But they do manage to exceed themselves with this piece: don’t take vaccines but rather take homeopathic remedies. Idiots.

HT: PZ Myers

The Australian Vaccination Network lobby group says more testing of the swine flu vaccine needs to be done before it is given to the public. The Federal Government has ordered 21 million doses of the vaccine developed by CSL.

Unfortunately giving air time to these woomiesters just encourages them and that is not something our nationally-funded broadcaster should be doing.

The Australian Vaccination Network, despite its harmless sounding name, is a full blown Anti-vaxxer organisation.

If you look at their website, all pictures of babies and wildflowers, they just appear to be one of those mushy alternative medicine types, but when you read what they say in detail:

We believe it is a parent’s right to choose what’s best for their child…some would say that this is one of the most basic rules of any civilised society.

Vaccines have never been tested

The gold standard of medical science is the double blind crossover placebo study. This test has never been performed on any vaccine currently licensed in Australia. In an astounding leap of logic, contrary to all rules of science, vaccines are assumed to be safe and effective and therefore, it is considered to be unethical to withhold vaccinations for the purposes of testing them.

Vaccines can cause serious long-term side effects

According to medical reports, children are now less healthy than they have ever been before. More than 40% of all children now suffer from chronic conditions, something that was unheard of prior to mass vaccination.

Vaccines do not necessarily protect against infectious diseases

For the very real risk of both short and long-term side effects from vaccines, parents are asked to allow their children to be given vaccines that at best, will provide a temporary sensitisation to illnesses and at worst, can make their children more susceptible to both opportunistic and infectious illness. As evidenced by the recent whooping cough outbreak in SA, the only Australian state which actually records vaccination status in cases of infectious illness, 87% of all those who contracted whooping cough and whose vaccination status was known were fully and appropriately vaccinated.

Pharmaceutical companies have paid for almost all vaccine research to date

Just as the tobacco companies paid for corrupt and incorrect research which purported to show that tobacco and tobacco products were safe for human consumption, so too the pharmaceutical companies have paid for and produced almost all of the research into vaccines.

Some childhood illnesses have beneficial aspects and therefore, prevention may not necessarily be in the best interests of the child

Measles, for example, has been used in Scandinavian countries to successfully treat such autoimmune conditions as eczema and many studies have performed which show that children who do not contract measles naturally as a child are more likely to suffer from certain cancers later in life.

With lists like this it is not even clear where to start:

There is ample evidence vaccines are effective, mass vaccination helped eradicate smallpox, which once killed as many as every seventh child in Europe.

While claiming the need for serious testing of vaccines, AVN can make wild assertions that children are less healthy than every before (tell that to families of the 19th century with their child mortality rates) and that chronic conditions are associated with the rise of vaccinations.

Pretty much all drugs produced by Pharmaceutical companies are tested by those companies, are AVN suggesting that all pharmaceuticals be avoided?

The measles is good for you!

They just link misinformation together in a long line of false assertions. As the Australian Sceptics report they:

…ignores the fact that this is an open debate rather than the back-room conspiracy which it claims vaccine production and distribution to be. It is happy to quote scientists claiming this vaccine is not safe enough, while it usually claims that scientists are silent on the risks of vaccines. It provides publically-available statistics and information on side-effects while at the same time claiming that such information is not available.

This double standard is also shown in the AVN demanding a full scientific investigation of vaccine safety and efficacy while promoting homeopathic treatments that have been scientifically proven to have no efficacy beyond a placebo effect and no effective ingredients whatsoever.

The ABC reporting this rubbish is no different to them reporting the anti-psychiatrist viewpoints of the Scientologists.

First, reviewers have a tendency to always give positive reviews to Australian films (out of some sense of loyalty I assume) but this means that the review loses its primary function – distinguishing between good and bad films. If I can no longer rely on reviewers to give a pointer to the quality of a whole class of films, then it is easier to just avoid that class in its entirety.

Second, and I don’t know if it is a function of the funding system, but it seems sometimes like only two types of films get made in Australia, films set in the outback, or films set in the grimy streets of western Sydney/Melbourne.

Take, for example, this recently release film, Cedar Boys, reviewed on the Movie Show:

In CEDAR BOYS, Tarek, LES CHANTERY, a Lebanese-Australian, lives with his parents and little sister in Sydney’s western suburbs…

And I stopped reading there.

The PM said in the presence of three female MPs: “I don’t care what you f***ers think,” News Limited has reported.

Three female MPs! Three! Blokes might be able to take that tough language stuff, but surely not female MPs?

It now seems that every single show or movie I watch has macs in it** which makes it appear if makes are the only kinds of computers in the world.

I actually find this a little annoying and am wondering if all the movie and TV studios have tied up some kind of contract with Apple.

Notes:
* Which despite being obviously# set in Melbourne, seems to have signage for a ‘State Police” rather than Victoria Police, in some attempt to make the show cityless and stateless. this is either just petty Australian parochialism or an attempt to sell the show on the world market.
# to me
** Bones, they show that I watched last night also had Macs. the other interesting thing about Bones (another forensic pathologist show) is that it appears that forensic pathologist have little programs for providing nifty animations of almost any process they undertake in the lab.

If the opinion polls are to be believed, Barack Obama is now, six months into his presidency, no more popular than George Bush or Richard Nixon were at the same stage in theirs. His ratings are sagging particularly badly with electorally vital independent voters: two-thirds of them think he wants to spend too much of their money. Two of the most specific pledges he made to the electorate—to reform health care and to produce a cap-and-trade system to curb greenhouse-gas emissions—are in trouble. And an impression is being formed in Washington of a presidency that is far too ready to hand over the direction of domestic policy to Congress; that is drifting either deliberately or lethargically leftwards; and that is more comfortable with lofty visions than details.

Of course this doesn’t mean anything. All politicians and parties go through a honeymoon period where they can do no wrong. This period inevitably end when suddenly the electorate (and the media) realise that the politician is actually only a normal human being and they have to deal with emerging issues in the normal, human, frail way.

But for Obama, the issue is not whether the media have declared his honeymoon over, it is whether he can deliver on the reforms his presidency set out to do. And despite setbacks and compromises there are bills now on the congress floor to implement a greenhouse gas emission trading scheme and reforms to healthcare to extend insurance. If he can get these through to the presidential signing then he really will have achieved something.

Of course there will be sniping and complaining the the bills do not do enough, they do not punish the coal producers enough, they cost too much, not enough people get insurance, they don’t control health cost enough. Many of these criticisms are true, but politics, of all places is where, as Voltaire said, the perfect is the enemy of the the good. Ultimately achieving something is better than achieving nothing, and these issues are long term issues, we will be debating and regulating greenhouse gas emissions for the next hundred years, the regulations can be improved over time.

Obama is pushing forward with an ambitious policy agenda in a political system with so many ‘checks and balances’ that getting anything done is almost a miracle itself. He is doing fine.