Judge, the No Vax 'Warriors' are anachronistic but not dangerous

The self-styled No Vax "Warriors" carry forward "an anti-scientific, anti-historical and anachronistic ideology" but none of their activities, if they do not result in crimes, "can represent the danger to public order that the crime of criminal association aims to counteract". This was written by a magistrate of the Turin court, Andrea Bonato, in the reasons for the sentence with which last June he acquitted, against the opinion of the prosecutor's office, seven defendants belonging to the so-called "Vi_Vi", the acronym that signed a number of anti-vaccine graffiti that appeared between 2021 and 2022 in the Piedmontese capital on motorway junctions, pavements, schools, hospitals and health facilities, university and union offices, museums, banks and, on one occasion, the building that houses the newspaper La Stampa.

The Turin prosecutor's office, on the basis of Digos investigations, claimed to have identified a real structure, active on Telegram, with "a secret operational base", branches "at a national level" in various Italian cities and an "internal mechanism" for the recruitment and training of militants. The case had been opened for criminal conspiracy to commit damage and defacement.

According to the judge, however, the individual acts of vandalism contested in the indictment appear to be the product of "individual or collective initiatives" of individual subjects and, as such, "not attributable to the group to which they belong".