Internists, professors, hospitals reject the conclusions of the Bergamo prosecutor’s office which accused not only politicians but also the leaders of Italian health care and top-level professionals of serious crimes who counted deaths, spent themselves to understand, fight and then defeat the beast Black. After almost three years of nightmare there is bitterness among the white coats. Heavy responsibilities have been unloaded on the members of the Technical-Scientific Committee or on politicians who may not have been timely, hesitant, postponed, made mistakes, but with the intention of doing the right thing.
«Only in Italy declare in a note the president of Fadoi, the scientific society of Internal Medicine, Francesco Dentali and the president of the Fadoi Foundation, Dario Manfellotto – there is a judicial initiative of this type. Are we then more intelligent, purer, more correct? Is the Italian judiciary the best in the world because it is the only one that has discovered errors? But have we forgotten that the pandemic has affected the whole world and that Italy was the first country to be overwhelmed? If so, then it is useless to hide behind a finger: we are all guilty, incapable and negligent because we all, not just the decision makers, acted on the basis of what science, conscience and knowledge provided in those dramatic moments”.
The two exponents of hospital internists, who have taken care of 70 percent of Covid patients in their wards during the pandemic, brand as “incredible” the accusations made against 20 suspects of manslaughter, a culpable epidemic including top experts and Italian healthcare clinicians whose professionalism is recognized and appreciated throughout the world are now being branded almost like criminals. «In three years and even more so in 2020, in those first weeks when the pandemic broke out in Italy, Dentali and Manfellotto remember – navigating in the dark in the face of an unknown emergency, we dedicated all our activities without time limits, with an all-encompassing commitment and with hundreds of deaths among doctors and health workers ».
A doctor who practically moved to the hospital during the Covid era is also critical of the judicial conclusions. “We had the unknown come that he got behind us. What should have been done during that time? – asks Matteo Bassetti, director of the Infectious Diseases Clinic of the San Martino hospital in Genoa -. There were no swabs, there was no knowledge of the virus, of the drugs, of anything. Of course, there was a problem, there was no national pandemic plan, but why should the President of the Lombardy Region or the Prime Minister have to go and investigate? When you go to hit many people together, you end up hitting no one and you won’t have a final truth”.
Massimo Andreoni, professor of infectious diseases at the Tor Vergata University in Rome, also thinks that everything will end up in oblivion: «The scientists under investigation are a fact already seen after the earthquakes when the technical offices of the administrations are accused – he explains -. Some mistakes were made, but you can’t criticize them today with hindsight».