The Covid Commission and the trial of science

Should we investigate the past or rewrite it? At the event for vaccine victims hosted in the Senate on the initiative of Lega MP Claudio Borghi, the speeches by Alice Buonguerrieri and Borghi himself suggest the latter. And they say a great deal about the direction that part of the majority wishes to steer the Covid inquiry committee in.

Buonguerrieri, leader of the Fratelli d’Italia group on the committee, defended the provision allowing certain disbarred healthcare professionals to apply for reinstatement to the register, presenting it as the end of a ‘witch-hunt’ against doctors who ‘have saved lives’. He linked this to the committee’s work, which is tasked with bringing ‘the whole truth’ to light. However, the provision – which is proving controversial – does not provide for a blanket reinstatement: it sets out precise conditions, linked to the disputed facts and the circumstances of the emergency, and merely paves the way for an application to the Central Commission for Healthcare Professionals, to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. The bill has passed its first reading in the Chamber of Deputies, still needs to be approved by the Senate, and does not provide for any compensation. To interpret it as a rehabilitation of those who opposed official guidelines is to ascribe a meaning to it that the text does not contain. It does, however, serve to curry favour with the anti-vaxxer movement. It is the pandemic viewed through an anti-vaxxer lens, with Fratelli d’Italia and the Lega at the forefront and Forza Italia taking a more backseat role.

It is thus the anti-vaxxers and the promoters of dubious home remedies who are being celebrated as heroes, not those who, amidst the uncertainty of those months, worked on the available evidence, updating it as research progressed.

Borghi was more explicit. To those who asked what purpose the committee serves if no one ends up in prison, he replied that, ‘unfortunately’, it is not up to MPs to send them to prison, but that if a magistrate wishes to proceed, so much the better. The parliamentary inquiry becomes the premise – not to say the hope – of judicial punishment.

The commission has the right and the duty to scrutinise the decisions taken, identify errors and determine who is responsible. The problem is an inquiry that starts from a pre-determined verdict: not to understand how the institutions dealt with an unprecedented emergency, but to prove that the health policies were wrong and that those who criticised them were right. 

Proof of this is the persistence of the slogan ‘paracetamol and watchful waiting’, reiterated again yesterday: a formula that is as effective as it is misleading, a caricature of ministerial guidelines that are far more nuanced. But circulars are read less often than social media posts, and a simplification repeated often enough becomes the perceived truth, rendering any verification unnecessary.

The relationship between politics and science remains turbulent. Science does not produce immutable truths: hypotheses are revised, treatments are updated. But it does not follow from this that every past decision is indefensible simply because it is open to challenge. Decisions must be judged against the knowledge available at the time they were made. In November 2020, decisions were based on the best evidence available at the time; the arrival of monoclonal antibodies and antivirals has expanded treatment options, but this does not prove that previous recommendations were wrong. Fallibilism acknowledges error; it does not erase the distinction between knowledge supported by evidence from a specific period and unsubstantiated conjecture. 

The risk, therefore, is not that the commission will investigate, but that it will use the inquiry to turn a scientific controversy into a trial of its opponents: an ideological verdict in search of evidence – in other words, the opposite of the truth it claims to be seeking. The aim is to institutionalise anti-science by rewriting history according to a biased set of criteria.