Anti vaxx Italian government fires health experts

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The Italian health minister’s decision to sack the entire board of the country’s most important committee of technical-scientific experts, who advise the government on health policy, has raised alarm over who will replace them.

In a move on Monday night that shocked Italian scientists, Giulia Grillo, from the vaccine-sceptic Five Star Movement , which has supported unproven cures for cancer, said it was “time to give space to the new”.

“We are the #governmentofchange and, as I have already done with the appointments of the various organs and committees of the ministry, I have chosen to open the door to other deserving personalities,” she wrote on Facebook.

Thevdecision will mean the replacement of 30 higher health council board members, including the president, Roberta Siliquini, the head of the school of hygiene and preventive medicine at the University of Turin who was nominated in December 2017 by the former health minister Beatrice Lorenzin

Grillo did not explain in further detail the motive behind her decision. She said in her post that some of the removed board members “could be reappointed”, but “not the leaders … who must have the trust of and be in full harmony with the minister in charge”. She said on Tuesday that the new council would be formed in January and nominees would be selected “based on [their] curriculum”.

Alfonso Celotto, a former chief of staff at the health ministry, said the move was worrying but compatible with the populist government’s strategy to do away with choices made by the previous administration.

In 2013 the Five Star Movement was a vociferous supporter of Stamina, a controversial stem-cell therapy promoted by a psychologist that was later proven to be a con.

Grillo has also caused confusion after making several U-turns on the government’s child vaccine policy. Her party, which is governing in coalition with the far-right League, came to power pledging to reform a policy brought in by the previous administration making 10 vaccines mandatory.

Grillo then said in June that parents could “self-certify” that their children had been vaccinated, instead of providing a doctor’s note, causing mayhem at the start of the school year. Then in mid-November, amid a measles epidemic, the government said it would uphold the vaccines obligation while calling for 800,000 infants, children and young adults to be vaccinated.