/ AGF
–
A specter roams Europe: it is the specter of no-vaxes. On the day when the vaccine debuts in twenty-five of the twenty-seven countries of the Old Continent, no one knows exactly how many enemies of serum are, where they nest, what intentions they have and how much consensus they reach. But everyone knows that, never as in this case, a minority can influence the fate of the majority.
Take the case of Italy: to achieve herd immunity, the vaccine must be administered to at least 42 million citizens, equal to 70 percent of the population, by next year. From this mass must be excluded people with a history of life-threatening allergic reactions, a share of immunosuppressed and pregnant women, children and young people under 16, who alone make about 9 million. It means that just as many serum dodgers are enough to turn the vaccination campaign into a flop like that of Immuni, the app promoted by the Ministry of Health for contact tracing.
What to do then? Make the vaccine mandatory? The answer to this question is extremely delicate. Because, net of all the persuasion campaigns that can be studied, involving Roberto Benigni, Riccardo Muti or rather Fedez and Chiara Ferragni, here the fiduciary relationship between representatives and represented is measured with relentless accuracy.
–
The first thing to do is not to tell lies. It will therefore be necessary for the government to consider carefully whether to keep the emergency commissioner talking on his behalf, who does not lose the habit of playing the three-card game with the numbers of the pandemic. To the reporter from Corriere della Sera, who asked him why on the first day of vaccination Germany had one hundred and fifty thousand bottles of serum and we only nine thousand seven hundred and fifty, Domenico Arcuri replied that “the number of symbolic doses to leave all together is proportional to the population”, therefore “Germany from the EU has had the same doses or a little more”. But even the most limping of us in arithmetic finds it hard to understand the proportion, so 9,750 doses of vaccine are to 60 million Italians as 150,000 doses are to 82 million Germans. Only in the evening, in the face of the doubts of many, will Arcuri’s office specify that “for the Vax day Germany had 11 thousand doses. The 150 thousand that have been delivered to him are part of the subsequent supplies that will arrive in our country starting from December 28th ”. Better than nothing.
However, even the truth could not be enough, in a country where until a few years ago a not insignificant number of primary care pediatricians advised families against the papilloma virus vaccine for girls. It’s called vaccination hesitation, as the National Bioethics Committee called it. It differs from the radical positions of the no-vax, and is estimated in 30 percent of the Italian population. “It is a complex phenomenon – write jurists and bioethicists in an opinion addressed to the government – connected to the individual and social perception of the risk of Covid-19 vaccination, also given the conflicting information received during the production of the vaccine itself. It is an indecision that can result in a postponement of the choice to be vaccinated, up to the refusal of vaccination ”.
With this context we must deal. There is a climate of mistrust after ten months of pandemic, after 72 thousand deaths and, above all, after the failure of many initiatives taken by the government. One above all: the investment strategy on wheeled benches to reopen schools. A flop that weighs on the collective mood of the country. Therefore the army trucks, which carry the precious serum everywhere, are not welcomed with the tricolor on the windows. There is no longer that sacred inspiration that binds a population to its authorities. Instead, what Mattia Feltri, in an editorial on Huffington, prevails call umarell syndrome: it is the distrust of those who, with the stench under their noses, think they know more than everyone else and go to look for the fault of others.
This state of mind pervades the European country historically most affected by that disintermediation of knowledge that has demolished the delegation and brought the populists to the palace. The same one that makes Heather Parisi say: “I will not get an experimental vaccine inoculated!”. How much effort governments, the European medicines agency, the pharmaceutical industry and virologists can do to persuade you, you will decide with your head. And his boss thinks that, since the organization of knowledge, especially scientific, is linked to certain power structures, it means that the results are influenced and distorted by the interests at stake. It is the prejudice that deludes itself into becoming reason, in the techno-dependent utopia of direct democracy. It comes instead to the inconsistent and falsifying syllogism of the no-vax ideology.
But that’s not enough. Ideology feeds on an existential fuel, a refusal to any constraint on one’s individual freedom. It is, as Mauro Magatti wrote, a life instinct that masks a powerful death drive, and which, in principle, rejects all control and all laws. We have already seen it in action last summer, in the gatherings that challenged all social distancing. With an attitude that, in the incapacity of a thought, does not accept frustration, waiting, absence, and for this reason it reacts by taking a radical position on the right to live.
It is the paradox of a country where liberals are historically missing, or irrelevant, and where even this complex mixture can feed the rejection of the vaccine. In the name of a misunderstood sense of freedom that neither Kant’s rationality, Bentham’s utilitarianism, nor Dworkin’s communal liberalism could justify. For this reason, the Bioethics Committee, which also encourages the spontaneous adhesion of the population to the vaccine, does not exclude that it should become compulsory.
But mandatory is easier said than done. Because here the vaccine measures the detachment, or rather the connection, between the intermediate bodies that make a democracy. Which certainly does not put a reluctant in chains to put a needle in his arm. But, at the most, it places a number of stakes to make the no-vax slalom more bumpy. Thus, to give an example, if the political authority prohibits unvaccinated white coats from entering the hospital, it is necessary that professional orders and associations collaborate by recalling members to responsibility. And do not raise the corporate shield with which the family doctors have hitherto avoided the administration of tampons.
If freedom and responsibility continue to diverge, the forms of prescriptions and prohibitions will tend to become more stringent, with the risk that authority will succumb to the temptation of shortcuts that dirty the face of democracy. This is why vaccination is a game that is won with a choral, truthful and never unrealistic story. And strictly respecting the tight deadlines of the mass campaign. Above all, there is a typically Italian risk to be avoided: that the delay weakens the results and strengthens the reasons for those opposed to the vaccine, but above all transforms them into goods that can be spent on the political market. If one thing we cannot afford, it is that the failure of the operation brings with it a resurgence of populism.
–
