The conspiracy theory nutters on the anti-vaccine warpath
Written on October 21, 2010 at 8:47 am
Who's trying to hurt my baby??
When a cameraman on the floor of the Channel 7 studios where we film Sunrise and The Morning Show rang in to say he’d been diagnosed with whooping cough, I was asked on air about this bacterial infection and why we have an epidemic of a vaccine-preventable illness here in Australia.
My response and Kochie’s declaration that parents who refuse vaccination for their kids are irresponsible earned us a solid shellacking on twitter and email.
While I don’t want to give the vaccine nuts too much air, I do need to lay out a few pointers for those who are anti-vaccinations for children;
- ANDREW WAKEFIELD. More dangerous than Bin Laden in my opinion, this year he was found guilty of academic fraud and professional misconduct for falsifying data to ‘prove’ that the MMR vaccine can cause autism in children. His work single handedly set vaccination rates here in Australia and overseas back decades and has left a legacy of mistrust about vaccines. He LIED- he made it all up. There is NO LINK between vaccines and autism. If I were the Hague, I’d have a warrant out for him and every parent whose unvaccinated child got sick should testify.
- HERD IMMUNITY. This is a concept where to create a kind of firewall to protect an entire population from a disease, you need to vaccinate a certain percentage of people in the community. The % of the population needed to be vaccinated against measles is 94%, the same number as whooping cough (94-96%), while for other diseases like mumps and polio, that number is lower- around 85%.
- CONSPIRACY THEORISTS. I’m not sure whether the people who honestly say that vaccination is a plot between the World Health Organizations, ‘Big Pharma’, the AMA and local GPs to make money can hear how stupid that sounds. I hear paranoia that borders on psychosis. Take your medications guys. By the way large pharmaceutical companies compete for revenues. They don’t do the cartel thing- there are too many listed on too many stock exchanges for it to work.
- CIVIL LIBERTARIANS. I count myself among you but frankly I want you to respect my child’s civil liberties not to contract a potentially lethal illness because you make a crackpot decision about your kids based on whacko Andrew Wakefield data and wild conspiracy theories. We’ve agreed that police can breach your civil right to drink and drive in order to protect you and others on the road. Maybe we need to start thinking about curtailing other civil liberties that can potentially kill other people’s children.
- POLIO experience. The WHO had come close to wiping out polio for good. It was left in a few countries only, when one of them without a public health infrastructure left public health announcements to the religious zealots in the villages. These guys declared the polio vaccine a US plot to give Nigerian children AIDS. (I know that sounds insane but we have educated Australians who think I’m in bed with drug companies and the AMA to line my wallet with vaccine profits). Polio ran riot in Nigeria, hitch-hiked via the Haj into another almost 50 countries that had been polio free (including Australia) and set the WHO’s polio agenda back 30 years. Misinformation of this sort is not just silly- it’s very, very dangerous.
If anyone else wants to tell me I’m a fat cat with shares in WHO, ‘Big Pharma’ and the AMA, who doesn’t do their research and then sends me their extensive scientific exploration in the form of a Daily Telegraph article, I will not change my mind on this matter so stop wasting your energy.
