Shun anti-vaccine talk, SFU urged
But university prez Petter cites policy on freedom of expression
Simon Fraser University should refuse to allow an anti-vaccine conference at its downtown Vancouver campus next week because the location may lend credibility to its “dangerous quackery,” according to a group of doctors and other critics.
But SFU said the Vaccine Resistance Movement, which opposes vaccinations in favour of alternative naturopathic treatments, has the same right as any group to rent a hall at the university.
“The criticism is misdirected,” said SFU president Andrew Petter in response to a letter signed by a number of doctors, including Nienke van Houten, a lecturer at SFU’s health sciences faculty.
“We have a very clear policy on freedom of expression,” said Petter. “The best way to discredit views that are wrongheaded is to allow freedom of expression of those views so they can be countered.”
Conference organizers, who didn’t return a call for comment, bill the symposium as a chance to learn how “families are facing increasingly intense pressure from the vaccine lobby and big government to comply with vaccine mandates.”
Speakers include a doctor who has written a book on “how vaccination compromises our natural immunity” and a woman who blames “vaccine injury” for her young daughter’s autism and death.
The SFU letter’s author, Ethan Clow of the Centre for Inquiry, a science-based atheist group, said the university is lending its “tacit approval” to the antivaccination movement.
Attendees “are going to get a lot of propaganda and a lot of scaremongering and emotional stories about the supposed risks of vaccination,” said Clow.
Van Houten said to properly air and discredit the “potentially harmful” information, SFU would have to arrange a panel.
But B.C.’s chief medical officer, Dr. Perry Kendall, said for doctors to engage in formal debate can lend more credence to opposition to vaccination, which he called undebatable.
He recognizes that those who are anti-vaccination believe there is a conspiracy between physicians and big pharmaceutical companies, and likely aren’t interested in other views.
People who are worried but willing to learn more can go to the Canadian Pediatric Society’s website and others, Kendall said.
“Vaccines, like any medicine, can have side-effects, but the benefits of vaccines far outweigh the risks,” he said.