Italy’s doctors face new threat: Conspiracy
theories
Amid fear and anger, pandemic-skeptics are accusing
doctors of lying about the virus.
Illustration
by Brian Britigan for POLITICO
BY GRETA
PRIVITERA
November
26, 2020 4:44 am
https://www.politico.eu/article/italy-coronavirus-doctors-face-conspiracy-theories/
MILAN —
From “heroes” to “terrorists.” In Italy, the doctors and nurses lauded for
their exhausting, dangerous work in the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic
are facing a new challenge: conspiracy theories accusing them of faking the
emergency.
In one
social media video, two women tell the camera they are in the emergency room at
Sacco Hospital in Milan, one of the hardest-hit cities in Italy. They want to
prove that the ER is empty, contrary to what is being reported by journalists,
who have sounded the alarm about a drastic uptick in cases.
The women
go inside the building, showing viewers a calm, empty interior. Next, they walk
back outside to demonstrate there are no ambulances lined up. Doctors,
journalists, and politicians have been lying, they say. “They are terrorists.”
The video,
which was shared thousands of times, is a fake. The rooms it features are not
located in the emergency wing of the hospital, which are in fact full. Nor does
the video show the places outside the hospital where ambulances regularly wait,
lined up one after another, to discharge seriously ill patients.
Similar
accusations have proliferated on Facebook, Telegram, WhatsApp and countless
other mediums, where posters claim ambulances are driving around aimlessly
without patients on board, or turning on their sirens simply to scare people.
Others
share images of deserted hospitals and theorize that doctors fabricated the
emergency so they can earn more money. Still others recommend eating avocados
to keep at bay a virus they insist is no more serious than a flu.
“If during
the first wave we were called heroes, now someone has changed their mind,” said
Andrea Artoni, a hematologist who works in a COVID-19 ward at the Milan
Polyclinic. “We are tired, fatigued and we work exhausting shifts trying to put
all the energy we have into saving those who get sick.”
It’s not
easy to face a second wave of the pandemic just six months after the first, he
said. “To those who deny the existence of this virus, I can only say to come
and take a tour in one of our departments. Come and see how our people die suffocating,
alone and lucid.”
Appeals
like Artoni’s fall on deaf ears among those who have ventured far enough down
the rabbit hole, armed with false theories about the severity of the global
pandemic.
According
to the deniers, the health emergency is an invention of the media, a distorted
narrative peddled by politicians and powerful people who are seeking to
manipulate the world from behind the stage curtain.
“Many
times, conspiracy theories arise from the difficulty in accepting the
unexpected,” said Massimo Polidoro, a science writer and university professor.
“For some people, it is more reassuring to invent an imaginary evil figure to
fight, because it is more comforting compared to the invisible virus that you
feel you cannot control.”
A recent
survey found that 81 percent of Italians are finding the second lockdown harder
than the first, saying they feel more anxious and distrustful of the
authorities leading the pandemic response.
Luca, a
43-year-old bar owner from Milan, said he is sure that Bill Gates plans to use
the COVID-19 vaccine to inoculate billions of people with a microchip that will
give him power over the population as if by remote control. Asked where he
heard this theory, and why he believes it, he said it came from a friend who
studied in the United States and “knows everything.” They talked about it
during their children’s swimming class.
Although he
still follows lockdown rules and wears a face mask, Luca said he is angry and
frustrated with what he describes as the government’s mishandling of the
crisis. In November, he was forced to shutter his bar in compliance with the
latest regulations.
It doesn’t
take much for these theories to spill out from the web into real life. In Milan
earlier this month a woman kicked an ambulance while a parked driver was
waiting to load a COVID-19 patient and started to yell at the paramedics,
calling them “terrorists,” who “go around with sirens to scare people.”
Beyond
concerns of people flouting lockdown measures, there is a growing fear that
fringe denialist theories could hurt the country’s long-term recovery.
“In such a
fragile historical moment as the one we are experiencing, certain nonsense does
nothing but fuel the distrust in institutions, in the state, in hospitals, and
in who is fighting this coronavirus,” Pierpaolo Sileri, Italy’s deputy minister
of health, told POLITICO.
“With the
arrival of the vaccine, these theories that circulate are even more dangerous
because they risk hindering adherence to vaccination,” said Sileri, who is also
a surgeon.
According
to new research, one in six Italians say they will not get a coronavirus
vaccine if it is available next year, and 42 percent said they will wait until
they better understand its effectiveness. Only roughly a third of the sample
surveyed said they “would certainly get it as soon as possible.”
In a
medical center in Vercelli, in the region on Piedmont, a number of patients
with COVID-19 still refused to believe they were infected. Marco, a nurse from
Bergamo, said he was increasingly angry about the depth of people’s denial of
the disease.
“If you
don’t experience the effects of the virus, I can excuse your ignorance, but
when you experience that reality and see the efforts, the energy mobilized by
the medical community to fight this emergency, you cannot continue to question
it,” he said. “It is offensive toward us, toward those who have died and their
loved ones.”
During the
early months of the pandemic, doctors and virologists appearing on television
to explain the rapidly evolving crisis would often contradict one another.
Those mixed messages offered rich pickings for the conspiracy theorists,
according to Cavanna.
He added
that he’d like to have a conversation with a denier. “I’d like to hear what
they have to say. I’m an oncologist and I’m used to hearing the strangest
things,” he said. “I would listen to them very seriously because I think that
we, the scientists, have a little fault in this too.”
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