The remote war between Luca Zaia, governor of Veneto, and Andrea Crisanti, microbiologist and current senator of the Democratic Party is back in fashion. “I’ve been here to break my cocoons for sixteen months, we’re about to bring you down and you’re going to agree to the letter to take the chestnuts out of the fire in the Academic Senate, to fix Crisanti!” the words spoken by the exponent of the League on the phone with an interlocutor, who however was intercepted, reported Repubblica. Zaia’s revolt would have been the Covid specialist’s statements against the effectiveness of the rapid tests acquired by Veneto and five other regions. An investigation began shortly after Crisanti’s complaint: he was convinced of the unsuitability of the swabs for screening purposes, as the reliability would have been 70% and not 90% as certified by the manufacturer.
Crisanti commented on the story to “Mow” magazine: “Declarations of unprecedented seriousness. I pursue him to the ends of the world to bind him in whatever responsibility he bears to me. This intimidation regime in this region must end. My current political experience in the Democratic Party is irrelevant. This is an ethical problem, not a political problem. I receive these statements with dismay. Because then these are not the only statements. Of course, I accessed the documents and there are many other statements, which demonstrate that he was the orchestrator of a campaign of defamation and discredit against, among other things, a person who works for the Region and who, among other things, took office precisely to safeguard the Region itself – stated Crisanti -. Evidently if the study I did and which was later published in Nature had been taken seriously, they would clearly have had to reflect on the orders they placed and the contracts of 200 and more million euros. These practically accepted as justification Rigoli’s statement (director of microbiology at Treviso, in charge of confirming the clinical-scientific suitability of the swabs, ed) that he had not carried out any study, and even knew that – concluded the microbiologist – he had done so”.
Source: IL Tempo
Emma Fitzgerald is an accomplished political journalist and author at The Nation View. With a background in political science and international relations, she has a deep understanding of the political landscape and the forces that shape it.
