On the sidelines of the latest announcement by Horace Schillaci on the reduction of the Covid quarantine for the asymptomatic, which is proceeding with an unbearable heaviness in decisions, there is an element of his speech, conceptually analogous to the general approach of those who preceded him, which in my opinion represents a bad message to be sent to the community and, for this reason, worthy of a brief critical analysis.
With regard to the infinite theme of allocations for the vast sector of public health, the current Minister of Health expresses himself as follows: “Only with the arrival of this terrible pandemic and in the face of 180,000 deaths has it been understood that spending on health it is a primary and indispensable expense. Today in a situation of serious difficulty, with the need to support families and businesses to avoid the collapse of our economy, the government has insured 2.2 billion euros for healthcare in 2023 and another 2.4 billion in 2024. A first sign of a trend reversal that will consolidate with the budgets for the next few years”.
Now, apart from the wholesale use of the increasingly controversial Covid death count, in which thousands of swab-positive subjects who died from many other causes continue to be included in the list, and glossing over the extra-Covid mortality excess, due to the distorting effect, denounced at the time by Schillaci himself, determined by the abnormal use of men and resources in the fight against the coronavirus, even Speranza’s successor seems to have missed the great opportunity to address the fundamental issue of prevention. A theme that, as it had emerged since the beginning of the pandemic, which Professor Bernabei, a former member of the CTS and current personal doctor of the Pope, defined as the pandemic of the very elderly and very sick, still today finds it difficult to emerge throughout the its evidence.
Prevention which, as regards the vast range of respiratory diseases similar to Covid-19, can only start from the fundamental assumption of a correct lifestyle. The classic a healthy mind in a healthy body theorized by Juvenal in the first century after Christ, which nowadays presupposes a correct lifestyle through a balanced diet and sufficient motor activity. So much so that it suffices to analyze the numbers, which as usual hardly anyone reads, of almost three years of viral passion to learn that even among the older sections of the population the apparent lethality rate, i.e. the one based on the infections detected, is very low among subjects who do not have any serious underlying disease. Lethality rate which, on the contrary, has tended to soar right from the outset precisely among those groups of people who are affected by metabolic diseases, above all diabetes, cardiovascular problems, obesity and a whole long series of pathologies deriving from a bad diet combined with the prolonged abuse of cigarettes and alcohol.
Nonetheless, as has been done and continues to be done with regard to the vaccine, alias the elixir of life, the line that we could define as individual irresponsibility prevails, implicitly urging citizens to care less about their own behavior in terms of prevention, reassuring them with the promise of always being treated and vaccinated for any ailment. And to the bad ones, just as happened to the useless and very harmful – in terms of general health – lockdowns of 2020, it will also be possible to resort to mass house arrest to prevent the contagion from reaching the most unfortunate or less careful people in following a correct lifestyle.
In this sense in an evolved liberal democracy, which we have shown we are not in the era of the coronavirus, the public hand should be limited to informing citizens about the risks for health deriving from some bad habits – which in the past has been done with greater commitment -, avoiding encroaching on the drift from the ethical state that we have painfully experienced with the green pass and compulsory vaccination. Therefore, while not underestimating the government’s effort in financially supporting public health, we must however avoid passing on the aberrant concept that money and advanced science alone make health, as well as happiness.
If anything, in the case of Sars-Cov-2, health has been maintained by the most attentive and luckiest people in terms of healthwhile the money was made by all those who, in one way or another, have orbited and continue to orbit around the colossal industry of vaccines, masks, tampons and all those presumed safety devices that have not moved one comma the dynamic trend of a virus that has inexorably installed itself in our societies.
Claudio Romiti, 1 December 2022