Thread by @michaelpsenger

THREAD – The Italian Job: How Lockdowns Came to Italy

How China’s totalitarian COVID response made its way to Lombardy, Italy and the western world. 1/

In Snake Oil, I detail the evidence that the CCP used multiple modes of influence including propaganda and science fraud to instigate lockdowns across the world. But what about Italy? 2/
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An infection, even one as lethal as cancer, often begins with a single wound. As goes infection, so goes totalitarianism. And in 2020, totalitarianism found its wound in the free world by way of Lombardy, Italy, which went into lockdown on February 21. 3/

Lockdowns were unprecedented in the western world and weren’t part of any democratic country’s pandemic plan prior to Xi Jinping’s lockdown of Wuhan, China. They failed and led to tens of thousands of excess deaths in every country, including Italy. 4/
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Worse, officials who led the response to COVID in many countries testified that Italy’s adoption of China’s lockdowns was one of the most important events causing them to adopt lockdowns. As White House COVID Coordinator Deborah Birx wrote in her book: 5/
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Likewise, in the words of Imperial College Professor Neil Ferguson, architect of the wildly-inaccurate COVID models that instigated lockdowns across the free world: 6/

Ferguson’s assessment is doubly ironic, because it was a study led in part by Ferguson and Imperial College that concluded, falsely, that the lockdown of Vo’ on February 22, 2020 had been effective that led to the lockdown of all of Italy on March 9. 7/
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Ferguson justified the lockdown of the United Kingdom based on the lockdown of Italy, which had in turn been justified with a false study in Vo’, Italy, that was led by Ferguson himself. 8/

Officials’ deference to China and Italy during COVID should be a red flag. By way of historical background, the last time Italy had a very strong, competent national government was roughly 179 AD, when Marcus Aurelius passed away, the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire. 9/

For 1300 years after the fall of Rome, Italy was largely governed as a smattering of city-states owned by rivaling, illustriously-wealthy families. 10/

After Italy became a republic in the 19th century, the private forces of these wealthy families roughly evolved into the clandestine networks often colloquially referred to as the “mafia,” serving as liaisons between the Italian political elite and various illicit activities. 11/

As a result, Italy has long been unique as one of the world’s most prosperous and talented countries, but also arguably the rich world’s most corrupt—a match made in heaven for an organization like the CCP. 12/

In 2013, a new political party formed by comedian Beppe Grillo called M5S began to rise. Like most of Italy’s political parties, M5S marketed themselves as anti-establishment, but Grillo and M5S had long sought and formed close relations with China. 13/
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After M5S member Giuseppe Conte became Prime Minister in 2018, M5S’s overtures to China reached a crescendo with Xi Jinping’s royal welcome as Conte signed onto his Belt and Road initiative, making Italy the first major European country to do so. 14/
nytimes.com/2019/03/22/wor…

On the same day Conte signed Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative, Italy’s Health Minister, M5S member Giulia Grillo, signed a Plan of Action on Health Cooperation binding Italy and China in certain fields including “prevention of infectious diseases.” 15/
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This Plan of Action on Health Cooperation was a continuation of health cooperation plans between Italy and China first launched in 2000 under former Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema, the first known member of a communist party to ever lead a NATO country 16/
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Massimo D’Alema now served as honorary president of the Silk Road Cities Alliance, a Chinese state organization, and was a leader of the newly-formed political party Article One (A1). 17/

Another A1 member, Roberto Speranza, became Italy’s new Minister of Health in September 2019. Speranza would soon sign the first lockdown orders in the modern western world, beginning with the lockdown of Lombardy, Italy, on February 21, 2020. 18/

On Nov 8, 2019, Speranza signed a new Implementation Programme of the Plan of Action on Health Cooperation between Italy and China, binding Italy to specific actions in the area of infectious disease control. Among Italy’s commitments were as follows: 19/
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On Nov 23, 2019, M5S founder Beppe Grillo had a long, private meeting with China’s ambassador. Then, on Dec 17, 2019, two weeks before the first announcement of the coronavirus, he appeared at the Senate wearing a mask, previously unheard-of in Italy. 20/
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Roberto Speranza later published a book which, just after being published, was hastily pulled from stores. In the book, Speranza betrays an embarrassing lack of concern about COVID and a far greater concern for using COVID to usher in far-left reforms. 21/
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In his book, Speranza says that a primary lesson of COVID is that the WHO must be strengthened, and he requested that the United States be prevented from leaving the WHO. 22/
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By contrast, throughout his 229-page book, Speranza never once expresses any criticism of China, going only so far as to acknowledge China has “a very different cultural, political and institutional model,” while advocating closer ties with China. 23/

Speranza makes clear that he was well aware, at the time he ordered the free world’s first lockdown in Lombardy, Italy, that he was copying a policy only China had done, and that it would be a restriction of citizens’ fundamental rights. 24/
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Prior to ordering the western world’s first lockdowns, Speranza played a role in Italy as an early COVID alarmist similar to that played in the United States by Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger. 25/
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Like Pottinger, Speranza organized Italy’s first coronavirus task force meetings prior to any confirmed cases in the western world, and began ratcheting up alarm about the coronavirus in Europe and Italy’s highest halls of power, saying he’d been inspired to do so by China. 26/

On January 30, 2020, Prime Minister Conte announced Italy’s first two confirmed COVID cases and immediately declared a state of emergency, “allowing the government to cut through red tape quickly if needed.” 27/
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When Speranza ordered the lockdown of Lombardy, he conveyed in a press conference that he knew he was taking an action of consequence not only for Italy, but for the entire world. 28/
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Speranza’s announcement aligns with an anonymous stock tip posted Jan 30, 2020 that the WHO was planning recreate China’s response across the world, first by locking down Italian cities. This proved to be a near-perfect foretelling of subsequent events 29/
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Indeed, Speranza had already commissioned a study on possible scenarios for COVID. This study, using China’s data, was provided to Italy’s Technical-Scientific Committee on February 12, 2020, led by Stefano Merler at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK). 30/
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FBK and Merler had been cited positively by Bill Gates, second-largest funder of the WHO, in 2017. The fact that Merler’s study existed was kept confidential until months later. Thus, it was dubbed the “secret study” by Italy’s opposition parties. 31/
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Merler’s “secret study” has never been publicly released, but Merler published two additional journal articles in 2020, each using data and funding from China, and each purporting to show the effectiveness of lockdowns and NPIs against COVID. 32/

A reasonable person would likely recognize that the inputs from China on which Merler based the conclusions in his journal articles, coming from a totalitarian regime with a well-known history of fabrication in every area, were lies. 33/
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Stefano Merler, lead author of the unreleased “secret study” based on China’s data which led to the free world’s first lockdowns in Lombardy, Italy, was effectively running a propaganda laundering operation on behalf of the CCP throughout 2020. 34/
science.org/doi/full/10.11…

In parallel with Merler’s secret study, there was also a more detailed secret “Operational plan,” no details of which have ever been released. In Dec 2020, the opposition went to court to compel its release, but Speranza still refused. 35/
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Speranza’s refusal to release Italy’s secret Operational Plan is interesting, because Germany likewise commissioned a confidential operational plan, later obtained through leaks and FOIA requests, based on “scientific findings” from China lobbyists. 36/
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The German operational plan outlined in detail the steps to implement lockdowns, mass testing, quarantine facilities, and other measures from China, including “appeals to the public spirit” such as the slogan “together apart.” Was Italy’s similar? 37/
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On February 23, 2020, the day Roberto Speranza signed the Lombardy lockdown into law, the Italian Ministry of Health issued PCR testing guidance to 31 labs across Italy. 38/
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The next day, Speranza appointed Walter Ricciardi, former head of the Higher Institute of Health, as liaison between the WHO and Italy to coordinate Italy’s response at a national level and eliminate “unilateral choices of individual territories.” 39/
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After the PCR testing guidance was issued, many COVID cases were detected across Italy. On March 9, 2020, Speranza and Conte placed all Italy on lockdown (officially the #IStayAtHome decree)—the first lockdown of an entire country in the western world. 40/
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Chinese experts arrived in Italy days later and immediately advised stricter lockdown measures. 41/
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Around that time, Italy was barraged with an unprecedented amount of online disinformation celebrating its lockdown and Chinese-Italian cooperation on COVID. 42/
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International social media was flooded with grisly stories of lines of coffins and military trucks carrying bodies in Italy, but many of these images—like those that came from Wuhan in the preceding weeks—were subsequently proven fake. 43/

In his book, Roberto Speranza expresses sincere zeal for far-left reforms. He may have gotten pulled into a Chinese-style totalitarian network out of an overabundance of zeal and affinity for the traditional, egalitarian propaganda of socialism. 44/
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Whatever the case, it will take years to unravel exactly who did what, and why, in the leadup to Italy’s lockdowns. But the picture of what transpired in Italy is starting to come together, and it’s every bit as damning as one might imagine. /end
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