In recent days, Serie A has been dealing with the case relating to the tampons carried out in recent weeks by Lazio, an event that could have criminal implications: in fact, both the Public Prosecutor of Avellino, competent for the reasons that we will see, and that of the FIGC are investigating. . The subject of the investigation is the fact that Lazio had players who tested positive for swabs tested in the UEFA affiliated laboratories train and play in the league before the last two Champions League matches.
Between the last week of October and the first of November, Lazio underwent three cycles of swabs, the first of which had found the coronavirus positivity of four of its players, which had added to the previous two (the club has chosen to never communicate the names of the positives, who are then identified by the summons or by the messages published individually). The first cycle in question dates back to October 26 and had been analyzed by the Synlab laboratories, to which all the teams involved in the European cups – including Lazio – must be addressed on the instructions of UEFA. The six positive players (Manuel Lazzari, Luis Alberto, Anderson, Ciro Immobile, Lucas Leiva and Thomas Strakosha) were therefore excluded from the squad for the Champions League match played in Belgium against Bruges on Wednesday 28 October.
Between 30 and 31 October Lazio had carried out a new cycle of tampons as per regulation in view of the championship match against Turin on 1 November. Unlike UEFA, however, Serie A does not require swabs to be examined by a single laboratory: each team goes to the recognized body of their choice. From the resumption of the matches, the Lazio swabs are examined by the Futura Diagnostica laboratory in Avellino, which on October 31 confirmed some of the positivity found four days earlier by Synlab but not those of Immobile, Leiva and Strakosha. These three players had therefore been called up for the match in Turin, and the first two used in the second half.
Two days later, however, Immobile, Leiva and Strakosha tested positive again in the swabs examined by Synlab on behalf of UEFA, and were therefore excluded from the Champions League match on 4 November against Zenit St. Petersburg. In light of the new positivity, the company also subjected the three players to swabs examined at its “trusted” laboratory, according to which Leiva and Strakosha were negative while Immobile weakly positive (which is why the company decided in in the meantime to add it to training). Lazio then turned to a third laboratory, the Rome Biomedical Campus, which confirmed all the positives. On Saturday 7 November, on the eve of Lazio-Juventus, the ASL of reference for the club finally intervened to arrange the quarantine of the three players despite Lazio still having faith in the negativity certified by the Campania laboratory.
On the same day the Avellino Prosecutor sent investigators to the Lazio sports center in Formello and to the Avellino laboratory to investigate the discrepancies that emerged in the various swabs carried out. Second The Gazzetta dello Sport the prosecutor is concentrating on the possibility of possible tampering: for now the only suspect is the manager of the Avellino laboratory and the crime hypotheses are false, culpable epidemic and fraud in public supplies.
The doubts surrounding the affair were fueled by the statements made in recent months by the health director of Lazio, Ivo Pulcini, then resumed by the president Claudio Lotito. According to Pulcini, the coronavirus was already “dying” last May, while more recently he claimed that a positivity considered weak “has no contagious significance”. In an interview published on Republic last week, Lotito added: “What does positive mean? Positive means contagious, right? Even in the vagina of women, of all women in the world, there are bacteria. But not all are pathogenic, only some in some cases become pathogenic and degenerate ».
On Monday, Pulcini should have presented himself to the federal prosecutor to be heard in the investigation into the tampon case, but he got the postponement – for the second time – for health reasons. In the meantime, the championship has stopped for two weeks for the national team, during which the FIGC could update its health protocol and work on the establishment of a single laboratory that examines the swabs of all the teams in the championship as the protocol already provides. of UEFA.
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