Comment and Opinion

Alternatives to Conventional Wisdom for Inquisitive Minds
and
Vaccine Science

(Unfortunately, it seems that Helen's web site has succumbed to a vaccine-preventable disease, and it is no longer with us.)

I received the following email from someone wanting to have her site listed here.

Dear Peter:

I wanted to thank you for providing an excellent resource for people exploring vaccine and medical issues. If you should choose to include my site on your list, I would be honored.

I was wondering why you don't seem to have www.redflagsweekly.com on your eminent list of 1000 rsoles? They routinely challenge orthodox medical views, including those on vaccines.

Sincerely,

Helen Tucker

Dear Helen,

Thank you for volunteering your site for inclusion in The Millenium Project. I am very pleased to do that as your site is one of the most egregious cases of lying to oppose vaccinations that I have ever seen. Your convincing and hypocritical pretence at balance and scientific rigour in order to hide your real agenda must have required considerable effort. I am sure that it will prove to be very deceptive to parents seeking information about vaccines and vaccine safety, therefore achieving your objective of denying some children the protection against infectious diseases that vaccination affords.

As a bonus, I have not only included your anti-vaccination page in the "Anti-vaccination Liars" category where it so rightly belongs, but I have included your main site in the "Medical Frauds" category as well. (Both sites, of course, are included in the special-mention "Liars" category.) I notice, for example, that you say: "One prominent example is ulcers. For decades, ulcers were thought to be caused by psychological stress and treated as such, despite evidence to the contrary. It took about 20 years to convince the medical establishment to finally accept evidence that it was caused by a bacterium and to change treatment accordingly to antibiotics". Barry Marshall first proposed that there might be a bacterial etiology for ulcers in 1981. By 1986, the standard treatment for ulcers was antibiotics. This is not "about 20 years", and is, in fact, quite a short time for a paradigm-shift change in a standard method of treatment. To blow further holes in the ludicrous use of this as an example of the might of conventional medicine, the largest-selling, most profitable drug in the world in 1981 was an antacid treatment for ulcers. Five years later there was no market, yet the company that made it could not suppress the research. A much better example that you might think of using is Edward Jenner, who proposed a paradigm shift in medicine at a time when disease-transmitting organisms were unknown. Like Marshall, Jenner had to use himself as a human guinea pig in order to get the medical establishment to take notice of what he was saying. Pioneers of unconventional thinking often have trouble getting heard, but the way science works is that the truth eventually wins, as happened in the cases of Marshall and Jenner. The fact that some apparently wacky ideas turn out to be true does not mean that all such ideas are true. As an example of this, Samuel Hahnemann was a contemporary of Jenner's, but while the worth of Jenner's discovery is seen every day in the faces of children who would not be alive if it were not for vaccination, the uselessness of homeopathy is just as evident today as it ever was.

The omission of the Red Flags site was an oversight on my part, and has been fixed. I do note, however, that today that site mentions the date "14 December, 2002". As the existence of such a date is a fact it seems somehow out of place among the other material on the site.