“Statements of unprecedented gravity. I’m chasing him to the end of the world to pin him on any responsibility he has towards me. This regime of intimidation in this region must end.” This is the comment released by the virologist Andrea Crisanti, to the magazine ‘Mow’, in response to what emerged from the ‘Report’ broadcast on some words of the governor of Veneto, Luca Zaia, in an intercepted phone call, in which he allegedly spoke of bringing the microbiologist , now a Pd senator, “to the crash”. Statements from which it seems to emerge that the expert would have been targeted by Zaia for his positions on the management of the pandemic and in particular on rapid swabs.
In the interview published online by the magazine, Andrea Crisanti defines his current political candidacy in the Democratic Party as “irrelevant”: “Here it is a problem of ethics, it is not a political problem. I welcome these statements with dismay. Because then these are not the only statements,” he says. “Clearly I have accessed the documents and there are many other statements, which demonstrate that he is 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, has taken positions precisely to safeguard the Region itself – says Crisanti – Evidently if the study I did and which was later published in ‘Nature’ had been taken seriously, clearly they would have had to reflect on the orders they were doing and the contracts for 200 million euros and more.These practically accepted as justification the declaration of Rigoli (director of microbiology of Treviso, in charge of confirming the clinical-scientific suitability of the swabs, ed.) that no one did study, and they were even aware that he hadn’t.”