A kinder and gentler 2005

At the start of 2004 I instituted a "kinder and gentler" policy for dealing with people with whom I might not normally be friendly. During 2004 the policy was reactive – I was kind and gentle when replying to critics. I will be extending the policy for 2005 to become proactive, and I will regularly reach out to someone with whom I might not be in agreement. I will send them a polite email commenting on their words and actions. By doing this I hope to establish a dialogue and to demonstrate my commitment to tolerance of their views.

I had a couple of practice attempts over the last week of 2004, and I have included them here.

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Kind and Gentle email collection
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Email to Maureen Hickman, leading Australian anti-vaccinationist:

Subject: That old mercury in the MMR BS
Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2004 16:38:29 +1100

Dear Mrs Hickman,

I thought that I would write to you under my 2004 policy of maintaining kinder and gentler relationships with people with whom I do not necessarily agree.

I have long followed your rantings and lies about vaccination, and I even had the perverse pleasure of seeing you lie live on stage once, and for all this time something has puzzled me. Is your lying some kind of psychopathological condition or do you just do it because you really don't care? I realise that these two states may overlap but the latter implies a greater level of conscious activity. One is mad, the other is bad.

What encouraged me to write to you today was your letter in the Manly Daily, written in response to a sensible article from the Manly-Warringah Division of General Practice. I don't have time to address all the lies in your letter (I don't want to miss lunch with the family on Saturday), so I will just refer to this particular one:

Medical evidence is also available linking measles, mumps, rubella vaccine and vaccines containing the preservative Thiomersal – a mercury derivative – to autism and neurodevelopment disorders.

You know, and I know that you know, that the preservative thiomersal (or "thimerosal" as it is referred to in the USA) has never been used in the MMR vaccine. I realise that you have very carefully worded your lie so that it doesn't actually say this, but the implication is clear. By the way, thimerosal is a compound of mercury, not "derived from", but you know that. The real lie, of course, is that there has never been a connection shown between vaccination of any kind and autism. Still, once the lie is uttered it can be difficult for truth-tellers to refute it.

I remember seeing you on stage that night at Hurstville lying about the mercury in vaccines which have not had mercury in them for years and then going on to praise murderer Alan Yurko for killing his girlfriend's baby. I have spent some time as an observer and critic of the mental health system and I must say that you would fit in well into almost any secure psychiatric facility that I have seen, although some of the patients might think that you are nuts. I'm sure you will be disappointed, though, to know that on that particular night your performance was eclipsed by Dr Archie Kalokerinos. Still, it is hard to beat someone who says that the World Health Organization and the Save the Children Fund "put Hitler and Stalin in the shade" with their policy of genocide. Better luck next time.

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Email to Deborah Delp, who has an autistic son and therefore wants to punish all the other children by allowing them to be infected by vaccine-preventable diseases:

Subject: Bad doctors
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 13:07:45 +1100

Dear Ms Delp,

Congratulations. I totally agree with you when you say "obviously crimes of trust don't carry heavy penalities in the UK" in your comments about the article at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/beds/bucks/herts/ 4117859.stm

The nonsense of giving separate injections for measles, mumps and rubella instead of the single MMR shot was always a fraud, and those people who promoted the practice deserve all the opprobrium they receive.

I look forward to your campaigning for very harsh penalties to be applied to Dr Andrew Wakefield, whose fabricated "research" contributed greatly to the scare about MMR vaccines by pretending to show a link between vaccination and autism. As you know, Dr Wakefield not only lied about how his "research" was conducted and funded, but he hid the fact that he stood to make a great deal of money if his "research" could influence public opinion or government policies. It was the dishonesty of Dr Wakefield that created the environment which allowed people like Dr Pugh to go about their evil business.

I know that you will be bringing up the disgraceful conduct of Dr Wakefield, because to do otherwise would make you look like a hypocrite.

By the way, did you know that Dr Joseph Mercola has said that both Dr Wakefield and Dr Boyd Haley are wrong about what causes autism and that the real culprit is the consumption of pasteurised milk? Isn't it good to know that neither MMR vaccine nor the mercury in thimerosal have anything to do with it?

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Suzanne Messina runs something called REAACH, which seems to be an anti-vaccination organisation set up to lie to the parents of autistic children. (REAACH doesn't appear to have a web site, but perhaps I should search for RETCH.) Suzanne was very unhappy that the American Council on Science and Health put the "vaccines cause autism" lie at the top of their list for "Great Unfounded Health Scares of 2004". (Actually, ACSH called it "The Top Ten Unfounded Health Scares of 2004", but Suzanne and her ilk have a need to lie, even if the facts can be checked within seconds.) To rebut the truth, a "Doctor Deth" was produced.

To: solvethepuzzle@comcast.net
Subject: Great name!
Date: Sat, 01 Jan 2005 12:33:48 +1100

Hello Suzanne,

I thought that I would write to you under my policy of maintaining kind and gentle relationships with people with whom I do not necessarily agree.

I really must congratulate you on the invention of a "Doctor Deth" to support your opposition to vaccination. There could be no more appropriate name for someone working to ensure that more children die and that more children are disabled by vaccine-preventable diseases.

I like your smear campaign against Elizabeth Whelan too. It is always good to attack the messenger when you have no way of countering what they say except by telling lies.

"Doctor Deth"!!! I love it!

Have a Happy New Year. The 750,000 children who died from measles during 2004 won't have that opportunity. I know that this is of no concern to you as they were someone else's children, not yours.

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The tsunami which devastated countries around the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004, caused severe headaches for anti-vaccination liars. While most wanted to donate something (although one leading liar suggested that the tsunami was just Mother Nature reacting to a new vaccine which could save 500,000 child deaths a year) there was the problem of finding a charity or relief organisation which would not waste the money on vaccines. After UNICEF and the Red Cross were eliminated, a suggestion was made to donate to A Touch of Love, a charity which distributes naturopathic "medicines" and nutrition advice, but never vaccines, in Third World countries. I wrote to the President of the Australian Vaccination Network, who had once described measles as "benign" and less harmful than a hangnail:

To: meryl@avn.org.au
Subject: Touch of Love
Date: Sat, 01 Jan 2005 12:52:24 +1100

Dear Ms Dorey,

I have a question about the Touch of Love charity. Have the people who work for the charity in developing countries been vaccinated against any of the local diseases? For example, if they were working in a country with endemic yellow fever they would have required a valid vaccination certificate to enter the country (and to return to Australia). I know that it is possible to obtain fakes of such certificates in Australia, so have the aid workers in A Touch of Love availed themselves of this opportunity or were they forced to undergo the actual jabs themselves?

Have a Happy New Year. The 750,000 children who died of "benign" measles during 2004 won't have that opportunity.

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Kind and Gentle (5/2/2005)
Keeping up with my 2005 policy of being kinder and gentler to people with whom I might disagree, I sent the following email to someone who wanted some entertainment:

To: "abolishvaccines" <vaccinegenocide@sbcglobal.net>
Subject: High pitched screams
Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 11:14:55 +1100

Hello Dan,

I saw your message to the AVN mailing list where you asked:

Are there any audio's available of a baby's high pitched scream after vaccination?

I can't help you with that, but if you go to http://www.tdh.state.tx.us/immunize/html/pertussis_txt.htm you can hear some recordings of children suffering from pertussis. For something that might give you even more pleasure, you can go to http://www.vaccineinformation.org/video/pertuss/ to see some videos of coughing children.

I know that you will enjoy watching and hearing these recordings and I am sure that the pleasure you feel will encourage you to be even more opposed to vaccinations in the future.

I can understand your disappointment at the WHO's estimate that only somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 children die each year from pertussis, but I am sure that if your anti-vaccination work is successful this could be brought up to match or even exceed the 750,000 who die from measles. Then you would really have something to celebrate.

(I apologise if my mention of large numbers of dead children caused you to have an involuntary orgasm, but I couldn't think of any way to include a suitable warning beforehand.)

Dan replied, but not with any words related to what I had said. He emailed me the entire contents of a web page headed "Hell is Real… Don't be fooled!". I suppose that this means that I am dealing with some kind of religious fanatic, but perhaps he has been reading Mark 10:14 (where Jesus said "suffer the little children") and thinks that the word "suffer" in that context has the same meaning as it does in common usage today. He therefore probably thinks that Jesus was ordering him to make children suffer, and what better way than to deny them life-saving vaccinations. No wonder he wants to hear recordings of screaming children. I will write to Dan for some clarification, but I suspect that any conversation with him would rapidly become even more surreal.

[The web page "Hell is Real… Don't be fooled!" disappeared occasionally in 2006, but luckily I kept a copy of the email from Dan and you can see this wondrous piece of prose here. Unfortunately my email program and my Acrobat writer weren't able to cooperate enough to convey the delightful colour scheme of the site, but I have managed to reproduce the style in this box where you can see the pale yellow writing and the bright blue links on the tasteful background. Sadly I was not able to capture the background music which apparently came with this web site, but I am sure that it would have been entertaining.]

here is the pale yellow writing and here is a nice blue link.

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Sheri Nakken is a homeopath who has the cure for autism. She once said that being on a mailing list with me was like women who had been raped being forced to associate with rapists and their supporters. At the time she said this she was supporting someone who had murdered a baby. She once ran the largest anti-vaccination liar mailing list that I knew of, but she shut it down one day because she thought that I might be a member and she was terrified (as they all seem to be) of exposing her lies to my eyes.

To: vaccineinfo@tesco.net
Subject: Mumps epidemic
Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2005 11:56:10 +1100

Dear Ms Nakken,

Someone mentioned that you posted an article from The Times to a newsgroup which reported a rise in cases of mumps in Britain and suggested that an epidemic is possible.

I was told that you posted the article without comment, so I can only assume that you wanted to show your pride at the success of the recent campaign in the UK against MMR vaccination, fuelled in a large part by Dr Wakefield's deceitful and fraudulent "research".

I wonder, however, if you could explain something to me. Why is it that you think that an increase in cases of mumps is a good thing?

Please do not tell me that you think this because you are insane. I already know that. I was looking for an answer which would make sense to someone who is not psychotic.

Thanks in advance.

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Kind and Gentle – Indigenous Science (19/2/2005)
On Sunday evenings, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio National network carries a program named Encounter, which "explores the connections between religion and life". On February 6 this year the program concentrated on the Boxing Day tsunami. (You can see something I wrote about the tsunami and religion here.) One of the speakers was Dr Polly Walker, a research assistant at the University of Queensland. Among her qualifications is that she is somehow related to Cherokee Indians, although she is apparently unable to detect the racism inherent in the idea that who her ancestors were gives her some special insight into the world. On this occasion, Dr Walker talked about "indigenous science" and compared it to "Western science", as if there was a possibility that different ethnic backgrounds can affect the truth about the world. As I implied in my comments above about her racial ancestry, this sort of cultural relativism is racism in its purest form. I wrote to Dr Walker, but I have not yet received a reply.

Dear Dr Walker,

This is just a short note to congratulate you on your contribution to the ABC's Encounter program on February 6.

Your speech perfectly captured the essence of post-modernism, where the words have individual meanings and are arranged in a correct syntactical form resulting in something which sounds sensible but is really complete drivel. I don't know whether you wrote the speech beforehand and rehearsed it or if you improvised on the spot, but it was brilliant anyway. If it was an improvisation then my congratulations are doubled. It is hard enough to do standup comedy with short jokes, but to be able to produce more than a thousand words of apparently coherent nonsense shows a skill far beyond even the dreams of most performers at places like the Harold Park Hotel. I particularly liked the way that you threw in a reference to Rupert Sheldrake as a way of letting listeners know that you were telling a joke. Nicely done!

Have you thought of expanding the piece for publication. Just as Alan Sokal was able to get Social Text to publish "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", I am sure that you can find a serious journal where the editors would not detect that they were being hoaxed by such buffoonery.

Again, congratulations. It was good to see that someone could introduce a little light-heartedness into a discussion about the tsunami disaster and to do it in a way which allowed us all to laugh without feeling that our amusement was somehow distasteful or disrespectful.

Thank you.

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Kind and Gentle – A nurse just doing her job (19/2/2005)
A nurse wrote to an anti-vaccination liar mailing list to say how she was advising mothers about the dangers of vaccination. I wrote to her:

Subject: Just doin' your job
Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2005 17:08:04 +1100

Dear Rochelle,

Someone has told me that you sent a message to the Australian Vaccination Network's mailing list in which you made the following statements:

I'm 25yo & a Registered Nurse working in Perth's only specialist Children's Hospital (Princess Margaret Hospital).

and, talking about advice you had give a patient:

I encouraged her to look up the AVN on the net & discussed a little bit of the info I've picked up so far. (hehe in the notes the docs had written "encourage vaccination" :))

I have some questions for you.

Does your employer know that you are actively undermining the vision, mission and values of the Women's and Children's Health Service (see http://wchs.health.wa.gov.au/general/about_us/documents/316.pdf) by directing parents to web sites containing lies about vaccination?

If you are concerned that the hospital may be making money out of vaccinations, do you think it reasonable that the institution should make even more money out of the misery which will inevitably result if liars like AVN get their way and vaccination rates fall?

Should I email the hospital and tell them that one of their nurses is laughing at doctors' recommendations about vaccinations and telling mothers not to protect their children?

She didn't reply so I wrote to her boss, and her boss said:

Dear Mr Bowditch

We have received information from you with regards to a Registered Nurse who has posted an anti immunisation message to the AVN mailing list. Thank you for this information. We would like to contact this nurse. We appreciate your assistance in providing us with her name. I refer to the email you sent 2nd March, 2005.

thank you for your assistance and attention to this matter.

kind regards

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Kind and gentle letter (19/3/2005)
I sent the following email to Raymond Gallup of The Autism Autoimmunity Project. Mr Gallup once announced that not only did he know for certain that I was in the pay of pharmaceutical companies but he even knew for sure what form the payment took (holidays at luxury resorts). Mr Gallup's aim is to leverage his son's misery to ensure that many more children get sick and die. As there are now at least four competing theories about the origins of autism (mercury in thimerosal, gut bugs in MMR, Mercola's pasteurisation idiocy, and a new one this week – monkey viruses in polio shots) it is interesting to see how the anti-vaccination liars can believe them all simultaneously. I predict that Mr Gallup's response will be vitriolic, vacuous and will miss the point completely.

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Pretend psychic John Edward, the man accurately described in the television show South Park as "the biggest douche in the universe", gave his stage show in Sydney in April, 2005. His latest claim to fame at the time was that he had communicated with Terri Schiavo before she died and she knew what was going on. People like to say that frauds like Edward do no harm and are just entertainment, but when they exploit tragedy for their own profit they are no better than criminals. Edward was going to appear on a high-rated television show to promote his books and show, so I sent the following email to the producers.

To: morningtalk @ nine.com.au
Subject: John Edward
Date: Sat, 02 Apr 2005 10:44:53 +1000

I believe that fake psychic John Edward will be appearing with Kerri-Anne on Monday. Perhaps she could ask this repulsive creature to comment on his outrageous and disgusting claim that he was able to communicate with Terri Schiavo and report that she was "definitely clear on what's happening now around her".

http://mediamatters.org/items/200503250006

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Eve Hillary is a "journalist" who writes about the Australian health fraud industry and how it is oppressed by the authorities. You can see some drivel she wrote about an attempt to clean up the quackery industry here. In an article supporting one particular quack, she had this to say about me:

Bowditch also has a link to a restricted access discussion group that is only open to "approved" members. The discussion group, QuackbustersOfTheIlluminati, states its purpose as being: "This is a meeting place for the anti-alternative-medicine committee of the Illuminati, where we can meet and consider our attack on health freedom within the broader agenda of world domination." It is not known what relationship Bowditch has with this group, why it is secretive or why it was formed.

Ms Hillary released an article on April 1, 2005, which told the world about the dreadful CODEX conspiracy which is going to deny everyone access to vitamins. (It won't, but facts have no place in an Eve Hillary article.). I wrote to Ms Hillary to congratulate her:

Subject: CODEX
Date: Mon, 04 Apr 2005 23:02:25 +1000

Dear Ms Hillary,

I have just read your April 1 article about CODEX. I must say that the date is appropriate, as there is no doubt that many people may be fooled by the CODEX conspiracy.

I must point out two problems with the article. The first is that Val Johanson has not been with the Complementary Healthcare Council for some months. The second is that you cite the 1995 paper by Dr Runciman et al and mention the number "18,000", but I know that you are aware of Dr Runciman's 2000 amendment which placed the upper limit at 10,000 deaths in hospitals resulting from adverse events (with half of these not being preventable). As you mentioned the 10,000 figure in something you wrote about Pan Pharmaceuticals in November 2002 I do not understand why you are now citing the older and since discredited figure. I should also point out that the 18,000 figure was an estimate of deaths from all forms of adverse events, not just "inappropriate doctoring and prescribed pharmaceutical drugs", but I am sure that when you wrote that you were just confused.

These glaring errors undermine the fine journalism in the rest of the article.

I am also both pleased and surprised that the CODEX article does not mention the Illuminati. I am pleased because it is difficult enough to maintain the secrecy of a secret society without journalists mentioning it all the time. I am surprised because, as John Hammell of the International Association for Health Freedom has so often pointed out, it is the Illuminati who are the driving force behind CODEX.

My invitation to you to join the QuackbustersOfTheIlluminati group still stands. There is, of course, a probationary period of three months before I can introduce you to Queen Elizabeth, President Bush or the new Pope. (I have been told about the replacement for John Paul II but I can't say anything until the College of Cardinals goes through its rubber-stamping charade.) I am afraid, however, that my rank does not give me access beyond that level, so you will have to ask one of them to introduce you to Bill Gates, George Soros or Rupert Murdoch.

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A bit more kind and gentle stuff (9/4/2005)
77% of the polio in the world is in Nigeria. The government plans to do something about this with a massive vaccination campaign.

To: vaccineinfo@tesco.net
Subject: Polio in Nigeria
Date: Sat, 09 Apr 2005 17:57:36 +1000

Dear Ms Nakken,

"138 220 vaccinators will spread out across Africa's most populous country for four days" WHOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I know that the thought of all those Nigerian children with polio gives you a warm glow in the crotch, but do you have to be so enthusiastic about it in public?

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Pure filth (9/4/2005)
Today marks the start of Homeopathy Awareness Week, and the following appeared on a sign at the launch of this festival of farce in Sydney.

The boy whom Amy Lansky, PhD, claims to have cured of autism is her son. I have written to her in a kind and gentle manner with my views about people who treat their children's medical conditions with witchcraft.

To: lansky@renresearch.com
Subject: Your book about Max
Date: Sun, 10 Apr 2005 18:51:43 +1000

Dear Ms Lansky,

I am writing to you under my policy of maintaining kind and gentle relationships with people with whom I do not necessarily agree.

Some people say that the lowest form of human life is that group of people who abuse children. I see that you are opposed to vaccination so you are ipso facto a child abuser even though that abuse may be vicarious.

There are actually two classes of people lower than vicarious child abusers or those who prey on the children of other people. The first of these are the people who abuse their own children. The extreme of badness, however, must be people who abuse their own children for profit.

People like you, who sell books proudly announcing that you have a sick child and that you are pretending to cure him with witchcraft. I cannot imagine anything more vile than someone who lies about their children to sell books and make money. It is bad enough that you should lie to the parents of autistic children and give them false hope about magic cures, it is bad enough that you tell them not to vaccinate their children and therefore leave them exposed to deadly and disabling diseases, but it is almost beyond belief that you would exploit your own son in order to sell your lying book. That you choose to suggest the idiocy of homeopathy just increases the evil, as you are not even suggesting something which might have a faint hope of success.

I would ask you how you sleep at night and how you face your reflection in the mirror without vomiting, but I realise that for people like you these are not problems. If you ever had a conscience it would have been thrown away at the sight of the first dollar.

At least the title of the book has some truth in it. It certainly is an Impossible Cure. I suppose that you will fall back on the literal meaning of the words if anyone takes your advice and finds that their child is not cured. You will be able to say "Didn't you read the title of the book? I said it was impossible".

Have a nice day. Millions of children who have died or been disabled by vaccine preventable diseases won't have that opportunity.

Dr Lansky replied to the above by assuring me that her son had really been cured of autism and that she made no money from her book (her website says that it is the number one best selling health book at Amazon.com). She then went on to lecture me about the effectiveness of homeopathy. Her response suggested that she is either too stupid or too self-opinionated to know when she is being insulted. As she has a PhD in computer science it is probably fair to assume that she is not stupid. Speaking of her PhD, an acquaintance of mine suggested to Dr Lansky that her mention of the degree in the context of a totally different intellectual field might be deceptive, and Dr Lansky replied that she only mentioned it to gain credibility. Perhaps she is stupid after all, if she can't see why this is a problem.

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The Returned & Services League (RSL) is a social and welfare society for Australian war veterans. A member wrote to me:

May I suggest, that you alert the Victorian RSL, that one of [XYZ]'s reps is intending to get the members of that league to join [XYZ], and propagate their [scheme], to unsuspecting old blokes

Ever eager to keep our old soldiers out of harm's way, I sent of this message to the Victorian branch of the RSL:

I received the following message from one of your members (who only identified himself as George) who is concerned about a company called [XYZ] Pty Ltd.

> May I suggest, that you alert the Victorian RSL, that one of [XYZ]'s
> reps is intending to get the members of that league to join [XYZ], and
> propagate their [scheme], to unsuspecting old blokes.

I share his concern that members of the RSL may be sucked in to what has been officially declared an illegal pyramid scheme by the Federal Court.

You can see the Court's findings at https://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/federal_ct/2005/276.html and a media release from the ACCC at https://www.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/668931/fromItemId/620299

It is typical of pyramid and multi-level marketing [scheme operators] to try to infiltrate organisations like the RSL, and any hint of official support (or even a tenuous connection) will be exploited to the full by implying that the fact that the organisation allows them access to its members is evidence that the [scheme] is legitimate. As an example of a tenuous connection, [XYZ] were claiming earlier this year that they were in partnership with UNICEF when, in fact, all [XYZ] had done was announce a plan to make a donation to the UNICEF tsunami appeal. No money had been donated at the time of the partnership announcement.

The RSL exists because people were ready to make sacrifices so that we can live in a free and just society. The members deserve better than to be the targets of people who are only after their money and who will raise false hopes of a "business opportunity" in order to get that money.

Please advise your members to avoid this [scheme], and also tell the [scheme operators] that the RSL membership does not exist to provide a means of satisfying their greed.

You can read more about [XYZ] at https://ratbags.com/rsoles/comment/XYZ.htm

Thank you.

[Please note that the above correspondence has been edited as the result of court action. [XYZ] Pty Ltd did not like their experience in court being given publicity and subsequently spent a lot of money to force me to stop talking about them. If there really is a company named [XYZ] Pty Ltd I am not referring to them.]

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Time to be kind and gentle again (14/5/2005)
There has been an outbreak of polio in Indonesia, and the government has started a mass vaccination campaign to try to contain it and eradicate it if possible. This has come to the attention of the anti-vaccination liars, who don't see hundreds of paralysed children as a problem. I have written to one of them,

Dear Greg,

I saw your comment on the AVN mailing list about the small number of children in Indonesia who have been paralysed by polio in the latest outbreak. Well, you think that 788 is a small number but I imagine that the parents of those children see it as a large number.

I think that your problem is the same as the one which some psychologists believe happens with pornography, where an ever-higher level of stimulus is required to achieve arousal as the viewer becomes desensitised with continual exposure. I suspect that at one time it only took one crippled child to get you started, but now almost a thousand is not enough. I can see why you support the anti-vaccination cause as it offers the promise of many thousands of crippled (and even dead) children for you to salivate over. As long as you just keep salivating – you wouldn't want to do anything which might make you go blind.

The answer I received suggests that it would be impossible to carry on a sensible conversation with the writer:

Curious post? You might know that I believe paralytic polio is a result of ingested poisons like DDT and possibly triggered by live OPV. Also that vaccine/disease data from remote unverifiable sources is a good way to promote fear and sell product. Take Care

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In November 2004 I had an email conversation with Dawn Winkler who runs an anti-vaccination liar outfit called "Health Advocacy in the Public Interest". Actually, I had several conversations with her as she had the rather unsettling habit of answering a message with multiple replies, thus making coherent discourse difficult. As this was combined with delusion, lack of reading comprehension, inability to face facts, and just plain outright lying I finally gave up when my bizarrity quotient was exceeded. Ms Winkler has decided to contact me again, and, true to form, she sent more than one message. Here are those messages (sent eight minutes apart) and my kind and gentle replies.

Dear Peter,
You are polite and you gave up our conversation?
I am mentally ill?
Dawn

<Ms Winkler then went on to quote something I had written to a hospital, warning them about her>

I am not a psychiatrist, so I am not qualified to make a diagnosis, but you certainly appear to be delusional, paranoid, phobic and sociopathic. You freely confess to "seeing" such non-existent things as eight-year-old autistics who shit their pants and cannot speak and other children with "green snot" constantly running down their faces. Normal people do not see these things. You seem to believe that there is some massive conspiracy involving pharmaceutical companies, but you believe this without evidence. You are fearful of non-existent threats such as mercury in vaccines which do not contain mercury, even though all evidence suggests that no harm would come from the mercury anyway even if it was there. You engage in activities which, if successful, would lead to the deaths or damage of countless children, but you show no concern whatsoever for these children. On that last point, I am possibly wrong to call it "sociopathic". "Psychopathic" is probably a better word.

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Peter,
Am I a "child killer"? Because that's how you word the introduction to our conversation.
Dawn

I am not accusing you of being like some of the heroes of the anti-vaccination movement and actually directly murdering children yourself. There are, however, ways of indirectly killing children. Anyone who actively denied food to children, causing them to starve to death, would be be called a child killer. Anyone who denied water to children, causing them to die of thirst and dehydration, would be called a child killer. Anyone who denied medical care for children suffering from life-threatening illnesses or injuries would be called a child killer. People who place children in harm's way by using them as soldiers or to clear minefields are called child killers. Nobody would dispute the "child killer" label in these circumstances.

You, on the other hand, actively advocate that children should be denied protection against life-threatening and disabling diseases, and the inevitable result of such advocacy, should it be even partially successful, is the death or permanent harm of many children. If you got everything you wanted, the deaths would be counted in the tens of millions and the blind, halt and lame in the hundreds of millions. You would sentence children to death. You are no different to the examples listed above. Get the words "Child Killer" embroidered onto a baseball cap. Put the cap on. It will fit perfectly.

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The Autism Autoimmunity Project pretends that it is not anti-vaccines. Not any more it doesn't.

To: December@TAAP.info
Subject: Can you recognise the truth?
Date: Wed, 03 Aug 2005 14:31:03 +1000

I have just seen the interview between Greg Ciola and April Oakes in Crusador.

It is almost farcical to see someone described as the Vice President of an organisation interviewing the President of the same organisation and pretending that it is just the editor of a publication doing his job. The fact that nowhere in the interview is the relationship mentioned is no less than I would have expected from an organisation which bases its existence on lies.

The part where the President asks the Vice President "How can someone contact you for more on this topic?" makes me want to withdraw the word "almost" from the previous paragraph.

The stated aims of your organisation are:

1) Fully define immune etiologies in autism;|
2) Develop appropriate treatment options for individuals who have autism through autoimmunity or immune system deficiency;
3) Develop mechanisms for prevention of immune-based autism.

Several people have tried to tell me that The Autism Autoimmunity Project actually believes in these goals and is not just some anti-vaccination liar outfit, but then I read in the pretend interview: "My first child, Casi, was a victim of the vaccination program. I thought I was being a good parent when I held her down while she was being vaccinated. Today, one child in 150 is labeled "autistic" and there is a great deal of evidence showing that vaccines play a role in the cause. Casi died on June 13, 1999 and since her death, I've made the commitment to warn the world that vaccines are both worthless and dangerous. Everything we've been told about them is simply not true. One of the most blatant lies is, "no shots, no school, no kidding". What a joke! There are exemptions in 48 of the 50 States. Another very glaring lie is that vaccines have eradicated certain diseases. Most of these diseases were being eradicated BEFORE the introduction of vaccinations".

I guess that you can no longer deny the fact that TAAP is not the least bit interested in its stated goals, because if it was then it would be looking for the real causes and cures for autism and not chasing after fantasies like vaccine dangers.

The list of officials of and advisors to TAAP is also instructive, as a more venal collection of child haters would be hard to find. At least one of them, however, has found a guaranteed way of preventing autism, but whether Alan Yurko's method of beating kids to death before they become autistic is likely to be widely promoted is something only you and your ilk can decide.

Whenever people ask me why I spend my time fighting the anti-vaccination liars who so endanger our children, I simply quote from Psalm 94:16 "Who will rise up against the evildoers? Or who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity?"

TAAP responded with some sophistry and a request to their supporters to email me to set me straight. This whole matter will be discussed on The Millenium Project in the next few weeks.

---

I was contacted by a journalist on Friday, August 26, 2005, for comments about homeopathy. The journalist was writing a piece about the study published in The Lancet which demonstrated, yet again, the uselessness of magic water treatment. I pointed her towards things I had written about homeopathy, explained the scientific vacuity of it and the fraudulent nature of claims that 200C preparations are actually made in practice, and commented on the irony that in the centenary year of Einstein's publication of his paper on Brownian motion we should even be talking about anything based on the idea of infinite dilution.

The reporter took the time to ensure that she had my correct affiliations (with Australian Skeptics and the Australian Council Against Health Fraud) to go with any quotes of what I had said. You can see the final article here.

I assume that I was not the only person interviewed who expressed scepticism about this quackery, but the only person quoted at all in the article was the president of the Australian Homeopathic Association, who dismissed the idea that clinical trials could say anything about homeopathy. And he got the last word.

Sigh!

As an aside, because Peter Torokfalvy from the AHA said that homeopathic preparations have to be individually prepared I sent the following elmail to him asking for his support in a campaign to remove homeopathic "medicines" from pharmacies. He has not yet replied.

Subject: True homeopathy
Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2005 00:00:29 +1000

Dear Mr Torokfalvy,

I see from an article about homeopathy in today's Australian that you say that homeopathy must be based on individual treatments.

I assume from that statement that you are just as opposed as I am to the sale of prepackaged "homeopathic" products in pharmacies. I look forward to working with you and the Australian Homoeopathic Association to rid pharmacies of these false "homeopathic" products, which by both your definition and mine can only be considered to be examples of quackery and medical fraud.

Thank you.

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Why do liars tell lies? Because they can. A message with the subject line "World's Largest Media Source Controlled by World's Largest Drug Company" containing the following words was posted to an anti-vaccination liar mailing list on October 31, 2005:

Sir Christopher Hogg is Glaxo's non-executive chairman. Sir Christopher Hogg was born in 1936 and has an MBA from Harvard. Interestingly, Sir Christopher is also the non-executive chairman at Reuters

I wrote to the author of the message:

So Sir Christopher Hogg is the Chairman of both Reuters and GlaxoSmithKline, is he?

http://about.reuters.com/investors/corpinfo/board.asp

""Niall FitzGerald became Chairman of Reuters on 1st October, 2004. Previously, he was Joint Chairman and CEO of Unilever. He joined the board of Reuters as a non-executive director on 1 January 2003.

He also serves as President of the Advertising Association, Chairman of the Conference Board, Co-Chairman of the Transatlantic Business Dialogue (TABD), Member of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum, Member of the International Advisory Board of the Council on Foreign Relations, Trustee of The Leverhulme Trust and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He also serves on the U.S. Business Council and the International Business Council. He is a member of various advisory bodies, including the President of South Africa's International Investment Advisory Council and the Shanghai Mayor's International Business Leaders' Council.

"His former appointments include: Non-Executive Directorships of Merck, Ericsson, Bank of Ireland and the Prudential Corporation, member of the Accounting Standards Review Committee, member of the Finance and Industry Committee of the NEDC, and member of the International Policy Council for Agriculture and Trade. Age 60".

http://www.gsk.com/about/boardofdirectors.htm

"Sir Christopher Gent is Non-Executive Chairman of GlaxoSmithKline plc. He assumed this role in January 2005. He also serves as Chairman of the Nominations and Corporate Responsibility committees. He joined the Board in June 2004. Sir Christopher is the former Chief Executive Officer of Vodafone Group Plc. Prior to his retirement from Vodafone in July 2003, he had been a member of its Board since August 1985 and its Chief Executive Officer since January 1997. He was also Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Mannesmann AG; a non-executive director of China Mobile (Hong Kong) Limited; and on the Board of Verizon Wireless. Sir Christopher joined Vodafone as Managing Director of Vodafone Limited in January 1985 when the mobile phone service was first launched, and held that position until December 1996.

"Prior to joining Vodafone, Sir Christopher was Director of Network Services at ICL. In this role, he was Managing Director of Baric, a computer services company owned jointly by Barclays and ICL, and was responsible for ICL's computer bureau services worldwide.

"Sir Christopher served as the National Chairman of the Young Conservatives from 1977 to 1979, and was Vice President of the Computer Services Association Council at the time he left ICL.

"He is a non-executive director of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc; a director of the International Advisory Board of Hakluyt & Co; a Senior Adviser at Bain & Co; and Chairman of the Advisory Board of Reform".