Polio vaccination 'acquitted' in Supreme Court: no correlation with subsequent disease

The correlation between the Salk vaccination against polio and the onset of a subsequent poliomyelitis has not been proved: appeal dismissed andtrial costs to be paid to the Ministry of Health. This was established by the fourth civil section of the Court of Cassation in its order 25129/2025, rejecting the arguments of a 60-year-old Sardinian man whose grievances had already landed before the judges of the Supreme Court.

First, explains the Court of Cassation, the grounds are inadmissible because they result in a request for a review of the merits, which does not fall within the competence of the Cassazione. The report drawn up by the Hospital Commission, to which, according to the appellant, the Court of Appeal failed to give due weight, has, according to the Court of Cassation, only presumptive value. Presumptions, however, must be serious, precise, concordant and, above all, multiple, as the requirement of plurality can only be waived in the presence of a fact with independently strong probative value.

Moreover, as the lower courts had already ruled, the Commission's report was flawed: it took into account data relating to a polio vaccine, Sabin, that was different from the one inoculated to the patient. Today's appeal, however, did not provide any explanation in this regard but merely reiterated the consideration that the Commission's report constituted an admission of guilt on the part of the Ministry. Yet, as the United Sections had already stated (judgment 19129/2023), the principle is not valid. The report of the Medical Commission, in fact, has no confessional value and, like any act of a public official, merely attests facts that occurred in its presence or were performed by it. Diagnoses and expressions of science or opinion, on the other hand, are circumstantial material to be examined by the judge.

According to the Court of legitimacy, then, the appellate court did not, as the appellant argued, take a fideistic approach to the technical expert's report that excluded thecausal link by making extensive use of scientific literature. Arguments that the appeal fails to undermine. Moreover, the large-scale production of the vaccine makes it possible to exclude the possibility that only the inoculated dose was in any way related to the onset of pathologies: if other anomalies had occurred, the scientific literature would have accounted for them. According to the Civil Cassation, therefore, the only criterion on which the appeal is based is the chronological one, which is not sufficient for the inadmissibility of the argument post hoc propter hoc.

The Supreme Court then concludes: 'Behind the screen of violation of the law and numerous procedural provisions, the appeal dissimulates criticism of an assessment that differs from expectations'.