Covid waste: to dispose of the masks, the State cuts the funds for people harmed by transfusions and vaccines
14 October 2026, 18:22
Il Fatto Quotidiano reports today that the Corte dei conti (Italy's Court of Audit) has stopped the 2025 payments for the Poste Italiane warehouses that hold the material left over from Covid. The 16 warehouses contain 22,692 tonnes of masks, overalls, gowns and gloves, bought during the emergency and never used. Since July 2023 they have been managed by the Ministry of Health, headed by Orazio Schillaci.
How much does it cost to keep them there? A decision of the Prime Minister's Office of February 2023 put storage alone at around €885,000 a month: more than €10 million a year. The Draghi and Meloni governments tried to sell the material, then to give it away. In the words of Il Post: "nobody has ever come forward".
If nobody wants it, why did the State keep paying to store it instead of disposing of it?
The Meloni government only decided to destroy it this summer. Decree-Law no. 144 of 7 August 2026, now converted by Parliament, creates in its Article 4 an extraordinary commissioner who must dispose of everything by 31 March 2027. What it costs is set out in paragraph 7: €44 million in 2026 and €40 million in 2027.
Where does that money come from? The Chamber of Deputies' briefing paper on the decree explains it. Of the €44 million for 2026, €35 million is found by cutting two spending lines meant for people harmed by infected blood transfusions or by compulsory vaccinations: the money to settle their compensation lawsuits and the money for their indemnities. The rest comes from a Ministry of Economy fund for expenses that cannot be postponed. The €40 million for 2027 is taken from the resources for indemnities to people who suffered permanent harm from the Covid vaccine.
So in 2027 the disposal of the pandemic's waste will be paid for with resources set aside for people harmed by that vaccination. The briefing paper does not say whether those funds had money to spare.
And until disposal, who keeps the masks? Paragraph 3 of the same article offers the commissioner a convenient route: the power to "make use of the economic operators at whose depots the materials are already stored", even without a tender, by way of derogation from the public procurement code. In plain terms: Poste Italiane, which has stored them for years, can go on doing so and being paid without a tender, in which a competitor might offer a lower price.
Elsewhere the storage bill has been added up and published. In the United Kingdom the National Audit Office, the body that scrutinises government spending on behalf of Parliament, wrote in March 2022 that storing personal protective equipment had cost the Department of Health and Social Care £737 million between March 2020 and October 2021. In Italy, the decree's documents give the tonnes and the number of warehouses. How much it has cost in total to keep the masks in storage, they do not say. There is only an estimate by Il Fatto Quotidiano: counting storage, disposal, goods never distributed and lawsuits with suppliers, almost €300 million.
Hence the question for the Minister of Health, Orazio Schillaci: how much has it cost, from 2020 to today, to store masks that nobody will use, and why did it take until 2026 to decide to dispose of them?
The masks left in the depots never protected anyone. The rent on the warehouses, on the other hand, was paid every month.
This article was prompted by a news item published in Il Fatto Quotidiano on 14 October 2026.