ROME – The Italian prime minister resigned on Tuesday, causing the government to collapse.
These kinds of things happen all the time in Italy. But the return to a known state of political instability has never taken place amid a pandemic that has so deeply scorched the country.
After Italy offered a terrible preview in the West of the misery wrought by the coronavirus, it is once again an unfortunate vanguard. It is being tested whether a country, even a country well accustomed to governments that are constantly disintegrating and reforming, can manage vaccines, national curfews, business restrictions and enormous economic bailouts during a full-blown political crisis.
“Italy is a big mess, but also a wonderful country,” said Agostino Miozzo, the coordinator of the powerful scientific committee, who highly recommended the closures and emergency restrictions approved by outgoing Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. “This is a country that is used to governing in emergencies and living in emergencies.”
Italy is by far not the only country to have undergone political upheaval during the pandemic, as evidenced by the storm of the American Capitol this month. But Tuesday’s government collapse has weakened the decision-making apparatus of a nation that has already killed more than 85,000 of its people through the virus.
The question is whether a collapse of a government in a country that has had more than 65 governments over the past 70 years actually matters when it comes to managing the Covid response.
As long as the political crisis is short-lived, the answer seems to be no.
“Time is of the essence,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, a political scientist at Luiss University in Rome. He said that if the crisis is short, as he expects it to be, it will have little effect on the mechanics of the response.
“If we come out of this with a stronger majority, it could be better,” he said. D’Alimonte said.
On Tuesday, Mr. Miozzo led a meeting on the explosion of vaccines, restaurant openings and problems with schools, while Conte did his resignation to Italian President Sergio Mattarella.
Mr. Mattarella will consult with parliamentary leaders for the rest of the week to choose from different options. He will decide whether Mr. Conte or someone else can gain enough support to govern, or a limited technocratic government is a better option. If not, early elections may be necessary.
Meanwhile, the government of Mr. Conte remains in custody.
As Italy’s political forces move to a head start and for more influence in the incoming government, the country’s leading health officials offer the assurance that the country will not fall into the anarchy fueled by Covid. According to them, Italy can successfully manage the pandemic on the motorboat in the short term.
‘Cruise control’, officials in the Tuscany region put it. And constitutional experts said the fact that Italy was already in a state of emergency even allowed a transitional government to exercise extraordinary powers over the virus.
However, some top officials have expressed concern about practical obstacles if the crisis continues or if the failure to form a stable political majority results in new elections.
Sandra Zampa, deputy health minister in Italy, said she feared an “absurd” political crisis would lead to a lack of direction at the top of the government, the consequences of which she said could be best seen in the United States. , with increasing infections and loss of life. She was worried that the call for new elections would ‘paralyze everything’ and make the surveillance government a lame duck.
Although the health response of Italy will remain the same as long as the important ministers and technicians remain in their jobs, Ms. Zampa said the cabinet shuffle and a weak government would make management much more difficult. “
She has already said that protesters gathered to sing: ‘we are disobedient’, restaurants opened illegally and regions challenged the methodology that caused their closure. The words of the government and its ministers, already weakened by the crisis, may carry less weight and their decisions may be less effective.
Miozzo, the science adviser, called the political crisis a form of “madness” and said there was no immediate impact on the country’s pandemic response, but that he was concerned about possible coordination problems between the central government and the regions. , where the vaccination of the vaccine and the closure limits are carried out.
The governors of those regions largely belong to the conservative political opposition that elects new elections, which are likely to favor Matteo Salvini, the leader of the nationalist league party.
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Answers to your vaccine questions
Although the exact order of vaccine recipients may vary by state, medical workers and residents of long-term care institutions are likely to be first. If you want to understand how this decision is made, this article will help.
Life will only become normal when society as a whole gets enough protection against the coronavirus. Once countries approve a vaccine, they will be able to vaccinate at most a few percent of their citizens in the first few months. The unvaccinated majority will still be vulnerable to infection. A growing number of coronavirus vaccines offer strong protection against disease. But it is also possible for people to spread the virus without even knowing they are infected, because they experience only mild symptoms or not at all. Scientists do not yet know whether the vaccination also blocks the transmission of the coronavirus. For the time being, even vaccinated people will have to wear masks, crowds inside, and so on. Must avoid. Once enough people are vaccinated, it will be very difficult for the coronavirus to find vulnerable people who can become infected. Depending on how quickly we as a society reach the goal, life by the fall of 2021 could begin to approach something as normal.
Yes, but not forever. The two vaccines that may be approved this month clearly protect people against Covid-19. However, the clinical trials that have yielded these results have not been designed to determine whether people who have been vaccinated can still spread the coronavirus without developing symptoms. It remains a possibility. We know that people who are naturally infected by the coronavirus can spread it while experiencing no cough or other symptoms. Researchers will study this question intensively as the vaccines begin. Meanwhile, even vaccinated people will have to think of themselves as possible distributors.
The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is delivered like a shot in the arm, like other typical vaccines. The injection will not be different from what you received before. Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccinations, and none of them have reported serious health problems. But some of them felt transient discomfort, including pains and flu-like symptoms that usually last a day. It is possible that people after the second shot may be planning to take a day off from work or school. Although these experiences are not pleasant, it is a good sign: it is the result of your own immune system encountering the vaccine and getting a powerful response that will provide long-lasting immunity.
No. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines use a genetic molecule to replenish the immune system. That molecule, known as mRNA, is eventually destroyed by the body. The mRNA is packaged in an oily bubble that can fuse with a cell so that the molecule can slide. The cell uses the mRNA to make proteins from the coronavirus, which can stimulate the immune system. Each of our cells can contain hundreds of thousands of mRNA molecules at any one time that they produce to make their own proteins. Once those proteins are made, our cells cut the mRNA with special enzymes. The mRNA molecules that make up our cells can only survive for a few minutes. The mRNA in vaccines is designed to resist the cells’ enzymes a little longer, allowing the cells to make extra viral proteins and trigger a stronger immune response. But the mRNA can only take a few days at most before being destroyed.
Several of these governors have already tried to deviate from the government’s stance on various issues, including vaccine management and the opening of schools. The crisis, Mr. Miozzo said, “can be translated into actions, even on vaccines, including the regions'” different priorities about who to vaccinate. “
“This is the real concern,” he said, “that the regions ‘in a way feel freer to take local and defined measures.’
Walter Ricciardi, an adviser to the World Health Organization for the Italian Ministry of Health, shared the case, but said the vaccines are controlled by the central government and he doubts whether the regions will suddenly start immunizing whoever they want.
According to him, however, all the tension is counterproductive.
“The virus is not interested in political positions,” he said. Ricciardi said. “And if there are no governments that have to take the task of making decisions, it spreads intact.”
Mr Conte and governing coalition leaders, made up of the center-left Democratic Party and the populist Five Star Movement, denounced former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi for causing the crisis.
Mr. Renzi accelerated the collapse of the government when he expressed his support for Mr. Conte, who after a week of insane investigation was unable to replace his votes in parliament, rushed. Mr. Renzi’s final was not exactly clear, but he is not the only one in the government who benefits from the premature departure of Mr. Conte nie.
Mr. Renzi said he pulled the baton due to the mismanagement of Mr. Conte, his lack of vision to decide where hundreds of billions of euros should be allocated to recycling funds that Italy will receive from the European Union, and his undemocratic methods. to empower unelected committees.
Critics of Mr. Renzi, who is many, says he threatened Italy’s response to the pandemic for a political chance. But his supporters argued that the government was hiding behind the pandemic and exploiting it for political protection, and that the argument made little sense precisely because the crisis, as government health officials said, had no immediate impact on the vaccination. . or the country’s Covid response.
“It is especially in moments of great weakness that it needs to be changed if a government does not do so,” said Ivan Scalfarotto, a member of Renzi’s Italia Viva party, who described his position as foreign minister under secretary ended. said on Italian television.
“That’s exactly when the ship is in the middle of a storm, we need to make sure we’re on the right track to get out of the storm.”
Emma Bubola, Elisabetta Povoledo and Gaia Pianigiani reported.