Anti-covid vaccine mandate protesters clash with police in Italy

Protesters challenging the imposition of ‘green pass’ – covid vaccine mandate – by the Italian government clashed with the police at the protest square. The anti-riot policemen fired tear gas canisters, water cannons at the protesters rejecting covid health pass, who blocked Trieste port.

The protesters had adopted sit-in agitation for four days since last Friday at the port. The President of the port, Zeno D’Agostino, had on Sunday, complained of the business obstructions caused by the sit-in protesters at the port. He had decried that “the situation can no longer be tolerated”; insisting that the region needs “a port that works.”

The protesters had threatened that they would hold another demonstration at Trieste port on October 30, blocking “all of Italy” if the government continues to impose the Covid Pass requirement on workers.

The police, after four days of the sit-in protest at Trieste port challenging the imposition of the ‘Green Pass’ Covid health policy by the government, urged the demonstrators to vacate the port “in the name of the law”. The police in northeastern Italy, thereafter, fired tear gas and water cannons to disperse the crowd.

The demonstrators were, however, chanting: “liberty! liberty!” – “people like us never give up!” The people protested that the regulation, which is “some of the strictest Covid rules in the world, was a first for Europe.”

The government had endorsed a law in September compelling all workers in Italy to present a Covid Green Pass, indicating proof of vaccination status, negative test result or recent recovery from coronavirus. The policy provoked wide uproar in Italy as currently going on in Nigeria where over 3,500 citizens have petitioned President Muhammadu Buhari to reverse the stereotype vaccine mandate in the country.