The waste city of Emilia Romagna under the lens of investigators. The Parma Prosecutor’s Office has opened a criminal case and is investigating the operational activity in the midst of the Covid emergency of the second hospital in the region governed by Stefano Bonaccini. In recent weeks, the NAS Carabinieri carried out a series of inspections at the Parma University Hospital, during which swabs and laboratory analyzes carried out since February 2020, i.e. since the first phase of the pandemic, were seized. The investigation began with a complaint received from the hospital itself, relating to the Virology Department, to which other subsequent complaints were added, now merged into a single investigation. At the center of the story is the Maggiore hospital in Parma, directed by Massimo Fabi, a man of the president, general director of the University Hospital since 2015. Due to his great commitment in the fight once morest the pandemic, Bonaccini and his then deputy Elly Schlein had reconfirmed Fabi as head of the Parma Aou on 8 June 2022. Now, however, the investigative spotlight has turned on his management of the pandemic, to ascertain any critical issues in the manager’s choice to oust some of the Aou’s laboratories of excellence, including that of Microbiology and Virology, from the network of centers for analysis of molecular tests. Not only. Fabi would have preferred to create an ad hoc team from scratch at the university’s Institute of Hygiene.
An inexplicable choice, in the most tragic moment of our country, when the watchword was to hurry to save lives. Even more so since the director general’s decision would have led to presumably useless expenses, amounting to several million euros, which weighed on the accounts of the National Health Service. In March 2020, while the whole of Italy was holding its breath in the face of the dramatic numbers of deaths and the health network was racing once morest time in search of disposable kits and reagents, Fabi had a center at its disposal that was already churning out findings, «ready to ‘use’ and equipped with all machinery. Yet he had decided to set up a laboratory for Covid diagnostics from scratch, rather than turning to the one already operational. The most relevant aspect, which would have started the investigation by the Parma judiciary, would be the choice to entrust the tests to the Hygiene laboratory, which was not equipped for those microbiological analyses. There was no team of virologists, so much so that the rector of the University, Paolo Andrei, was forced to look, with a letter dated 19 March 2020, for doctors available to form the new team. And he didn’t even have the equipment to carry out the swabs, nor the machinery nor the PPE. The NAS carabinieri are now analyzing the seized medical findings, while the prosecutors evaluate any waste.
As shown in the “Reporting of Covid-19 expenses incurred – Fund for national emergencies – periods 1 March – 6 April 2020 and 7-13 April 2020”, the Region led by Bonaccini has disbursed over 530 thousand euros per week to equip the laboratory wanted by Fabi, only for reagents and supplies of consumables and disposables. A disproportionate figure, if you consider that, with that trend, healthcare would have spent between 4 and 5 million euros on reagent kits and test tubes alone for the Covid test.
Not to mention the costs faced by the Region led by the Democratic Party to equip the Hygiene Department with the machinery it didn’t have. For the “Cappa Glove box class 3” 11,736 euros were spent, while for a “biactiva 180 plus” 10,980 euros were spent.
Several people were informed of the facts and have already been interviewed by the investigators. Among these is Doctor Vittorio Sambri, appointed in March 2020 as coordinator of the regional network that carries out Covid-19 laboratory diagnoses. Summoned by the Nas of Parma on 14 July 2021, Sambri put on record: «The extraordinary commissioner Massimo Fabi did not report the Microbiology and Virology Laboratory of the Parma university hospital despite the fact that this laboratory had the technological capacity to process the Covid-19 samples. I remember that in April 2020 I asked Doctor Massimo Fabi why he had not reported the hospital’s laboratory, and the interested party’s response was that there were problems in that laboratory, such as not to allow its inclusion in the regional network”. This is how Fabi paid a high price, and with public money, for the choice to oust an already operational laboratory to recruit an unequipped one.
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2024-04-01 16:05:34
