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Thalidomide is a drug that was sold in the 1950s and 1960s as a sedative, anti-nausea and hypnotic; it was a drug that had an extremely favorable risk / benefit ratio compared to other drugs available at the time for the same purpose. It was withdrawn from the market in late 1961: women treated with thalidomide gave birth to infants with severe congenital changes in limb development, i.e. amelia (absence of limbs) or varying degrees of phocomelia (reduction of the long bones of the limbs), generally more affecting the upper limbs than the lower ones, more often bilaterally, albeit with different degrees.
Since 2009, therefore with about fifty years of delay, the Italian State has paid a monthly allowance to the victims of thalidomide born between 1959 and 1965. Remembering this dramatic episode, never remembered in these equally dramatic months, does not mean being no vax, it does not mean being against science, it means remembering that science is doubt, not certainty. And the “fascist” attitude that today precludes any doubt is unacceptable, just as this point of view will be unacceptable for all those who yearn to be vaccinated as soon as possible. This laceration will be one of the many heavy legacies of this tragedy. Having given pharmaceutical companies a criminal shield does not help to increase trust, but this is not the only point, justified by the rush. There are two scenarios that are foreseen in the coming months.
TWO POSSIBILITIES PLUS ONE
The first scenario, which is optimistic, outlines a context in which the virus goes away by itself, as has always happened in all pandemics in history, without vaccines; in this case the vaccine would still be identified as the determining factor in blocking its circulation. At that point, I hope that the debate on compulsoriness will come to an end in a natural way, overwhelmed by the resumption of a normality that will no longer want to hear about viruses for the next hundred years, and not even the shameful claims of those doctors who repeatedly declare that they will not cure who will not get vaccinated, with all due respect to the Hippocratic oath and the ethical principles so much recalled in recent months. The second scenario, possible, is that the vaccine is not as effective as it seems, and at that point the responsibility will again be placed on the citizens who have opposed, for a thousand reasons, more or less acceptable, to be vaccinated.
This scenario would further extend the film already seen, a film that always indicates in the citizens the culprits of the spread of the virus. A distressing scenario, but one that would further legitimize the mandatory nature of the vaccine, and the need to replicate it after a few months, because one should never let one’s guard down. There is also a third scenario, less linked to the consequences of a vaccination campaign by Istituto Luce, but linked to the dynamics of the communication of fear. After this long period of reporting on terror, citizens will likely begin to be vaccinated against fear rather than the virus, and willing to let their guard down in order to get back to life. At that point, when fear will no longer share, perhaps the positive news will begin to be what the public will want to hear, and at that point the main stream will change; the positive news will accompany the rebirth, forgetting the intensive care and deaths that may continue to exist, with the same hypocrisy that accompanied the negative news.
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