Injecting gloom
SHANELLE and Bryce, God spare me.
Despite my oft repeated defence and support of free speech and the right for people to say pretty much anything they want, I sometimes have to question if the argument is always sustainable.
A couple of days ago we were treated in the media to the thoughts of Shanelle and Bryce Cartwright. Bryce is a rugby league “star” who plays for the Gold Coast Titans and Shanelle is a “glamorous” WAG.
Shanelle, expecting her second child, has achieved the ultimate WAG aim, international media coverage. Has she received her doctorate in pharmacology or perhaps written the definitive text on developing bi-lingual skills in three month olds?
Nah, but Shanelle has announced that she and Bryce are anti-vaxxers, anti nappies and don’t really trust hospitals either.
You can see my dilemma regarding free speech on this one I hope.
Type in “vaccines are good for you” and 32 million pages magically appear. Type in, “are bad for you” and up comes 13 million pages. What a dilemma.
To the anti-vaxxers, these antipages carry the same weight as Moses descending from the mountain with the Ten Commandments.
There is a McCarthy-like zeal with these prophets of doom and a similar lack of rational debate. Forget authoritative analysis, forget peer reviews just grab at anything that will give people cause for alarm.
Often we use the web to justify our own position on any subject and vaccination is one of those topics. Surely 13 million can’t all be wrong can they? The simple answer to that is yes they can.
Autism is the catch cry of the anti-vaxxers and has been for years claimed to be caused by vaccinations.
The widespread fear that vaccines increase the risk of autism originated with a 1997 study published by British surgeon Andrew Wakefield.
The article was published in The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal, suggesting that the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine was increasing autism in British children.
The paper has since been completely discredited due to serious procedural errors, undisclosed financial conflicts of interest, and ethical violations.
Wakefield lost his medical licence and the paper was retracted by The Lancet.
Further investigation proved that Wakefield, whose campaign linked the MMR vaccine with autism, was paid more than £400,000 by lawyers trying to prove the vaccine was unsafe.
But even after this research was exposed for the fraud it was and still is — some 18 years later — the conspiracy theorists still hang their hats on it. The fact that vaccination has been voted consistently into the top 10 medical advances over the past 100 years means nought to those who don’t believe the facts.
In the WHO’s European region, some 82,600 in 47 countries contracted measles last year — the highest number this decade.
Of those, 72 kids died. Heidi Larson, a specialist in vaccines and public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said the increase in cases was a “wake-up call on the importance of building confidence in vaccination”.
This has been put down to the “immunisation gaps at local level still offering an open door to the virus.” So many unnecessary deaths caused by the misinformed, misled and mindless anti-vaxxers.
So Shanelle has got her 15 minutes of fame. Obviously her Instagram account needed a boost in numbers as the selfies of her breast feeding and showing off her baby bump in a bikini just wasn’t generating enough hits.
Unfortunately there are enough intellectually challenged and those who like to live their lives through others, for her comments to be dangerous to their children and even those of vaccinated children if the “herd” protection decreases.
For those who need a conspiracy theory to attach themselves to, I’ll give you an alternative one to anti-vaxxers which is just as plausible but far less dangerous.
Yodelling was developed in the Swiss mountains when Christianity swept through Europe. The natives, who had followed devil worship for over 1000 years, used the yodel to pass down satanic rituals, maintaining their ancient culture but keeping it secret from Christians.
I know to be a fact, that these rituals still involve sacrificing small babies to produce bountiful seasons and planting fresh goat testicles for soil fertility. How come no one else has exposed this dark side of Swiss life?
Vaccines are one of the great pillars of modern medicine. Children before vaccines, were killed or permanently maimed by diseases like measles, smallpox, whooping cough, or rubella, to name just a few. Today this can be completely prevented with a simple and safe injection. Don’t be an idiot.