This terrible movie is another great example of FEBL (Fucking entertaining Big Lie) media. For some reason, in recent years a bio-luddite movement has formed against one of the greatest, proven, scientific discoveries in medicine and biggest sources of the relief of global suffering, the process of vaccination. A growing cult has chosen to identify vaccination as some kind of grandiose conspiracy and in doing so, they are engendering paranoia and endangering lives.
The format of this paranoia is very similar to both the Scientologists war on psychiatry or Evangelicals war on Darwinism. Rather like the fact that there are a small minority of biologists who believe in Intelligent Design, this documentary shows the views of some of a small minority of physicians who have problems with vaccination. There are risks with vaccination as there are with almost any medical procedure, and people who do not believe in it, but that does not mean that vaccination does not work, or that the benefits so vastly outweigh the risks that they are overwhelmingly worth it.
In the United States, the place of Tom Cruise for a war on physicians rather than psychiatrists, is taken by the quack radio host, Gary Null (who is not in this Australian documentary but is a popular anti-vaccination extremist). Null’s method is to setup vaccination as some kind of faceless government conspiracy compared with touchy feely alternative medicine, an argument which he delivers with a pleasant, soft, reassuring voice. This is an easy way to persuade people, because it is not comparing like with like.
Rather like the way that natural child birth surrounded by candles is a preferable environment to a sterile linoleum floored hospital room, but is a more dangerous one, vaccination only works if everyone does it, so vaccination tends to be delivered through the somewhat anti-septic environment of government organized vaccination programs. It is because government programs tend to be more faceless and sterile than private ones that they raise the suspicions of those who are susceptible to paranoia and equate truth with personal desirability.
The solution to damping this paranoia was spectacularly shown when we visited our pediatrician, Michel Cohen, as group of prospective parents, before our son was born. At the end of a question and answer session, one man said that he was wary of governments and therefore wary of vaccination. Dr Cohen’s answer was that although it should be the man’s choice what to ultimately do, vaccination was not so much about the individual as about the community.
By replacing society and government with ‘community’, telling the guy he had a choice and implying that lack of vaccination put the individual before the community, i.e. was selfish, Dr Cohen had pulled a Gary Null. He had expressed something in comforting terms, but this time it happened to be the truth. Brilliant, quite brilliant.
Vaccination Information Service/Taycare Pty Ltd
45 min 20 sec Jan 20, 2008
www.vaccination.inoz.com
Link
tags: FEBL (fucking entertaining big lie) religion science
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