What the Grandmother Knew That the Law Did Not

Maria Teresa Marangoni considers how a universal biomedical paradigm collides with local cultural knowledge and historical memory in debates surrounding Veneto’s vaccine mandates.

“It was normal.” Egle, the grandmother who said this to me, was born in 1947 in a small town outside Vicenza, in Italy’s northeastern Veneto region. She was describing childhood measles, not as a medical emergency, but as a familiar pause: isolation at home, the thin broths her own mother prepared, brought on a tray. “You were sick, then you weren’t,” she said. “We didn’t call it fear” (all quotes are my translations from Italian or the local Vicentino dialect).

I interviewed Egle as I was looking to answer this question: What happens when a universal biomedical paradigm meets a place that already has its own way of reasoning about health, risk, and authority, as well as its own historical wounds? As a UK-based researcher, I was interested in how local cultural contexts navigate an increasingly globalised approach to health problems and solutions. Between 2018 and 2022, I interviewed parents, grandparents, and health workers in the province of Vicenza. I listened to stories about vaccines. Not one person told me they were “anti-vaccine.” They were vaccinated and the great majority had vaccinated their children. Others had questions. And yet, again and again, I heard a quiet, exhausted refrain: “No one really wants to listen to my questions.”

Egle’s generation also carried quieter memories, some of them unspeakable. In 1933, in the town of Gruaro, near Venice, 253 children were tested with a diphtheria vaccine. Twenty-eight died. A survivor, Adamo Gasparotto, later said: “In that accursed March of 1933, we were used as human guinea pigs. I survived; many other children did not” (Gasparotto, quoted in local newspaper Il Gazzettino 2013). A few years later, in 2017, another story re-emerged from memory thanks to a book titled Una cicatrice collettiva [A Collective Scar]. In 1958, nearly 2,800 children across the Veneto region received an anomalous Italian tuberculosis vaccine. Many were hospitalised with serious complications at the injection site. They survived, but the horrible scars on their left forearms never faded. The book reconstructed the incident and documented how “that poisonous liquid ruined their left forearm forever, forcing them into months of fear, treatments, and hospitalisations,” as Il Gazzettino (2017) reported.

When the “Lorenzin” Law, instituting new vaccine mandates for children up to the age of sixteen, arrived in 2017, it did not encounter a blank slate. It encountered a region where the state had already vaccinated, and where the state had already harmed. The grandmother’s generation had not forgotten. Their children had heard the stories. And now Health Minister Lorenzin and Rome, the national government, were demanding trust again.

Ways of knowing and a wound that will not close

The grandmother’s generation grew up with illnesses that are now preventable. Some lost playmates to complications, but they all shared with their parents and grandparents a kind of weathered pragmatism: childhood sickness was something to be managed, not an apocalyptic event. That knowledge lived in homes and parishes, not in clinics. As medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman (1980) observed, such explanatory models are not irrational but culturally grounded ways of making sense of sickness. Layered beneath that pragmatism was a deeper, darker knowledge, that the same state now demanding universal compliance had once tested vaccines on children without consent.

Her daughter’s generation, mothers and fathers in their thirties and forties, navigates a different landscape. They see media headlines calling measles “terrifying.” They receive mandatory vaccination schedules by registered mail. When they ask a paediatrician about adjuvants, or about timing for a premature or vulnerable child, they are often told: “Trust the science. Don’t look online.” One mother described her hesitation not as denial but as continuity. “My mother had a fatalism about illness that I don’t have,” she said. “But now the fear is amplified. And when I try to ask a real question, not to refuse, but to understand, there is no space for me.” But the deepest wound was different. It was not about refusal. It was about a broken agreement.

Before 2017, many families in Veneto had worked out a schedule with their trusted paediatrician: starting a few months later for a child born premature or diluting the required doses over a longer period to respect the family’s pace. These were not vaccine deniers; they were engaged parents, the very people public health claims to want. When the Lorenzin Law arrived in 2017, it not only targeted the unvaccinated, it also forced a strict, compressed schedule onto families who had already chosen vaccines, and who had already negotiated a reasonable, clinically sound timeline with their doctor. Their agreement was no longer enough. They had to comply with Rome’s timeline, not their paediatrician’s. One father told me: “We were not refusing. We had a plan. The law said: ‘your plan doesn’t matter.’”

What I witnessed in Veneto was not a failure of communication. It was a collision between two epistemologies. Drawing on the framework of Sheila Jasanoff (2004), we might call this a moment of co-production: scientific knowledge about vaccines is not neutral but shaped through interactions with social orders, including regional governance cultures that prioritise dialogue over imposition. Universal biomedical knowledge presents a single, rigid schedule as the only rational path. Situated, local knowledge asks: “For my child, in this body, with this family history, right now, what is the right pace?” and murmurs: “The state has harmed us before.”

The experiment that worked (briefly)

Between 2007 and 2017, Veneto did something unusual. Regional Law 7/2007 (Regione Veneto 2007) suspended mandates for several childhood vaccines. Instead of fines or school bans, the region relied on dialogue: nurses and doctors were trained to talk, not threaten. They acknowledged rare adverse events without defensiveness. They treated a parent’s “no” as a beginning, not an end. Vaccine coverage remained high, above critical thresholds. Then came the Lorenzin Law and mandates were reimposed. The stated reason was falling coverage elsewhere in the country. The unstated message, heard clearly in Veneto, was that your local way of doing things does not count.

For families who had already vaccinated, and those who had a doctor’s plan, the message was even more precise: your paediatrician’s judgment is not enough. Your negotiated schedule is not enough. Only Rome’s timeline counts. Veneto mounted a constitutional challenge, but the Constitutional Court upheld the law’s core provisions (Corte Costituzionale 2018).

In my interviews, a name kept surfacing. Giorgio Tremante, a father from nearby Verona, who had spent years documenting his children’s severe reactions after routine vaccinations. He was not a doctor. He was a father with notebooks. He petitioned, wrote letters, was ignored for years. Eventually, Italy’s compensation law (Legge 210/1992) acknowledged his family’s case (Tremante 2001). People in Vicenza still mention his name. Not for the legal victory, but for the method: the meticulous records, the refusal to be gaslit. “He showed us that a parent’s observation is evidence,” one mother told me. Tremante was not alone. He stood in a long, painful line, behind the mothers and fathers of Gruaro’s twenty-eight dead children, behind the 2,797 scarred arms of 1958. The law had forgotten them. Veneto had not.

What the law would not hear

Philosopher Miranda Fricker (2007) calls this difficulty of parents to be taken seriously epistemic injustice: when your way of knowing is dismissed not because it is wrong, but because you are the wrong kind of knower. A father without a medical degree. A grandmother who remembers measles as normal, and who remembers Gruaro as a whisper. A mother who asks about aluminium salts. A family that had already agreed to vaccinate, but on a schedule co-created with their paediatrician, not imposed by statute.

Public health communication often presents vaccines as a black box: safe, effective, non-negotiable. The schedule is part of that black box. Open it, the logic goes, and you risk confusion. But in Vicenza, parents kept prying at the lid. Their questions were not anti-science. They were situated, shaped by family memory, regional pragmatism, the ordinary distrust of distant authority, and the knowledge that the Italian state had, within living memory, used children as test subjects.

Healthcare providers, trained to protect the black box, often responded with impatience. The phrase “You are not a doctor” was the principal tool for dismissing those parents. Another was the rigid invocation of compliance: “The law says this is the schedule,” a father was told, to which he replied: “But my doctor agreed to a different schedule.” The answer did not change.

That response did not create compliance. It created something stranger: vaccinated families who felt punished. It created Corvelva, a parent network that shares legal advice and emotional support. It created the grandmother who whispered to her daughter: “I raised you without all these fears. Trust yourself.”

Why this matters beyond Veneto

This is not a story about Italy. It is a story about what happens when universalist frameworks, however well-intentioned, encounter living, breathing local cultures of health that carry historical memory of state-inflicted harm. The WHO’s Expanded Programme on Immunization and the Global Vaccine Action Plan, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control’s guidelines, the assumption that one-size-fits-all mandates are the only response: all of these export a biomedical paradigm that is ahistorical as well as acultural. It does not ask: “What has this state done to these people before?”

The families I spoke to were not asking to refuse vaccines. They were asking for something more modest: to be trusted. They had already done the work. They had found a doctor they believed in. They had negotiated a timeline that respected their child’s vulnerability, their family’s pace, their own reasoned judgment, and their inherited memory of harms that the law had never acknowledged, let alone atoned for. The law took that trust and broke it over a compulsory schedule. Veneto’s 2007 to 2017 suspension experiment suggests another way is possible. Not because people from Veneto are unusually virtuous. Rather, because for ten years the system was designed to listen and to allow families and clinicians to make decisions together, without a state-imposed timeline, and without pretending that Gruaro and 1958 had never happened.

That experiment was ended by a national law that valued uniformity over trust. But in the kitchens and paediatric waiting rooms of Vicenza, the older knowledge persists. It is not romantic, nor is it always correct. It is simply there, and any public health that ignores it will spend its energy fighting shadows, including the ghosts of the children the state once used.

I think again of the grandmother born in 1947. She is vaccinated. Her children are vaccinated. Her grandchildren are vaccinated. She knows there were others who chose differently, but when she sees a news story about fines for unvaccinated children, she shakes her head. “They are trying to force what we already chose to do,” she says. “Why?” Her question is not about the unvaccinated. It is about her own family. She remembers the years before 2017, when dialogue superseded mandates, as she watches her own daughter’s frustration and disbelief while being told that the choice she made with her paediatrician has been overruled by a compulsory schedule. And beneath that memory, she carries quieter ones: of Gruaro, of 1958, of scars that never faded. The law did not ask about those memories. The grandmother could not forget them.

About the author

Maria Teresa Marangoni is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Exeter, working on the final stages of her thesis. Her project analyses the complex interplay between global health policies and local health governance, with her case study focusing on childhood immunisation and the Italian experience. You can find her on Bluesky @maresamarangoni.bsky.social and on LinkedIn: MariaTeresa (Maresa) Marangoni, AFEHA.

References

Corte Costituzionale. 2018. Sentenza n. 5/2018. https://giurcost.org/decisioni/2018/0005s-18.html.

Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.

Il Gazzettino. 2017. “Vaccino e cicatrice, esce il libro-verità.” Il Gazzettino, April 27, 2017. https://www.ilgazzettino.it/pay/venezia_pay/vaccino_e_cicatrice_esce_il_libro_verita-2404594.html?refresh_ce.

Jasanoff, Sheila, ed. 2004. States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and the Social Order. Routledge.

Kleinman, Arthur. 1980. Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture. University of California Press.

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Regione Veneto. 2007. Legge regionale 23 marzo 2007, n. 7. Bollettino Ufficiale della Regione Veneto, n. 30, March 27, 2007. https://bur.regione.veneto.it/BurvServices/pubblica/DettaglioLegge.aspx?id=196236.

Repubblica Italiana. 2017. Legge 31 luglio 2017, n. 119. Gazzetta Ufficiale. 
https://www.gazzettaufficiale.it/eli/id/2017/07/31/17G00138/sg.

Tremante, Giorgio. 2001. Maggiorenne e Vaccinato o diritto alla vita? Macro Edizioni.

Vecchiato, Renato. 2016. Una cicatrice collettiva. Il mio libro Editore.