[ad_1]
Safe and effective Covid vaccines: Should we trust the promises, Professor Garattini?
We have no alternative, but we must ensure that the results data are made public. Without transparency, we stop at press releases …
And who can ask the multinational drug companies to make their results public?
It depends on the governments, on Europe, on the states that have partially funded the research: they have the power to do it. Public opinion must be informed without propaganda, with vaccines there must also be people’s trust.
Are you afraid of the wave of denial from non-vax groups?
The margin of those who declare that they do not want to vaccinate is still too high, mistrust is fueled by the lack of transparency. If the results exist, it is correct to vaccinate, but also to make the kit available to countries that do not have money to buy it.
It would be correct to remove the patent, as Sabin did with the polio vaccine …
desirable, but difficult to happen: those who invested want to be paid. At “Mario Negri” we do not patent anything, we want our results to be known and available to everyone. But we don’t do business with health, our nonprofit science.
Silvio Garattini He is 92 years old. Scientist, pharmacologist, founder of the Mario Negri institute: he uses the experience of his whole life with the vaccine so as not to be caught off guard, he says, because the strategy depends on what is known, but in the meantime he dreams of a new health Prepare as soon as possible a plan, like Germany, which has already indicated the 60 vaccination centers and where the distribution will take place. Explain that in the face of all these deaths we cannot repeat the initial flop of masks or tampons, to arrive at the delays of the influenza vaccine. In the midst of a pandemic crisis, we must be able to trust politics and science …
Instead …
Instead, everyone has their opinion. The messages of politics are contradictory and science is talked about like football in the bar. In this way, only mistrust is generated.
Covid puts the current healthcare system to a severe test.
Covid has given us a warning. The time has come to get out of the dualism between health and the economy: it is true that if there is no work you will starve, but it is equally true that if you get sick you do not work. Health must become a fundamental good in Italy, it must not be important only when you are sick.
Today we are in very bad shape …
The Covid numbers are monstrous, but the damage caused by non-surgical interventions and postponed exams will soon be seen, because there are no operating rooms or hospital beds. Unfortunately, there is not only Covid: every year in Italy there are 170,000 deaths from cancer and more than 200,000 from heart attacks and ischemias. Those with serious illnesses run the risk of not being protected. The health system on the ropes.
What’s your proposal?
A rethinking of the health system and a cultural revolution that starts from the school, from the teaching of science as education to life. The disease must be considered a failure. My dream is a health care in balance between hospital medicine and local medicine, with much more research and prevention.
It has been talked about for years, but there is a wall of interests ahead.
Prevention is an investment. It costs little and produces a lot, while everything else is a huge market. The health care market tends to produce things that serve disease, while good health tends to prevent it.
Vaccines are also part of this market.
With Covid, vaccines are a must. But we must not give the impression that this is going to solve everything, it would be a bad message to make us believe that there are no more rules to respect and that you can go back to doing whatever you want … summer.
Politics does not seem very interested in reforming the current health system …
The goal for the future will be not to be caught off guard, as we were with Covid: few places in intensive care, little medicine in the area, too many cuts in public hospitals, few resources for research. In Health, we must think in terms of available reserves, as we do with Defense: an army in the field to guarantee peace.
Health as Defense
Exact. What are battleships, planes, weapons, barracks for? They are a deterrent, a preventive measure to avoid war, an investment whose advantage is not activated. The new health care must be planned with more investments in prevention and especially in research: the hospital logic has been definitively put in crisis by the coronavirus.
Medicine in the area has been strategic in the fight against Covid: but for years we have neglected it, transforming general practitioners into bureaucrats transcribing prescriptions …
Today there is great mistrust between general practitioners and hospitals, while they should all be part of the same national health service. What is the reason why there is an independent category of professionals? If there is resistance from those directly involved, start with the young, hiring them in the same health sector as the hospital doctors.
Did the imbalance between hospitals and territory weighed more in Lombardy than in other places?
Overhospitalization is a distortion of the Lombard system. There was a time when Lombardy had more heart operations than all of France. A Parisian colleague told me that they had a third of our staff for the same number of surgeries.
Did you share Lombard’s management of Covid?
No. I am deeply disappointed. Lombardy should be the spearhead of the country, the national reference. Instead, the ability to give a line was lacking here, the doctors were left too alone in their respective trenches. And some delays cannot be explained …
Are you talking about the other vaccine, the flu?
I did it on Monday, I am one of the lucky ones. He was on the waiting list like thousands of other retirees. My doctor received the doses, but they are not sufficient for all applicants. Lombard Health Care has scoffed at flu shots.
Pessimistic about the future?
I am optimistic by nature. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here in the trenches in ’92.
November 25, 2020 (change November 25, 2020 | 07:39)
© REPRODUCTION RESERVED
[ad_2]
