Why can’t the law deal with anti-vaxxers?

THE law is powerless against anti-vaxxers and dubious alternative health pushers writes, Claire Sutherland. Why are they free to push their dangerous and wrong claims to the vulnerable?

FREE speech is a principle most people who aren’t despots believe in.

But even the greatest libertarians among us agree it famously shouldn’t extend to shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre. (Unless, of course, there’s, you know, a fire).

And that’s because the shrieking of `fire’ where there isn’t one is likely to cause senseless injury to anyone who believes the lie and joins a panicked stampede.

And yet the anti-vax brigade and dubious health bloggers are free to scream ‘autism’ and make absurd claims such as “cancer and disease is your body trying to save you”, and neither can live inside us if we live “truly healthily in all areas of our lives”.

(That particular pearl of cancer victim-blaming came from Brisbane raw food Instagrammer Olivia Budgen, who has since deleted her post. Hopefully before anyone with actual cancer or disease decided to eschew medical intervention in favour of celery juice and zucchini noodles.)

There’s been plenty of cases of desperate people who tried to cure themselves with evidence-free recommendations with tragic results.

It seems there's always another Belle Gibson wannabe waiting on Instagram pic.twitter.com/GmH7lViBpa

— Saman Shad (@muminprogress) November 22, 2017

Cancer liar Belle Gibson might be our most famous, but it doesn’t take too much searching to find unqualified drongos preaching bulldust to the desperate and fearful.

Just observe the whooping cough outbreaks at the anti-vax ground zero of Mullimbimby in NSW, a hotbed of scaremongering cranks who are hellbent on frightening parents with a discredited “study” linking autism to childhood vaccinations.

Whooping cough can kill babies. And does.

Or Adelaide “alternative health practitioner” Elvira Brunt, who was named in the SA state parliament in 2009 for claiming she could cure cancer through abdominal massage, and who once advised the parents of a child dying of leukaemia to deprive her of treatment and painkillers. (Her more recent business is treating autistic children with “belly button massage”).

So my question is, how is any of these bizarre statements different from shouting fire in that crowded theatre?

In a legal sense, there is no difference, and neither is there any legal penalty for saying any of these things

If you want to shout fire in a crowded theatre, you can. And if you want to falsely assert a link between vaccinations and autism, you can do that too.

It’s the price we pay for our belief in free speech. It’s the same price we pay when moronic racists abuse people who don’t look like them, or Margaret Court suggests transgender children are the devil’s work. They’re entitled to their awful views, just as every right thinking citizen is entitled to strenuously disagree with those views.

Baby Riley Hughes died from whooping cough. Anti-vaxxers are free to spread misinformation about vaccinations and as the vaccination rates go down, whooping cough outbreaks rise.

A doctor who spouts idiotic anti-vax nonsense can be struck off by the Medical Board of Australia, but he or she is not breaking any laws of the land, even if a parent chose to follow that advice and their child died of a preventable disease as a result.

We’re rightly reluctant to apply limits to free speech, because that way totalitarianism leads. In many ways, we’re lucky to live in a society where people can say whatever they want, no matter how wacky or life-threatening.

And it’s true that making it illegal to encourage people to follow dangerous and discredited health practices would be difficult to police, and open to abuse and interpretation.

But surely there’s an argument that the worst, most egregious of these people should be treated like bomb hoaxers.

Hoaxers also spread false information designed to provoke fear, and are prosecuted with the full force of the law whenever they can be identified. Why not someone who preys on the vulnerable and desperate to offer false hope with made-up cures, or who frightens new parents with discredited studies which leads to babies dying of whooping cough?

Any move to restrict free speech should of course be made carefully and with plenty of soul-searching — and driving dumb ideas underground and making martyrs of idiots would be a significant risk.

But we shouldn’t just throw our hands up at the notion we should somehow protect the most vulnerable from the unscrupulous and unhinged.

Claire Sutherland is the acting editor of RendezView.