Healthcare personnel "by law and even earlier by the so-called Hippocratic oath are required in every way to do their utmost to treat the sick, and never to create or aggravate the risk of contagion of the patient with whom in the exercise of professional activity they enter directly contact".
It is one of the passages of the decree with which the Council of State rejected the appeal of an Abruzzese doctor against the suspension for his refusal to get vaccinated, a refusal motivated “on the basis of certainly unsubstantiated scientific doubts”.
The judges reaffirmed "the prevalence of the fundamental right to health of the community over individual doubts or groups of citizens on the basis of reasons that have never been scientifically proven".
Doubts, it says, which also concern doctors "despite the massive amount of scientific studies that indicate the clear prevalence of vaccination benefits for the individual and for the gradual reduction of the pandemic still seriously underway".
The superiority of the right to health, it is underlined, "takes on an even more peculiar and decisive connotation when it is the health personnel who refuse vaccination".
"After all - underlines the decree signed by the President of the Third Section, Franco Frattini - only the massive vaccination, also and above all, of those who ordinarily come into contact with other citizens for service, especially in situations of vulnerability, represents one of the indispensable measures to reduce the multiplication of infections, hospitalizations, victims and potentially very dangerous new variants ".
No violation of fundamental rights, as the doctor complained, because "the damage to the community of patients and to general health would be incomparably more serious than that complained of by the health worker on the basis of scientific doubts certainly not proven in the face of vastly superior evidence, with the provision of tens of millions of vaccines in our country alone, of the positive effects of vaccinations on the fight against the pandemic and its devastating human and social consequences ".
