Following the legal threats against Ben Goldcare, bloggers have seen the threat as an attack on them all and banded together in common cause. Click on that last link and you will find a massive deluge of blog posts about the LBC threat. There is even a Facebook group “Defend Ben Goldacre from LBC”. Many hands make light work.
Anti-vaccinators have exploited the internet for years. Websites, blogs, and forums are widely used by activists to promote their wrong-headed cause. However, when the pro-science pro-vaccine lobby use similar methods a common accusation is leveled at them. Here it is posted at JABS, the UK’s leading anti-vaccine website.
There is no way all of this could have happened so quickly without Pharma backing.
Really, this post has taken 5 minutes to write. The last one linking to the transcripts three minutes. Granted the individuals who transcribed the radio broadcast spent more time, but people feel strongly about this. They are willing to put the time in because they are thoroughly sick of ten years of bullshit published by the media, and the cranks who have peddled this lunacy and continue to do so in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Perhaps they see it as a public duty to counter material which is endangering children?
Pharma hasn’t contacted me or paid me. Nor do they need to contact or pay pro-science bloggers. Many bloggers are as critical of quack science when employed by the industry, as they are of the anti-vaccine movement. Print or broadcast quackery and you will be called on it. Resort to the law to suppress criticism of crank views, and it will blow up in your face.
4 Comments
That is entirely why we did it.
Like all our posts, no funding, no outside support. We are sick of the unstoppable flow of wrong-headed and potentially dangerous commentary that passes for expertise and the ridiculous assumptions that underpin antivax rhetoric.
So you support censorship then Tony?
The BBC investigating why parents don’t vaccinate is called honest reporting about events in the real world.
If the BBC stop presenting both sides to any debate i will stop paying my licence fee.
I am in favour of responsible reporting.
That means investigating why people do not vaccinate.
It does not include giving airtime to lunatic fanatic antivaccinatorsspreading falsehoods.
Andrew: The BBC already do fail to present both sides of a debate – for instance they’re not given to providing much of a platform for the BNP and other groups that would incite violence and hatred (though they do talk about the issues around racial tensions and so on when such matters arise). I think this is generally a sensible policy.
Anthony: good post. I’m always surprised quite how much people assume conspiracy rather than just that a lot of people have the opposing viewpoint.