One thing also confuses me. If vaccines are supposed to create immunity how can an unvaccinated child be a danger to a vaccinated one? It doesn’t seem the herd immunity argument holds up to me.

I believe there are powerful political and economic forces at work in this arena, and they are much better trained at rhetoric than most of us. Goldacre does an amazing obfuscatory job here; focusing on his part as victim of corporate bullying, all the while his pro-vaccine message gets delivered to the reader “under the radar” and as if it where a fact. This article is also a great testament to the power of internet marketing; the memes in this article will have now infected countless net users (like a virus!) and will be making the national mind up more and more .

Ultimately, one has to ask oneself. IF, just IF vaccines have (even in just isolated cases) caused conditions as serious as autism (and there SEEM to be no shortage of parents willing to testify to this – I met one on the train to Manchester once!), isn’t this reason to pause and re-consider the hard line approach?

Of course the empiricists will probably come back with “just follow the evidence” but if the evidence (i.e. which studies are accepted, which are denounced as works of the devil) is subject to the same economic and political biases that all other areas of modern life are, how can we trust it? Doesn’t personal testimony (of parents) have greater value here?

Just as with smoking, just as with mobile phones, there are MASSIVE disincentives to corporate powers for any link with childhood damage to be established. It is no wonder that Wakefield was disgraced and now Ms. Barnett is being vilified.

I don’t doubt that people like Jeni Barnett are not the most scientifically trained or informed, but there is a good case opposing vaccines, and it isn’t going to go away as Millie above says. There may even be some truth in it, who knows?!

It just doesn’t seem to make sense to be injecting preservatives and some animal tissue with culivated viruses on them (I am also not the most informed here) into the blood streams of young children, before they have adequate defenses against such toxins. I mean, please, ask yourself, could it be true that vaccines are not the benign public saviour of our children they are touted to be?? Could they be more about business than public health?

*calms down*

They need to teach basic scientific methodology in primary schools so that people stop using anecdotal evidence to frighten other people. In fact I’m going to try and teach my kids this as early as possible when I have kids, I’m going to take responsibility for filling any gaps I feel have been left by schools. Why do people think it is their right to do whatever they want? With rights come responsibilities! If you have the right to make decisions about your child’s health and vaccinations and so on, you have the responsibility to base that decision on proper information, not on anecdotal evidence and fearmongering. You have the responsibility to make sure that your decision doesn’t harm other kids around yours, or society as a whole. How difficult a concept this seems to be!

I have also created torrents of the audio for those who know of P2P filesharing and they can be found at either:

http://www.mininova.org/tor/2266689
or
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4715089

This kind of magical thinking cannot be tolerated in the media of the 21st century. Jeni Barnett should be pilloried and shown up as the ignoramus that she is.

On the up side, all you guys coming in from Stephen Fry’s Twitter shouldn’t take this site offline

Johnathon – Positive Internet on-call Engineer

If we take the lead from Jenni Barnett and use the cigarette analogy – if anyone went public and outright promoted cigarette smoking there would be uproar against them – there is so much overwhelming scientific evidence to say that cigarette smoking is harmful. In the same way, she is promoting a practice which an overwhelming body of evidence says is harmful i.e. not vaccinating.

This could be just another sad example of the media being uninformed and presenting ill thought out opinions as fact. The saddest, and quite frankly deeply upsetting part of it all is that as a direct result of the media frenzy, children (and potentially adults later in life) will not only be killed but permenantly and seriously disabled.

On the other hand, if journalists seriously consider the MMR vaccine to be a cynical money-making exercise, then consider the real cost – a couple of quid for a vaccine, hundreds of thousands of pounds for a lifetime of care for a severely disabled child.

The insult thrown at the medical profession is also sad. That a professional body which spends its entire working life attempting to improve the quality of life of those within its care would knowingly put those same people at risk is preposterous. ‘Evidence based medicine’ is the order of the day – everything done for a patient has to have proof of benefit behind it, be it a medication, a procedure or an investigation.

Evidence has to stand up to scrutiny and the Wakefield paper does not. Why is it that one badly researched and poorly written paper condemns an entire profession? What is the motive for this entire professional body to to abandon all ethical and moral principles to participate in what would have to be a mass deception of global proportions?

Jenni Barnett should not be condemned however tempting that is. For a long time, the mass media perpetrated a fraud on the population. It is not suprising that the hype is still believed whether in public or private. A suitably knowledgeable person, in posession of all the facts should sit down and have a sensible conversation. Review the evidence – ALL the evidence; for AND against. The only way you can make an informed decision is to be in posession of all the facts.

If even just half of them complain, it’ll surely get a result for you.

Stephen xxx
http://twitter.com/stephenfry

So much for her being “interested in the debate”.

I’ve never listened to Jeni’s radio show before, for all I know she’s normally an excellent radio chat-show host. Listening to the transcript, as I commented in an earlier post, it’s clear she was way out of her depth on this occasion. It’s important to remember that this is also the fault of her editorial team. A 3 hour show is not made spontaneously and this was a significant discussion, it must have been planned and discussed. The editorial team should have helped Jeni to research, and advised her appropriately, instead of allowing her to run off at the mouth with unfounded opinions.

… if you should want to, for any reason …

http://www.oust-jeni-barnett.com

I am not holding my breath, though. They do seem to prefer a “little man against the big corporation” storyline to the truth.