The summits between the government, the commissioner and the Civil Protection have been going on for days to speed up the vaccination campaign. But now in Italy we have up to 643,200 doses (the precise number is not quantified) of AstraZeneca still in the refrigerators, because they have been seized by the judiciary. These are two “indicted” lots. The first is lot ABV2856, blocked last March 11 by AIFA following the reporting of possible serious adverse events. On the same day, the Carabinieri of the Nas intervened to execute a decree of the Syracuse prosecutor who ordered to identify the 249,600 doses of the batch and seize those not yet administered. The second is batch ABV5811. In this case without the intervention of Aifa.
On March 15 the Nas, on the orders of the prosecutor of Biella, carried out the same type of seizure throughout the country for the residual doses of the 393,600 belonging to the suspect lot. The seizure came after the unfounded alarm on the safety of the AstraZeneca vaccine which had led the Piedmont region to a unilateral gesture of prohibition of its use, before the governments of half of Europe did so, awaiting an EMA judgment which, however, in the meantime suggested not to stop vaccinations. Five days after the pronouncement of its Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee (Prac), which reiterated the safety of the AstraZeneca vaccine, Ema and then Aifa also confirmed that “there is no evidence of a problem related to specific lots or particular production sites “. But the decisions of science and those of the prosecutors do not travel on the same tracks: the train of justice is always late. Thus, if it has already been a serious mistake to seize vaccines as a precaution, it is even more absurd to stop vaccinations after the scientific authorities have cleared those batches. With a pandemic and hundreds of deaths a day, perhaps it is the case that “the times of justice” are aligned with those of science, especially on issues in which the magistrates do not have technical skills higher than the EMA.