Immunity of law (second edition)

In delivering the manuscript of the first edition of this book we were both fearful – or rather, hopeful – that it would soon become obsolete and that readers would keep it on their shelves as evidence of a bad political adventure. It was the end of the summer of 2018. A few months earlier, the ruling party that had called the Lorenzin decree was defeated in the elections and left the leadership of the country to the two current majority parties, the same ones that had opposed the decree. The then deputy Giulia Grillo , now Minister of Health, had called it " useless as well as medieval ". His party comrades had defended the freedom to choose whether to join a health treatment with passionate and precise arguments . The secretary of the Lega Matteo Salvini , even after the formation of the government, even from the Pontida stage, had undertaken to ensure that no children were excluded from educational services. His criticism was not about "vaccines" but about the ways and motives of the decree.

It was therefore a very cold shower when, close to the start of the new school year, the Arrigoni-Taverna amendment to the "Milleproroghe" decree which would have suspended the decavaccinal requirement for attending kindergartens, was withdrawn without giving explanations . And in Parliament a useless and painful dispute was staged not on the obligation, but on the possibility … of self-certifying his acquittal.

From then on it was all a Kafkaesque descent. While someone was sending police squads to sift through thousands of kindergartens to verify the compliance of the certificates, with an economic and military effort worthy of the most heinous crimes, in an almost sinister press silence, the process of discussion of a new law, the bill, began. n. 770 , in whose basic text it is stated that it will be possible to extend the suspensions also to compulsory and high schools and that the legislator – that is the democratic assembly – will no longer have the right to identify the vaccination objectives, but will have to comply with the dictate of non-elected technical bodies. A " National Plan for the Elimination of Measles and Congenital Rubella 2019-2023 " was drawn up, to date in draft, in which it is proposed to subordinate access to some public competitions to the administration of the trivalent, thus extending conditionality rights from school to work. Speaking on the issue of pediatric vaccinations, the ministerial consultant who drafted the Plan also suggested a "profound critical review from parental authority to parental responsibility" to "revisit the practice of vaccination objection (which parents exercise as legal representatives)" .

Social conflict flared up in the ambiguity of politics. Those infected with measles became "greasers" on the front pages of the newspapers. Relations between families, schools and paediatricians deteriorated, leading in some cases to warnings, complaints and appeals to the judicial authorities, opening deep wounds in social cohesion. Citizens and zealous officials denounced the places where children excluded from kindergartens dared to gather to cultivate a glimmer of social life. The intolerance and self-confidence of the "righteous" extinguished critical voices, especially in the medical world, branded them and threw them to the public's disapproval. The debate on social networks polarized into factions with insults, threats, hopes of illness and death. Even a part of the scientific establishment, the one that would have had the tools to cool the clash, lowered the political discussion to the rank of stadium support, of "evidence" against "fake news".

The most interesting news of these months, however, has been the unveiling of the transnational dimension of the problem and the identity, in some cases astonishing, of the narrative strategies and slogans that accompany it, from one part of the globe to the other. Introduced precisely in Italy because, according to some thoughtful commentators, we would be the most "irresponsible" of all, the law that makes the enjoyment of certain social rights subject to vaccinations has been replicated with a few variations first in Macron's France and then in Macrì's Argentina . As of this writing, there are discussions about introducing similar obligations in Israel, England, Spain, Switzerland, Ireland and Germany. With the "No Jab, No Pay [no sting, no money]" policy, Australia had led the way by denying family benefits to poor or large families whose children were not vaccinated according to the national schedule, and anticipated the climate of intimidation of dissidents, as reported by prof. Brian Martin in the book Vaccination Panic in Australia (Irene Publishing, 2018).

The issue is also close to the heart of non-governmental subjects. The think tank Chatam House also participated in a conference in the Senate between representatives of the Italian government and top management of the GSK company in the person of prof. Salisbury , former chairman of the WHO (World Health Organization) expert committee during the H1N1 "pandemic" story reconstructed in this book. More recently, the UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, Kate Gilmore , declared that "there is no right to refuse vaccinations."

This enlarged dimension of the problem, in which the new vaccination obligation policies seem to be fully placed on a global agenda, can explain the embarrassed and embarrassing silences of our local politics, its not very credible "benaltrism" and the U-turns of some of its exponents. As for us, it represents a further stimulus to study and report. If communication and intervention strategies converge all over the world, if the rhetoric of a science that can and must take the place of politics, of a protocol-based and mass-replicable medicine and of an authoritarianism in the name of a "perpetual emergency" are valid for all, it becomes even more urgent to understand the paternity and the motives of this progressive, standardized and forced medicalization.