Giorgio Agamben’s speech to the Commission on Constitutional Affairs of the Senate, October 7, 2021

“I will focus only on two points that I would like to bring to the attention of the parliamentarians who will have to vote on the conversion of the Decree into law. The first is the evident, I stress the word evident, contradiction in the Decree in question. You know that the Government with a special Decree Law, number 44 of 2021, called the criminal shield, now converted into law, has exempted itself from any liability for damage caused by the vaccine. And how serious these damages can be is shown by the fact that Article 3 of the Decree in question, explicitly mentions Articles 589 and 590 of the Criminal Code, which refer to manslaughter and negligent injury.

As authoritative jurists have noted, this means that the State does not feel responsible for a vaccine that has not completed its testing phase and yet, at the same time, tries to force citizens to vaccinate themselves by any means, otherwise excluding them from social life and now, with the new Decree that you are called to vote, even depriving them of the possibility of working. Is it possible to imagine a situation legally and morally more abnormal? How can the state accuse of irresponsibility those who choose not to vaccinate, when it is the same state that first formally disclaims any responsibility for the…