Vittoradolfo Tambone, Paola Frati, Francesco De Micco, Giampaolo Ghilardi, Vittorio Fineschi

The Lancet

Globally, we are seeing a side-effect of COVID-19: political violence.1 This effect usually shows itself in three steps: denial of scientific evidence, judgement of the intentions of political decision makers as a conspiracy, and civil disobedience and street violence.
This dynamic embodies violence on an intellectual, institutional, and physical level. Intellectual violence tends to break the trust between the scientific world and public opinion, institutional violence aims to divide politics from society, and physical violence shatters civil coexistence. In other words, it is the best strategy to destroy the idea of basic democracy, as recalled by Josiah Ober.2

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