Covid, Silvestri: “Italy looks like a madhouse, absurd extremes”

“I didn’t want to say it, but honestly looking at it from outside Italy this summer 2021 looks like a cage of madmen. Until yesterday a person had to put on a mask, under penalty of very severe fines, if he went alone for a walk in a park or in a forest looking for mushrooms. With Italy’s victories at the European Football Championships, thousands of people, almost all without masks, are seen shouting and hugging each other stuck for hours, all under the nose, if not with the blessing of the authorities Sorry for the harshness, but I don’t think it takes an H-index of 80 to understand that we have to find some middle ground between these extremes, both absurd. ” This is the analysis of virologist Guido Silvestri, a lecturer in the USA at Emory University in Atlanta. “This very Italian schizophrenia – writes the founder of the social column ‘Pills of optimism’ on Facebook – is the result of the catastrophism-closure-extremist carried out by certain media and ‘institutional’ experts, perhaps terrified by the idea of ​​repeating the mistakes of beginning of the pandemic (from the series ‘Milan does not stop’). A narrative supported by the well-known social batons, who attacking and percolating the optimism of knowledge (the real one, which brought us vaccines, antibodies and a thousand other things), proposed a caricatured and politicized version of science that plays only the game of no-vax and deniers of all kinds “. “Dear friends, we still have time: let’s all return to reason, to common sense, to a prudence made up of optimism – not terror and / or ‘chair-saving’ political agendas – and behavior based on scientific evidence. most important of all: vaccinate as many people as possible and as soon as possible “, urges the scientist.