Legal immunity (second edition)

In handing over the manuscript of the first edition of this book, we were both fearful – or better said, hopeful – that it would soon become obsolete and that readers would keep it on the 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 titled the Lorenzin decree was defeated by the elections and left the country's leadership to the two current majority parties, the same ones who had opposed the decree. The then deputy Giulia Grillo , today health minister, had called it " useless as well as medieval ". His party mates had defended the freedom to choose whether to join a health treatment with passionate and precise arguments . The secretary of the League Matteo Salvini , even after the formation of the government, even from the stage of Pontida, had committed himself to ensuring that no child was excluded from educational services. His criticism did not concern "vaccines" but the ways and motives of the decree.

It was therefore a very cold shower when, near 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to the "Milleproroghe" decree which would have suspended the decavaccinal requirement for attending kindergartens, was withdrawn without explanation . And in Parliament there was a scene as useless as painful dispute not already on the obligation, but on the possibility … to self-certify his acquittal.

From there on it was a whole Kafkaesque descent. While someone sent teams of carabinieri to sift thousands of kindergartens to verify the conformity of the certificates, with an economic and military effort worthy of the most heinous crimes, in an almost sinister press silence the process of discussing a new law began, the bill n. 770 , in whose basic text it is stated that it will be possible to extend the suspensions also to compulsory and higher 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 dictation of unelected technical bodies. A " National plan for the elimination of measles and congenital rubella 2019-2023 " was drafted, which is currently drafted, in which it is proposed to subordinate access to some public competitions to the administration of the trivalent, thus extending the conditionality of rights from school to work. Speaking on the issue of pediatric vaccinations, the ministerial consultant who drew up the Plan also suggested a "profound critical review from parental responsibility to parental responsibility" to "revisit the practice of vaccination objection (which parents exercise as legal representatives)" .

In the ambiguity of politics, social conflict flared up. Measles infected became "greasers" on the front pages of newspapers. Relations between families, schools and paediatricians deteriorated, in some cases resulted in 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 glimpse of social life. The intolerance and the assurance of the "righteous" extinguished the critical voices, especially in the medical world, they branded them and threw them in the meal to the public's disapproval. The debate on social networks polarized into factions with insults, threats, wishes for 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 cheering, of "evidence" against "fake news".

The most interesting novelty of these months, however, has been the unveiling of the transnational dimension of the problem and the identity, in some amazing cases, 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 commentator, we would be the most "irresponsible" of all, the law that makes the enjoyment of some social rights subject to vaccinations has been replicated with a few variants first in Macron's France and then in Macrì's Argentina . As we write, there are discussions about introducing similar obligations in Israel, England, Spain, Switzerland, Ireland and Germany as well. With the "No Jab, No Pay [no puncture, 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 prof. Brian Martin in the book Vaccination Panic in Australia (Irene Publishing, 2018).

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

This enlarged dimension of the problem, in which the new vaccine obligation policies seem to be fully placed on a global agenda, can explain the embarrassed and embarrassing silences of our politics, its little credible "benaltrismo" and the U-turns of some of its exponents. As for us, it represents a further stimulus for deepening and reporting. If communication and intervention strategies converge all over the world, if the rhetoric of a science that can and must replace politics, of protocol medicine and mass replicable and of authoritarianism in the name of a "perpetual emergency" are valid for all, it becomes even more urgent to understand the authorship and motives of this progressive, massified and forced medicalization.