Italy's Austerity Policy To Blame For Unpreparedness For Pandemic - Ex-Health Minister

GENOA (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 31st March, 2020) The austerity policy of the previous Italian governments has resulted in the country's complete unpreparedness to health risks, such as the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, former Minister of Health Girolamo Sirchia told Sputnik in an interview.

Sirchia was the health minister when the country faced the SARS epidemic in 2003.

"The problem is that Italy, like all the other nations of the western world, has not followed the international recommendations to be prepared for such things and to raise preparedness ... Preparedness has been repeatedly recommended, because we knew that at some point a flu like this would explode and would follow the path of the Spanish flu, which killed 50 million people at that time," Sirchia said.

He noted that these recommendations came from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) but have not been considered by Italy. Moreover, the voice of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), a decentralized EU agency based in Sweden, was not heard.

"The European CDC that is in Sweden should coordinate the national CDCs. We set up an Italian CDC in 2003 at the Ministry of Health. This CDC dropped out of view, it has never been revitalized, financed or even considered because the objective of the government was to cut spending," Sirchia said.

The ex-minister noted that such inaction was a sign of "low culture, even non-culture."

"Governments only think about the economy, and CDCs cost money. When something costs [money], the government cuts it. The logic is always to cut spending. The policy of public health spending reduction ended up in a disaster, a very serious mistake for which those economists who promoted austerity should apologize. This should make the government understand that we must change the policy, that we cannot save money on public health but we have to cut spending on something else, and that basically we should learn to spend better," he continued.

The former minister believes that when the COVID-19 crisis ends, the government will be forced by people to change its austerity policy, especially in spending related to health system maintenance.

The Italian public debt is the second-largest in Europe after Greece and amounts to over 130 percent of the GDP. According to the EU fiscal rules, member states must reduce their public debt every year to keep it below the ceiling of 60 percent of the GDP, which is why Italy has been subject to fiscal austerity measures since 2011.