The anti-vaccination danger

EVERYONE is entitled to a personal view, but when that view is dangerous there is no untrammelled right to publicly promote it.

The anti-vaccination movement spreads a dangerous message and deserves no publicly-sanctioned platform.

EVERYONE is entitled to a personal view, but when that view is dangerous there is no untrammelled right to publicly promote it.

The anti-vaccination movement spreads a dangerous message and deserves no publicly sanctioned platform.

The message threatens the health of not just the children of anti-vaxxers, but the children they interact with. It threatens to revive damaging and potentially lethal diseases that modern medicine has helped to eradicate or control.

As reported in Thursday’s Herald Sun, the Australian Vaccination-sceptics Network screened the film Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, at a Village cinema at Crown casino on Wednesday night.

The alarmists were also granted space outside the cinema to sell books and DVDs that challenge the benefits of vaccination and seek to portray measles as a disease that is somehow good for children.

The material, including a book aimed at child readers titled Melanie’s Marvellous Measles and the film Cover-up, a so-called documentary, are not only wrong in fact, they threaten wider community health.

Like most conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers ignore the huge wealth of credible science and instead choose to latch on to flawed internet research. Picture: Thinkstock

READ MORE: ARE VACCINES SAFE? VACCINATION FACT VS. FICTION

The anti-vaccination movement is cult-like in its dogmatic and often abusive approach to the issue. Like most conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers ignore the huge wealth of credible science and instead choose to latch on to flawed internet research, specious arguments about isolated instances of adverse reactions and outright lies. But what makes anti-vaxxers even more insidious than other streams of conspiracists — whether it be claiming the 9/11 attacks were a US conspiracy or the Apollo Moon landings were a hoax — is the direct impact vaccination refusal has on public health. In the digital world the internet gives everyone a platform and a voice. The enormous wealth of information at people’s fingertips provides infinite benefit and efficiency. But not all voices deserve the platform the digital age provides.

Whether it be Islamic State’s genocidal propaganda, child pornography or social media trolls who incite and abuse, a range of groups and individuals need to be weeded out and silenced.

Digital access has enabled the spread of the anti-vaccination movement and its manipulation of information to confect false theories dressed as fact and aimed at scaring vulnerable people.

In response, the Australian and Victorian governments have adopted policies to encourage misinformed or negligent parents to immunise their children.

The federal government will withhold family tax and childcare benefits unless parents immunise their children. Across infant years to age four, vaccination protects against, among others, hepatitis B, tetanus, whooping cough, measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox. The law also requires immunisations be up to date before a child starts childcare and kindergarten. But with immunisation rates as low as 85 per cent in areas, some parents are being reckless or complacent. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare data, recorded by postcode, correlate low immunisation rates with infection risk clusters. In recent years an inner Melbourne primary school had to send home non-vaccinated students for their own protection after a measles cluster, which followed a chickenpox outbreak in the area.

The Australian Vaccination-sceptics Network’s dangerous film should not be publicly screened again.

Almost three years ago on the eve of the 2014 election, Premier Daniel Andrews pledged to build the Victorian Heart Hopsital.

HEART HOSPITAL HIT

COST blowouts have hit the proposed Victorian Heart Hospital as the Andrews Government struggles to attract private investment.

The landmark project has been planned to become the nation’s first specialist cardiac hospital but questions have now been raised over planning and funding.

As revealed in today’s Herald Sun, project costs have blown out by a further $100 million and work is yet to start.

Almost three years ago, on the eve of the 2014 election, Premier Daniel Andrews pledged to build the facility, which was then costed from $400-$450 million, with partners expected to invest $300-350 million.

Health Department tender documents now put the project at a “likely total expected investment” of $450-$600 million.

Although the Andrews Government has stumped up $150 million and Monash ­University has pledged up to $70 million as well as land at Clayton, the government has failed to secure the crucial private and philanthropic investment.

The federal government has also kept its hands in its pockets, leaving Victorian taxpayers potentially filling the void or having a scaled-back version. Opposition health spokeswoman Mary Wooldridge has likened the Heart Hospital project to Labor’s disastrous myki cost overrun.

It also follows the decision to ban private beds at the new Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, which cost up to $40 million in donations.

If the Andrews Government is having trouble delivering this hospital, you would have to ask how will it go with the $11 billion Melbourne Metro project?