Italy Moves to Reinstate Anti-Vax Medics as Measles Surges and Flu Uptake Hits Decade Low

A far-right coalition bill to rehabilitate healthcare workers struck off for anti-vax violations trades public health credibility for populist votes, as nearly half of Italian adults already distrust vaccines.

Antonio Cremasco spent 20 days in intensive care after contracting Covid in March 2020. Everyone who was in the ICU with him died; he survived, got vaccinated, and credits the jab with saving his life a second time. His own son remains a vaccine sceptic. That family fracture now maps onto the Italian body politic.

A bill approved in October by Italy's lower house would allow healthcare workers struck off during the pandemic — not for refusing a jab, but for serious violations such as promoting scientifically baseless treatments — to apply for reinstatement. The measure is championed by Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy and the League, and its passage through the lower house depended on support from National Future, the new far-right force led by former general Roberto Vannacci, who openly courts the vaccine-sceptic audience. A senate vote is scheduled for January. The number of medics affected is believed to be very small. The damage calculus is elsewhere. Nearly one in two Italian adults are already hesitant about vaccination, according to a 50,000-person study published in the Lancet Regional Health Europe in February by the University of Turin. The driver is not safety fears but misinformation and institutional distrust — precisely the conditions that a public rehabilitation of anti-vax clinicians would accelerate. As researcher Roberta Siliquini put it: "Those who want to disinform are very good at communicating." The consequences of eroding vaccine confidence are not hypothetical. Measles infections hit 472 in the first five months of this year, up from 322 in the same period last year, with more than half of cases in young adults. Flu vaccine uptake among over-65s has dipped to 49.81% this season — below 50% for the first time since 2014-15. In August, a four-year-old girl in Palermo died of diphtheria after her parents refused vaccination, convinced by the debunked claim linking vaccines to autism. The political genealogy is instructive. Vaccine scepticism took root in Italy in the late 1990s around debunked MMR-autism claims, was supercharged by social media, and became a wedge issue when a centre-left government extended mandatory childhood vaccinations from four to ten in 2017. The Five Star Movement rode anti-vax sentiment into government in 2018 before the pandemic forced a reversal. Now the right has inherited the constituency. League politician Claudio Borghi hosted an anti-vaccine seminar in the senate the day after the lower house vote and is pushing to roll back the 2017 mandatory childhood vaccination law, framing mandates as the cause of resistance. The framing is worth dissecting. Borghi told the Guardian the reinstatement bill aims to "foster reconciliation" and that "nobody should lose their job because of a personal belief." But the medics in question were not struck off for personal beliefs — they were struck off for professional conduct violations: promoting treatments without scientific basis. The bill reframes a professional standards enforcement as a civil liberties issue, a move that nurse Lorenzo Mattia Signori described with precision: "It would be like going to church and hearing a priest who says he doesn't believe in God." President Sergio Mattarella used a cancer research gathering to condemn anti-vax messaging and "destructive fake news" — widely read as a rebuke. He retains the constitutional power to refuse to sign the bill into law. Whether he exercises it will signal how far Italy's institutional immune system can resist a pathogen that is, at this point, more political than biological.