One evening with the no-vax people: "We don't trust each other anymore". Ed

They look for certainties and bring their children to the debate but then leave them to play in another room

FEDERICO CALLEGARO – Pubblicato il 15/10/2017 – LA STAMPA Torino

"They've been making fun of us all for so long that now we can't believe anyone anymore." With a single sentence said at the end of a chat born on the stairs of SpazioQuattro, district club in via Saccarelli 18, a 70-year-old lady, who arrived with a friend of her age, tries to condense months of debate on vaccines, web hoaxes, post-truth. Inside the building, the group «Freedom of Vaccinal Choice Turin» is projecting Ambra Fedrigo's no-vax documentary «Reasonable Doubt», and the two ladies have come precisely to cultivate this doubt. Theirs is not the average profile of the spectators (the forty people in the room are almost all younger, pregnant women or parents with children in tow and are of medium-high culture) but it is by talking to them that one realizes that around the debate born on vaccines there is not only the issue of the health of their school-age children, but also that of trust in our surroundingsin an almost philosophical sense.

The hall is predominantly female (about two thirds of those present are women) and many spectators have brought their children, who however remain in another room to play throughout the screening. There are also many expectant mothers and the discussion that holds the most discussion among the small groups, before the lights go out, revolves around how to deal with the documents relating to vaccines to be presented at school and how to behave when the car checks begin. certifications.

«Il dibattito si è troppo polarizzato ed è diventato politico – spiega un genitore, arrivato con la compagna -. La colpa è principalmente da addebitarsi a a law that insists on coercion and obligation and that links what should be a free choice to the possibility of enrolling one's children in school». Ma tra i presenti c’è anche chi è contrario ai vaccini, tutti, e non soltanto per le modalità imposte del ministero: «Dentro ci sono metalli pericolosi – sostiene convinta una signora arrivata da sola -. Per realizzarli hanno utilizzato le cellule di un bambino abortito da una donna internata in un manicomio negli Anni 70».

With very few exceptions, however, the audience is particularly moderate: lack of trust in the authorities, fear of vaccinating too young children, fear of applying multiple vaccines at once, are the most common doubts. Therefore, there is a significant difference between the viewers of the video and the documentary itself, as soon as the screening begins: if the parents who arrived in the San Donato area are afraid, in the documentary they find certainties without contradiction. Interviews with mothers with children who claim to be harmed by vaccines, doctors who explain how the metals contained in drugs cause autism, teachers who say that to avoid disease it is sufficient to drink "clean water", are part of the main corpus of the work , which intersperses expert questions with videos of fire-breathing dragons and twilight music.

«It's amazing how certain beliefs spread – commenta, riferendosi al dibattito sui vaccini, una ragazza che si è mischiata tra il pubblico per scrivere la sua tesi sulla post-verità -. Today fake news and scientific research, both available with the same search engines, end up becoming the same thing».

Related news: Vaccines? No thank you. In Bologna now the No vax are also inventing an anti-compulsory theatrical show

Ed.: In a recent conference, Minister Lorenzin said that health in Rome is the worst in Italy and if Rome is administered by the Raggi then the worst health in Italy is the fault of the Raggi.

If Rome is "full of drugs", as Minister Beatrice Lorenzin once again declared, and Raggi is the mayor of Rome, then presumably it is Raggi who is dealing drugs in Rome.

Raggi will have many faults, but this way of reasoning has only one name: "bad faith", or the way in which certain parties deceive us citizens by not saying things as they are in order to weaken their electoral competitors and increase the votes of provided for in their favor.

For many years, the Municipalities have lost their managerial and organizational responsibilities in health matters and it is the Regions and the government that make the good and the bad times. And if Rome is full of drug addicts and the services to treat them are not funded, then the cuts by the government and the Lazio Region are the cause of the large number of drug addicts.

The sensationalist phrases then uttered by Walter Ricciardi in support of Lorenzin's claims ("The only capital in Europe to have worsened its health indicators"; "All the indicators, from the most solid one which is life expectancy and infant mortality to that of cancer, lead to a worsening of the situation of Roman citizens compared to the rest of Italy") are completely misleading, therefore very unscientific: they are proposed as absolute while they should be evaluated as relative to a series of comparative data of context that they lack altogether. Ricciardi's claims are in fact political not scientific.

Another example is the continuous state propaganda in favor of generics, but if they don't take off as they want it is because patients realize that different excipients or different qualities lead to different bioavailability of the two drugs, i.e. different efficacy and they realize that patients , that the much-vaunted savings for the health service funds (to be allocated to the improvement of services) is a thesis that does not hold up because the difference between the original drug and the equivalent one is paid by the citizen out of his own pocket and there is no improvement of services indeed!

All this leads to disorientation in citizens who are no longer able to discern truth from falsehood.

If science lacks autonomy and politics can use it as it pleases, then according to the transitive rule science, like politics, is destined to lose people's trust. And this is not a problem but a tragedy that no one seems concerned about. No vaxes are just a consequence of this drift.