Why is Italy the anti-vaccination capital of Europe?

Italy is facing one of its worst epidemics of measles, with the nation accounting for a quarter of all the cases in Europe this year. The scale of the outbreak - with a sixfold increase in rates of the potentially deadly disease over the past year - is being blamed on Italy’s vocal anti-vaccination movement, and on government complicity.

The debate has reached a peak in the past week, after Ivan Zaytsev, a volleyball player with Italy’s national team and an Olympic medallist, posted a photo online showing his seven-month-old daughter after receiving a vaccination. In response, he was sent a barrage of abuse from anti-vaxxers.

As public debate rages, and the governing alliance of the Northern League and the Five Star Movement (M5S) look to further discredit the science of vaccinations, we examine how the anti-vaxxer drive began and what might happen next.

Where has this movement come from?

Scepticism in Italy about vaccines dates back to the infamous discredited 1998 study by British doctor Andrew Wakefield that linked the MMR vaccine to autism in children.

His findings were quickly debunked, but as late as 2012, a court in Rimini, northeast Italy, controversially ruled that a child’s autism had in fact been caused by the MMR vaccination, Time reports.

“The Rimini ruling was overturned in 2015, but the judgment had by then done its damage,” the magazine adds.

In Wired, journalist Riccardo Saporiti argues that the continued popularity of the anti-vax movement can be linked to political corruption scandals that have eroded faith in public services in Italy.

“Italians first started not trusting their politicians in the 1990s, then we lost faith in doctors and economists,” Saporiti writes. “Now when it comes to vaccines, everyone has an opinion on it.”

Politicians from the ruling alliance of the right-wing League party and the anti-establishment M5S movement have actively fuelled suspicions about the safety of childhood vaccines, much to the chagrin of the scientific community and their supporters.

Measles outbreak and elections

Public health authorities are “incredulous that the small but loud anti-vax movement has gained traction during an entirely preventable outbreak”, says the Associated Press, “thanks to an election campaign where prominent politicians have questioned the safety of shots and denounced obligatory inoculations”.

In mid-2017, the Democratic Party, then in control of the government, implemented a new law requiring parents to inoculate their children against ten diseases before they could enroll them in school - a piece of legislation that was met with a fierce backlash from M5S and the League in the run-up to the country’s elections this May.

Despite the protests of the medical community, the dispute looks set to keep going for some time yet. 

Matteo Salvini, deputy prime minister and League leader, recently said that the requirement for ten vaccines was “too much”.

He argues that mandatory vaccinations incurs on Italians’ “freedom of choice” and that “having twelve [shots] together exposes the children [to] risk”, Time magazine reports. The jabs should be at the discretion of “of Mum and Dad”, Salvini insists.

Andrea Grignolio, a medicine historian at La Sapienza University of Rome, claims Salvini’s carefully worded argument is the “first step toward getting rid of the vaccine completely”.

“It is an intelligent strategy... what you are offering is a route for citizens to avoid vaccinations,” Grignolio concludes.