Burioni and the intolerance of reason

by Vittorio Macioce

It is early in the morning and the virologist wakes up nervous. It is time to mock the malacarne of the unvaccinated. Roberto Burioni kept you company in the first days of the pandemic with his Virus, the great challenge. It is a book worth reading. Only he doesn’t recognize himself every now and then. This happens when the keyboard lion quartered in its guts takes over and beats quickly a handful of characters. The result is this. “I propose a collection to pay the no vax Netflix subscriptions for when from 5 August they will be under house arrest locked in the house like mice”. The virologist, unfortunate, countersigns.

Before him, Ilaria Capua thought about it, declaring on television: “I no vax pay for hospitalization”. He says it as a provocation, but we understand that he considers it an effective punishment. You can’t be too lenient with someone who gets on the wrong side of history.

It is the intolerance of reason and it is becoming contagious. It leaves no neighborhood. There’s no time. There is no redemption. Doubts, fears, uncertainties do not count. One cannot be recalcitrant. This applies to those who make it an ideological question and to those who are in the gray area of ​​the wavering. It is a question of faith.

The question is whether the “puritanical” approach is the wisest one. Puritan refers to Oliver Cromwell’s government of the round heads. It is the idea that for the good of all there can be no room for those who desert. Is this really the way to vaccinate the highest number of people? It is insolence, spite, demonization, pointing the finger with contempt towards those who no longer deserve the right of citizenship. It is to call them mice, like laboratory guinea pigs, to feed the suspicions even more. Maybe not. All this only ends up making the vaccination passport hateful. It is dullness that responds to dullness. It is the betrayal of the scientists.

This is not the face of science. It never was. In scientific discourse there is no room for anathemas. There are no sinners. Science is not religion. Naturally Burioni and Capua do not launch their invectives, provocations, excommunications as scientists. They do it as opinion leaders. Except that good or bad play a role in this story. They have become influential people as scientists. The border is not so clear. The virologist who in public discourse wears, out of annoyance, out of coquetry, the clothes of the priest of reason does not help those who think that the vaccine is the shortest way out of the pandemic. He responds to the square with a pulpit.

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