Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
After protests, city a petri dish
Rallies over Italian health pass spark surge in new cases
TRIESTE, Italy — When Italy introduced Europe’s toughest and most expansive health pass last month, the northeastern port city of Trieste became the epicenter of protests as vaccine skeptics marched alongside dock workers who shouted that the measure infringed on their right to work.
Now, two weeks later, Trieste has emerged as the center of a COVID-19 outbreak linked to those protests that threatens to burden intensive care units and mar the reputation of a city that was once a cosmopolitan hub of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and today has vast ambitions to revitalize its port.
“The situation in Trieste is particularly worrisome,” said Dr. Fabio Barbone, the public health researcher leading the effort against the spread of COVID-19 in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, where Trieste is the capital.
The region’s president, Massimiliano Fedriga, was more blunt, saying, “It is the moment to say with clarity: Enough idiocy.”
Under the leadership of Prime Minister Mario Draghi, Italy has mostly succeeded in containing COVID-19 cases after being devastated early in the pandemic, a fact that drew praise at the G-20 summit he hosted last weekend in Rome.
But the Trieste outbreak shows how an unvaccinated minority can still threaten the greater public health and how difficult it can be to bring vaccine resisters into the fold.
Throughout Europe, which last week accounted for nearly 60% of the world’s new coronavirus infections, contagion levels are becoming so high that the World Health Organization on Thursday warned of the possibility of 500,000 deaths in the next three months.
“Europe is back at the epicenter of the pandemic — where we were one year ago,” said Dr. Hans Kluge, the WHO’s director for Europe.
He attributed the spike in cases largely to inadequate levels of vaccination in places like Russia and to the easing of public health precautions such as mask wearing, particularly in Britain.
On a recent morning in Trieste’s main Unità d’Italia Square, a central theater of many of its demonstrations, Dario Giacomini, a leader of the protests and a radiologist who has been suspended by his hospital for refusing to get vaccinated, sat outside the Caffè degli Specchi. Without a Green Pass, as the health pass is known, he was not allowed to sit inside.
As protesters in the square struck yoga poses or held up signs reading, “Trieste calls, Italy answers,” he complained that the health pass sidelined the unvaccinated from the country’s workforce and rendered vaccine skeptics “socially dead.” The anti-Health Pass movement would spread everywhere, Giacomini insisted, but “Trieste was the spark.”
Yet while protests elsewhere in Italy have since died down as Italians have accepted the Green Pass, in Trieste officials eager to counter the city’s new reputation as the center of vaccine skepticism have had to ban further protests in the square and threaten penalties against those who disobey.
For the authorities, the reason for the spike was clear. Valerio Valenti, Trieste’s top law enforcement official, told reporters this week that the current outbreak was “strictly correlated” to the protests. Doctors agreed.
The number of new cases in Trieste last week doubled over the week before to more than 800, and authorities were deeply concerned about Trieste’s “exponential” growth in cases.
Throughout the region, positive cases have climbed while the number of swab tests have remained constant. COVID-19 patients have taken up about 18% of the region’s intensive care beds, crossing a dangerous threshold.
“The biggest cluster,” said Barbone, the region’s public health researcher, emerged in 93 people who crammed together without masks and shouted slogans at the rallies in Trieste. “All of these people are not vaccinated.”
Italy’s measures, which went into effect Oct. 15, require proof of vaccination, a negative rapid swab test or recent COVID-19 recovery to go to the workplace. The leader of the dock workers protesting the law was Stefano Puzzer, a local activist with political ambitions.
Vaccinated himself, he argued that it was unfair to make unvaccinated people pay to work by forcing them to pay for their own swab tests. Many of his supporters pointed out that Italy’s Constitution began with the words “Italy is a democratic Republic founded on labor.”
The government rejected that case, arguing that it would be too expensive to pay for millions of swab tests and that such a policy would undercut the government’s vaccination efforts. But the protests, at times broken up with water cannons, drew all sorts of anti-vaccine protesters, and a major demonstration planned at the end of October promised tens of thousands of protesters.
On the eve of the rally, after speaking with authorities, Puzzer disbanded it for fear of infiltration by violent elements. .
“Don’t come to Trieste because it’s a trap, a big fat trap,” Puzzer appealed on social media, leading to new conspiracy theories by Giacomini and other vaccine skeptics about infiltration by government spies to incite violence and tarnish their movement’s image.