Italy lower house advances vaccine-sceptic medic return bill

Italy’s lower house approved in October a bill allowing healthcare workers struck off during the Covid pandemic over anti-vaccination-linked violations to seek reinstatement, the Guardian reported in a Nov. 12 news article.

The political stakes have risen as a February Lancet Regional Health Europe report of 50,000 adults found nearly one in two Italian adults hesitant about vaccination. Health-ministry figures put measles infections at 472 in the first five months of this year, versus 322 a year earlier.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy is promoting the measure, and the League, its far-right coalition partner, also supports it. The Guardian reported that backing from Roberto Vannacci’s National Future was decisive because Forza Italia lawmakers were split.

The bill would cover healthcare workers removed from professional registers for serious violations linked to anti-vaccination positions, including promoting treatments without a scientific basis. Medical experts cited by the Guardian were less concerned about the number of workers involved, described as very small, than about public trust in vaccines.

“Political communication and the lack of trust among Italians in institutions carry a significant weight,” said Roberta Siliquini, head of the school of hygiene and preventive medicine at the University of Turin and chief researcher on the Lancet Regional Health Europe report. “There really is a disinformation campaign in this sense – and those who want to disinform are very good at communicating.”

The debate has reopened memories of Italy’s early pandemic trauma. Antonio Cremasco, 76, from Bassano del Grappa in Veneto, told the Guardian he contracted Covid on March 6, 2020, spent 20 days in intensive care and then 20 days in a hospital ward, followed by six months of oxygen therapy.

“All those who had been in intensive care with me died,” Cremasco said. “Without the vaccine, if I had caught Covid again, I had a high risk of dying too.” He said he recently received his annual Covid and winter flu vaccination but has struggled to persuade his vaccine-sceptic son of the drugs’ safety.

Public-health data cited in the article point to wider strain. Flu vaccine uptake among people aged 65 and over has fallen to 49.81% this season, the first time below 50% since the winter of 2014-15. In August, a four-year-old child in Palermo died of diphtheria; her parents reportedly told doctors they had not vaccinated her because they believed vaccines were linked to autism, though there is no evidence of such a link.

Claudio Borghi, a League politician, hosted an anti-vaccine seminar in the senate on Oct. 28 and has proposed revising a 2017 law that expanded mandatory childhood vaccinations from four to 10. He told the Guardian the reinstatement proposal was meant “to foster reconciliation after all these years” and said: “In our view, nobody should lose their job because of a personal belief.”

President Sergio Mattarella used a speech at a cancer research gathering the same day to condemn anti-vaccine messages while warning against “irrational beliefs” and “destructive fake news.” Lorenzo Mattia Signori, a Veneto nurse and regional secretary for the patient-advocacy group Cittadinanzattiva, accused politicians of seeking anti-vaccine votes and said: “We cannot have them in hospitals.”

The bill still requires senate approval, with a vote scheduled in January, before it can become law.

Source: news article, The Guardian, Nov. 12, 2026