Virologists campaign in Italy

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Scientists made famous by the pandemic are tempted by the parties ahead of this Sunday’s parliamentary elections

“If we didn’t have a vaccine against covid, I would be very concerned about what could happen in an Italy ruled by centre-right parties that have winked at the anti-vaccines.” This is the view of Andrea Crisanti, director of the department of molecular medicine at the University of Padua and “head of the list” of the Democratic Party (PD) in the Europe constituency ahead of Sunday’s parliamentary elections. A militant veteran of this centre-left formation, he has decided to go into politics and take advantage of the recognition he has received during the pandemic, in which he emerged as one of the country’s most respected virologists.

Crisanti is not the only expert on the coronavirus who could go from hospitals and television screens to the corridors of power. Although he is not a candidate for the next parliamentary elections, he has expressed his desire to become the next government Matteo Bassetti, director of the Infectious Diseases Clinic at the San Martino Polyclinic in Genoa. “I am available to lend a hand as a technician,” Bassetti said last month when asked if he would be willing to become the future health minister.

Basetti’s sympathy for the centre-right bloc is well known, which, according to all polls, is starting out as a favorite for the next poll meeting. The conservative alliance consists of Fratelli d’Italia (FdI, Brothers of Italy), Giorgia Meloni’s far-right party, Matteo Salvini’s League and Silvio Berlusconi’s electoral brand Forza Italia.

Like Crisanti, another epidemiologist made famous by the pandemic, Pier Luigi Lopalco, is also trying to avoid a victory for the center-right bloc. He is a leftist candidate in the Senate in the Apulia region, in the south of the country, and has political experience, having coordinated the committee responsible for covid management in his community, where he was also a councilor for a year Health. Lopalco believes the right is more dangerous when it comes to managing a pandemic than the left because it is “more concerned about the economy than health”. These statements have provoked the critical logic of the conservative parties.

“I get chills to think you can talk about right-wing and left-wing virologists. The well-being of patients and public health must come first. Scientific integrity is my compass, the rest doesn’t count,” Crisanti says, recalling that he has criticized some decisions in the past both by the right-wing regional government of Veneto and others by the outgoing central executive, of which the PD is a part. He blames them for not acting firmly enough to try to stop the spread of the virus. “Scientific integrity cannot be questioned by the political ideas that everyone has,” emphasizes the director of the Department of Molecular Medicine at the University of Padua, whose entry into politics was answered by Matteo Salvini, leader of the League, with a hard message on social networks: «The televirologist Cristanti, candidate in the PD. I think a lot of things are now understood.”

In particular, for this expert, it is crucial that parties such as the League of Fratelli d’Italia have shown themselves in some phases of the pandemic to be aligned with the anti-vaccination movements or with those who opposed the use of the vaccination certificate. “It is a pity that they have forgotten that the public interest must be their main goal and that they have taken a position that does not meet scientific criteria,” criticizes Crisanti, who is relatively calm about the “balanced situation” in which he arrived covid.

“And if new variables emerged that also put vaccinated people or those who have overcome the disease in serious trouble, the political leanings of the government would matter very little. We would return to a public health requirement and the virus would dictate the agenda again,” he says.

The far-right Brothers of Italy, favorite in next Sunday’s parliamentary elections, have suspended one of its candidates for parliament for praising Adolf Hitler on social media. Calogero Pisano, leader of Giorgia Meloni’s party in the province of Agrigento, Sicily and a member of the national leadership, posted on Facebook in 2014 that the party’s slogan (“Italy above all”) reminded him of “a great man of 70 years ago”, stating that he was not referring to Benito Mussolini but to “a German”.

As a result, Pisano has been suspended “with immediate effect” from his internal positions, according to a party statement, stressing that “he does not represent the Brothers of Italy at any level and is prohibited from using their logo”. The letter acknowledges that it could even be legally sanctioned.

Source: La Verdad

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