Giorgia Meloni, during her electoral campaign, had stated it several times: the pandemic management of a center-right government will not be characterized by obligations and constraints, at most “recommendations” to be vaccinated for age groups at risk.
“Stop vaccination obligation”
A promise that the Minister of Health, Horace Schillaci, intends to maintain by implementing a prudent health policy without resorting to compulsory vaccination. We need to enter a new phase of the political management of Covid, but how? According to the minister it is necessary“Empower citizens, don’t force them”. In a long interview on Libero the Minister of Health clears the field of all misunderstandings: he confirms that he is a technician lent to politics, a “civil servant” of the nation, but ensure that “his political thought is reflected in the orientation of the current government” and adds:“I wouldn’t be interested in being part of a centre-left government”. Schillaci wants to give a strong signal of discontinuity with respect to the previous management of the former minister Hope and to do so, he wants to change the relationship between the state and the citizen. A relationship based on transparent communication and respect for personal freedoms. “We need to give a message of discontinuity – explains the minister – Public health must be depoliticized, it is not right or left”. There is also a veiled attack on Speranza and her communication choices: “In the last 3 years there has only been talk of Covid. Today, however, the epidemic has changed and we should start talking about Covid 23, to make people understand that the disease is different from the original one”. And on the vaccination obligation, Schillaci is even more explicit: “We will not put the vaccination obligation back and we will be increasingly attentive to mediating the right to health with respect for personal freedoms”.
No-Vax Doctors
The Minister of Health, pressed by the interviewer’s questions, returns to talk about the latest decisions of the executive. The decision to reinstate unvaccinated health personnel is a choice that the minister proudly claims. “The rest of the world had already returned. We brought forward a few weeks both for a staffing problem and for a philosophical choice: on Covid and vaccines we need to move towards a national reconciliation”. In Italy the percentage of no-vax doctors is small but the decision to reintegrate them into hospitals has increased criticism from the opposition who accused the executive of “a wink at no vax”. The minister goes straight and replies piquedly to those who say they do not trust no-vax doctors: “A somewhat superficial and purely political statement”.
Judgment Consulta and Commission of Inquiry
Schillaci doesn’t go too far, both as regards the judgment of the Constitutional Court on the “Legitimacy of compulsory vaccination”and for a possible commission of inquiry into pandemic management. “I respect the judgments of the Constitutional Court” who deemed the appeal against the compulsory vaccination introduced by the Draghi government in 2021 inadmissible. And on the commission of inquiry, the minister avoids “politicise” the pandemic and ensures: “Parliament has every right to clarify what has happened, what is happening and what will happen”.