries this exists, in Italy it does not.
In Italy we moved by improvising, so we have 3 different bodies to analyze and provide data: the Ministry of Health, the Higher Institute of Health, the Civil Protection. Not only that, these data come from different regions that use different methods of collection and transmission. We have created enormous confusion, which is not only communicative, but also operational. This determines, for example, the perennial delay of every action, which is obsolete even before being put on the field.
It is not that we have not accumulated knowledge. In reality, we have not clearly and clearly identified who has to formulate a strategy within the scientific community. The Scientific Technical Committee itself is an advisory body, whose powers are not well defined, whose composition was not originated by a selection based on a scientific background. It is a body created suddenly, with an advisory function, in which politicians have chosen who to insert. There is therefore nothing comparable to the scientific board of institutions such as, for example, the Hans-Knöll-Institut or the National Institutes of Health . This situation will also be reflected in the near future.
What we are experiencing will not in fact be the last wave of this virus and this will not be the last virus we will have to deal with. In Italy we do not have effective tools to deal with health emergencies. Our Civil Protection has expertise in the management of various types of catastrophes, but shows that it has no expertise in the field of health emergencies. The problem lies in the willingness of bad scientists to meet the expectations of politics. Very often a bad scientist does not know that he is a bad scientist, unless he is a real fraudster.
In this situation, the factor that has prevailed the most and that has caused science to lose credibility is undoubtedly represented by the proliferation of publications. The publishing system and the publishing market on the one hand, on the other the fact that to support this system we have unfortunately created a criterion for evaluating scientists based on the number of publications and the amount of citations they receive.
Order, order! John Bercow, the Westminster speaker, yelled. Then he left office. We have placed the order in the hands of Mario Draghi: will the Prime Minister be able to line up and implement the program for a true rebirth? We hope so. In the meantime he has changed some pawns on the chessboard of sick Italy: in civil protection Curcio has arrived again, the Parliament and the EU Commission have aligned themselves with the blows on the confusion of vaccine production, the super Commissioner Arcuri guilty of an enormous amount of unclear he was a commissariat with a general. Soon say we can hope for better times? I wouldn't say, there's a very good chance we're getting there. Patience and competence is the virtue of the strong.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/ecco-come-draghi-sta-facendo-ordine/ on Tue, 02 Mar 2021 05:24:19 +0000.