I was attacked online for presenting evidence on Covid – it made me reflect on how we can rebuild public faith in science
Last year, as the number of Italians getting a fourth booster dose of the Covid vaccine waned, the country’s ministry of health asked me, as a scientist, to appear on a 50-second TV spot, explaining why vulnerable people should get another jab. It was aired hundreds of times on television. As a result, I received a lot of emails attacking me; on Twitter and Facebook I was (wrongly) denounced as someone in the pocket of big pharma.
At the height of the pandemic in October 2020 I’d had a similar experience. At the time, I was president of the Accademia dei Lincei, Italy’s most important scientific academy, and the second deadly wave of Covid was arriving. I argued in a long and reasoned article, highlighting the epidemiological situation in detail, that either drastic measures would need to be taken immediately or500 deaths a day could be expected by mid-November (unfortunately the prediction was accurate). Immediately after publication, I receivedemails telling me in the strongest of terms that I had better not get involved in other people’s business.
Giorgio Parisi is a theoretical physicist and the author of In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonder of Complex Systems. Together with Klaus Hasselmann and Syukuro Manabe, he won the Nobel prize in physics in 2021
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