My three words for anti-vaxxer antics: how dare you

I HAVE three words for the anti-vaxxers robbing new parents of information that could save their babies’ lives, writes Wendy Tuohy.

Samantha Reade lost her son Kristian to whooping cough.Picture:Rob Leeson.

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I HAVE three words for the anti-vaxxers robbing new parents of information that could save their babies’ lives: how dare you?

How dare you bunch of fantasists believe you have the right to destroy other people’s opportunity to be informed about how to protect their children?

It takes a special brand of arrogance to think you know better than decades of rigorous scientific research, including the testing and retesting of any vaccine released onto the Australian market by the Therapeutic Goods Administration. And including the thorough investigation of any alleged vaccine side-effect.

It takes a callous heart to think robbing other parents of information that belongs to all of us is fine in the name of pursuing your anti-medicine crusade — information that forms a vital part of the community safety net holding back diseases that used to kill millions.

These fanatics rail against their “human right” to dodge vaccination being questioned, preferring to turn their kids into public health time bombs rather than submit them to the same type of verified science the rest of us embrace.

They scream about their rights (to put others at risk) being violated by the Federal Government’s new no-jab, no-pay welfare laws, yet they’re happy to take it into their own hands to remove the right of other parents to make up their own minds.

Nothing will stand in the way of their myth-based zealotry, and as parents of babies who have died of the preventable illness whooping cough have discovered, these people are so blinded by their misinformed cause they couldn’t care less about the loss of other people’s kids.

Both Catherine Hughes, whose baby boy Riley died this year of whooping cough, and Toni McCaffery, whose daughter Dana died in 2009 of the same highly contagious illness, have been vilified by anti-vaxxers for trying to warn new parents about the risk of non-vaccination.

Like many other babies who have died in the past decade in Australia as whooping cough returns thanks to declining vaccination rates, both Riley and Dana were too little to have yet been vaccinated. Mrs Hughes was pilloried on Facebook just this week on one of the off-the-wall forums of the hard core anti-vaxxers, in a spoof-horror movie meme depicting her and state and federal politicians and health ministers advocating stricter laws to encourage parents to vaccinate.

What a breathtaking irony it is that this mob can accuse science-based community health strategies of spreading fear when they are doing the best they can to keep comprehensively debunked theories about the mythical link between vaccination and autism alive.

Talk about fear.

The favourite line of this selfish group is that “vaccine injuries” can cause health issues and conditions such as autism (a theory promoted by “research” found to be so fraudulent that its author, former doctor Andrew Wakefield, was struck off the UK medical register and barred from practising medicine).

They’re quite happy to link immunisation with the onset of autism, based on imagined circumstantial evidence, and to dismiss the fact that symptoms of the condition very often become apparent at around the same age vaccinations are given.

Why take any actual science into account when fear serves your purpose so much better?

If I sound angry, it’s because I am. You should be, too, that a rabid group of medical conspiracy theorists is putting babies, pregnant women, older Australians and people with suppressed immunity — such as cancer patients — at such high, needless risk.

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