Last month, when Italy launched Europe’s toughest and most comprehensive health passport, the northeastern port city of Trieste became the epicenter of protests. Anti-vaccination skeptics marched alongside dockers claiming that the measure infringed on their right to work.
Now, two weeks later, Trieste has emerged as the epicenter of something else: an outbreak of Covid linked to those acts, threatening to overwhelm the ICUs and damage the reputation of a city that was once the cosmopolitan center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now has large ambitions to revitalize its port.
“The situation in Trieste is especially worrisome,” said sanitarian Fabio Barbone, who heads the anti-Covid effort in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, of which Trieste is the capital. The president of the region, Massimiliano Fedriga, avoided beating around the bush: “It’s time to speak frankly: no more idiocy.”
Under the leadership of Prime Minister Mario Draghi, Italy has largely managed to contain Covid’s cases after being ravaged by the disease at the start of the pandemic — a fact that was lauded at the G20 summit the prime minister chaired in Rome at the end of last week.
But the outbreak in Trieste makes clear how an unvaccinated minority – whether because of concerns about personal freedom, the right to work or unfounded conspiracy theories – is still capable of jeopardizing the general public health and how difficult it can be to take the resistant vaccines to change their minds.
Italy is not the only country in this situation. In Germany, a sharp increase in Covid cases and hospitalizations led Health Minister Jens Spahn to warn of “a pandemic that affects mainly the unvaccinated and that is huge”. Unvaccinated patients fill beds in ICUs, leading to calls for banning their entry into certain closed public spaces.
Across Europe, which last week accounted for nearly 60% of new Covid cases worldwide, contagion levels are getting so high that on Thursday the World Health Organization (WHO) raised the possibility. half a million deaths in the next three months.
“Europe is once again the epicenter of the pandemic, the same place we occupied a year ago,” said Hans Kluge, WHO director for Europe. Kluge attributed the large increase in cases largely to insufficient levels of vaccinations in places like Russia and laxity of health precautionary measures such as the wearing of masks, especially in the UK.
On a recent morning, in Unità d’Italia square, the center stage for many of the public protests in Trieste, Dario Giacomini, leader of the demonstrations and radiologist who was suspended from the hospital where he works for refusing to be vaccinated, was sitting in front of the Caffè degli Specchi. As he did not have a Green Pass, as the health passport is known, he was prohibited from entering the café.
As protesters in the square performed yoga poses or held up signs saying “Trieste calls, Italy responds,” Giacomini criticized the health passport’s exclusion of the unvaccinated from the Italian workforce and “socially killing” anti-vaccine skeptics. He insisted that the movement against the health passport would spread everywhere and that Trieste was the initial spark.
The acts in other parts of the country stopped as the population accepted the Green Pass. In Trieste, however, the authorities had to prohibit further demonstrations in the square and threaten punishment for those who disobey the norm, wanting to combat the city’s new reputation as a center of anti-vaccine skepticism.
Some inhabitants of the city are already fed up. On Sunday, law professor Mitja Gialuz, a leading figure in the community, launched a petition asking residents to declare that they believe in science and the vaccine. The petition has already received nearly 50,000 signatures.
Many Italians began to ask what is happening in Trieste, which at various times has seemed a place apart from the rest of the country. After the role it played in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the city was a central place between empires and a crossroads of Italy, Central Europe and the Balkans.
At the turn of the 20th century, it was a stronghold of the Italian movement to claim so-called “vacant” land on the peninsula and across the Adriatic. (“Viva l’Italia! Viva Trieste Livre!” cried Guglielmo Oberdan when he was hanged after a failed attempt to assassinate the Austro-Hungarian emperor in 1882.)
After World War II, the US and UK controlled Trieste to prevent it from falling into the hands of communist Yugoslavia, returning the city to Italy in 1954. A sign with “Welcome to the Free Territory of Trieste” in the center reminds you that it still some think it was illegally annexed by Italy.
“Trieste has always been a different place,” said Giacomini, who is not a native of the region, seeking to explain the city’s independence attitude against the vaccination decrees of a government he equates to a dictatorship. Experts consider this idea absurd.
“People talk about independence, but that has nothing to do with the problem,” said Piero Delbello, director of the Regional Institute of Istrian, Friulian and Dalmatian Culture, as he checked the Passe Verde of a visitor to his museum, used as a center. of vaccination during the Spanish flu of 1921. “Let’s not look for historical reasons where they don’t exist.”
Delbello suspects that the higher level of infections in Trieste is due more to the geographic position of the region and the border it shares with Slovenia. For authorities, the reason for the Covid outbreak is clear. Valerio Valenti, the top police official in Trieste, told reporters this week that the current outbreak is closely linked to the protests. Doctors share this view.
New cases in Trieste have doubled last week from the previous week, reaching more than 800. Officials are alarmed by the increase, which they call exponential.
Infections across the region are on the rise, while the number of tests remains constant. Covid patients now occupy 18% of the ICU beds in the region, crossing a dangerous threshold.
According to Fabio Barbone, the health researcher in the region, the greatest concentration of cases emerged among 93 people who gathered without masks and shouted slogans in protests in Trieste. “None of these people were vaccinated,” he pointed out.
The measures that took effect in the country on Oct. 15 require people to present proof of vaccination, a negative rapid test result or proof of recent recovery from Covid in order to go to their places of work. The leader of the port workers who protested the law is Stefano Puzzer, a local activist who harbors political ambitions.
Vaccinated himself, Puzzer argues that it is unfair to force unvaccinated people to pay to work by forcing them to pay for their own tests. Many of its supporters point out that the Italian Constitution begins with the words “Italy is a democratic republic founded on work”.
The government rejected the argument, saying it would be too expensive to pay for millions of tests and that such a policy would weaken its vaccination efforts. But the protests, which in some cases were quelled with water cannons, attracted anti-vaccine protesters of all kinds, and a large protest scheduled for the end of October promised to gather tens of millions of people.
On the eve of the act, after speaking with authorities, Puzzer canceled the act, fearing that it would be infiltrated by violent elements. “Don’t come to Trieste because it’s a big trap,” he said on social media. His appeal led Giacomini and other anti-vaccine skeptics to come up with new conspiracy theories about infiltrating government spies to incite violence and tarnish the movement’s image.
Ciro Mauriello, 29, an unvaccinated protester who came from the Emilia Romagna region with a friend to participate in the protest before it was cancelled, says he believes the state intended to sabotage the demonstration. “Like January 6 in the United States,” he said, noting that Democrats planned the attack on Capitol Hill to tarnish the image of Trump supporters.
Behind him, other protesters were playing, trying to grab each other to inject their comrades with a make-believe vaccine. What a lot of them ended up getting was Covid.
Longshoreman Fabio Tuiach, former councilor of Trieste, a member of the Liga party and neo-fascist Força Nova, wrote on Facebook on October 25 after receiving Covid-19’s diagnosis: “Days ago I was in front of the water cannons and I passed the all day wet. I think that, with that, added to the temperature at the end of October in Trieste, it was impossible not to get sick. I did a quick test and the result was positive.”
Even so, he insisted: “For me, Covid only exists in the mind of someone who has been hypnotized.”
.
