Time.news – “I didn’t know anything about the WHO report, I downloaded it from the web. I didn’t even know who Zambon was, I found out from Report. When I read it, I thought that there was nothing dramatic and that it was a very useful document for all other countries ”. The undersecretary for health, Pierpaolo Sileri, told the Time.news about the document on strengths and weaknesses in the Italian management of Covid written by Francesco Zambon and other researchers, then published for a few hours before being removed from the WHO website.
Sileri also talks about the story of failure to update the pandemic plan, placing it in one a long string of non-responses to his pressing requests of clarification to what he calls “bad apples” in the ministry. “Even today – he underlines – I don’t know what happened in the ministry from 2010 to 2017, I still wonder whether or not a national pandemic committee for the pandemic was set up, as foreseen by the plan. I wait for the Prosecutor to clarify it “.
The starting point is two emails, dated 15 and 21 April 2020, in which the director of the Communicable Diseases Office, Francesco Paolo Maraglino, responds to requests for clarification, writing that the plan “was issued in 2006 and was updated with specific documents relating to the influenza pandemic from A / H1N1 in 2009-2010 (the so-called swine, ed). It is still in force today “.
“Maraglino – explains the deputy minister – answers me after many phone calls in which I asked to send me the plan. At that point I have an official document from the general management telling me that the plan was renewed in 2009. But I need to know what else has been done, as a doctor I smell that something is wrong precisely reflecting on the existence of that pandemic committee, a sort of ‘head’ that should have coordinated all the pre-pandemic activities. In the meantime, Claudio D’Amario (director of the Ministry’s Prevention from February 2018 to January 2020, ed) comes to me and tells me that meetings, inter-ministerial working groups, exercises have been held and I ask him to provide me with documentary evidence of these activities . D’Amario adds that the plan has been renewed in 2016 and that the new one is also ready ”.
In May 2020 Sileri asks again, as is clear from other emails to the proceedings of the investigation in which he was heard as a witness, further clarifications on the subject. “In the meantime, I come to discover from the ‘Report’ program that the plan is from 2006, it has no longer been updated and integrated, as I was told by Maraglino, with the documents of 2009. I tell you the truth: from 2010 to today I have not I know what was done even though I asked and asked for it. I know that in mid-May I received the draft of the new current plan”.
In the mid-April email, Maraglino also refers to a “plan that is classified to me and to be evaluated whether to talk about it, but it is very important. Does it seem possible to you that such a sentence could be written to a deputy minister? Sorry, what floor are we talking about? It is the testimony that not even this have told me. I learn that day that there is a plan I knew nothing about. Are they the projections of the Merler study or is it an anti-Covid plan? I still haven’t understood it ”.
Sileri reports that he was only given the proxies on 25 August 2020, having been appointed Deputy Minister in September 2019, which means much more limited power at that stage. When asked whether the issue of the pandemic plan had ever been addressed before the outbreak of the pandemic, he replies: “The ministry works on many dossiers and protocols, when they need to be renewed, a note is made for the minister, the deputy or an undersecretary with specific powers . We found only two notes addressed to the then ministers Lorenzin and Grillo signed by Guerra and D’Amario. In February 2020 there were at least two meetings of the task force in which the pandemic plan was discussed “.
From then on, his story of continuous attempts to learn more with little success. Thus explains the reason why, once you found out it was “A foreign body” in his ministry, has not resigned or has denounced: “I trusted what some ‘bad apples’ told me, not in the political part but in the ‘technical’ one and I publicly denounced that the plan was from 2006 as soon as I discovered it. Guerra himself kept saying that the plan was from 2016 and verbally this was heard in the ministry. I also publicly asked for the head of the general secretary. The documents that were on the site spoke of a plan updated to 2016 and, if the minister and I are told that the plan was from 2016, for us it is from 2016.
As a doctor I smelled that something was wrong but when I asked for the documents they were never given to me. When Ranieri Guerra left he told me that there was a plan ready. He later asked me to help him figure out if there was this plan because, once he went, he no longer had access to the documents. Where was this floor? Individuals should be asked, Ruocco (general secretary of the ministry, ed), D’Amario and Guerra himself, Minister Speranza and I have found what we have found ”.
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