A case of democratic science
On this blog I have dealt on many occasions with the alarming ethical and political implications of the obligation of vaccination for children introduced in 2017 by the former minister Lorenzin and since then remained there, a corpse in the well of a public life already poisoned by many disagreements to bring you other useless poisons, in the choral indifference of all political forces. On the subject I published a book with Pier Paolo Dal Monte, I wrote and demonstrated that the new obligation has curbed people's rights and trust but not diseases , which has provoked an unmotivated and unprecedented scholastic hecatomb that has lent alongside a rhetoric of "science in government" equally damaging for scientific freedom and democratic government , and much more. Instead I have never dealt with the medical aspects of the affair, for at least three reasons: a) because I do not have the skills to do it, b) because I consider the most important method of merit (with the same dogmatic and imperative approach, yesterday economic reforms, today ecological ones , tomorrow who knows) and c) because scientific research itself is a product that responds, if not in the results at least in the selection of the questions, to the dominant political and economic orientations .
All this being said, an initiative recommended to me by the president of the Comilva association, which I recommend to the knowledge and participation of readers, seemed to me most worthy of diffusion. I would call it a proposal for "democratic science" (that is, true) to act as a barrier to the massacres of democracy in the name of science .
The initiators of the initiative designed an experiment to measure, in a sufficiently representative sample of the Italian population, the degree of effectiveness of the vaccinations currently in use in producing an effective immune response against target diseases. Participants are asked to undergo a sampling in an authorized diagnostic facility (I did it here , at a cost of € 80.00) to measure antibodies in the blood and to transcribe the results in an online application. The collected data will be cross-referenced with the subject's clinical history (vaccinations and recalls made, diseases contracted naturally) to return a statistic on the efficacy of the prophylaxis received according to different dimensions: antigen and product administered, diagnostic methodology, temporal distance from administration, age of the subject etc.
Paradoxically, the scientific literature on these issues – that is, on the ultimate sense of practicing vaccinations – is very sparse and the health authorities do not carry out tests to verify at least the sample of the effects of prophylaxis at regime, despite the contained diagnostic costs, the savings that could achieve by avoiding unnecessary recall or ineffective products and the benefits of better pharmaceutical monitoring. Even more paradoxically, the "coverages" invoked and imposed by littering rights are synonymous with the performance of a medical act (the injection) and not its purpose (protection), as if the former were the purpose, the latter the his pretext . To the violence of the obligation is added the logical violence of a zootechnical and industrial treatment that the law considers practically an end in itself , with a blind mechanism that today is not even found in veterinary practice . In this, the Antibody Studies project also plays a role of scientific substitute and aims to bring a theme too ideologized and brandished as a totem, yet another, to criminalize dissent in the context of rationality and public utility.
For further information, refer to the initiative's website .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Il Pedante at the URL http://ilpedante.org/post/un-caso-di-scienza-democratica on Tue, 04 Feb 2020 10:53:07 PST.