“It was a night in June 1981 and for me it was the night before my final exams.” A night that for the virologist Roberto Burioni, a tireless anti-fake news champion, was important for more than one reason. Not only for the rite of passage that the test itself represented, but above all because, together with a group of friends, he fell into a trap and understood “how easy it is to make someone who wishes with all his heart that nonsense is believed to be nonsense true.” The doctor, professor of Microbiology and Virology at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University of Milan, tells it, reminding Adnkronos Salute of the anecdote with which he opened his book ‘Balle Mortalli’ in 2018.
That night, after “I had studied for months waiting with fear for the final moment”, writes Burioni, “I was naturally terrified. I thought about the next day, about the commission in which sat, as an external member, the fearsome Professor Lovati who had been preceded by news of its draconian severity”. That night “I should have slept, but I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to study, but I didn’t know what to study. At a certain point, around 10, the phone rang: it was one of my classmates who told me that, through complicated negotiations, we had in advance the titles of the tracks for the Italian test that we would have to take the next day.. We immediately rushed to the house of one of us, where we spent the whole night preparing the essays using those titles which, naturally, did not come out the next day.”
However, it went well, very well indeed. “We were promoted with excellent marks – continues the virologist – and the diploma remained, at least for me, only a faded memory”. Except for an existential question: “How was it possible that a group of students made up of intelligent and well-prepared kids could fall for, with their eyes closed, a nonsense like that of the topics that had escaped the ministry in advance? We threw ourselves headlong into those titles and none of them we had the slightest doubt about their veracity: why?”. With the answer, Burioni titles the introduction to the book: “Men willingly believe what they wish to be true”.
Just as the Gauls narrated by Julius Caesar in ‘De bello Gallico’, although “strong and courageous”, took the false news of the weakness of the Romans as true and threw themselves into “a senseless attack which led them to a catastrophic defeat”, at in the same way Burioni and his friends, “now alone in front of the final exam”, wanted to believe in help, even if unlikely, in “something that would make us feel less vulnerable. The false titles of the essays arrived and, like the Gauls, we we believed. Here is the teaching of maturity” for the virologist.
A “very vivid” memory – he highlights – because what followed graduation, that is, becoming a doctor, it put me in touch with people who wanted something in the most intense way possible. Those who fear for their lives only desire to be healed and this desire cannot be compared to any other”. As the Bible says, “man is ready to give everything he possesses for his life”. Not only that, “he is willing to believe any lie in those moments.”
“I have seen very intelligent people, brilliant scientists, highly experienced doctors – assures Burioni – suddenly lose all their wisdom and clarity in the face of pain and rely on charlatans who calmly tell lies. Unscrupulous practitioners” twice guilty, because “the lies told to those who are sick, or even to those who just believe they are sick, are terrible”. Cruel and sometimes fatal. “Lies, they say, have short legs. But when they concern health – the doctor comments – they run fast enough to reach those who believe them and kill them”.
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