What if the vaccine skepticism promoted by the United States government since the nomination of Health Minister Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were to seep into European vaccine authorities? Italy narrowly avoided such a disastrous scenario this summer. On August 5, when the new members of the national technical advisory group on vaccination – which is responsible for guiding Italy's vaccination strategy – were announced, two names in particular alarmed the scientific community.

The first, pediatrician Eugenio Serravalle, is notably president of a group that strongly questions the safety of vaccines and discusses their supposed correlation with various disorders or diseases such as autism – a false claim that Kennedy has spread for years. The second, hematologist Paolo Bellavite, sparked controversy in 2021 by stating that there was little certainty regarding the benefit-risk ratio of Covid-19 vaccines.

Thanks to mobilization by the scientific community and civil society, notably through a petition, Health Minister Orazio Schillaci eventually decided, 11 days after the group's creation was announced, to dissolve it entirely, against the wishes of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. The question now is which 22 experts will be chosen to form a new group – a subject that had previously attracted little public attention. No timeline has been announced for the formation of this new committee.

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