Hilary's Desk

Did everyone listening to the Insight immunisation documentary (podcast URL) on Sunday 19th June, put on their "thinking" cap?  How many listeners do you think, just "believed" all the comments made by the paediatricians or doctors?  After all, they went to medical school, so they must know everything?

I've decided to upload the podcast, in case it mysteriously disappears:  MP3 streaming file.

Where I have something to say, I will mentioned the "time" on the podcast in this format: 1.52 (Tim Blackmore) To me, this documentary was astonishing.  Firstly, because Phillipa Tolley's background research was palpably absent.  But then, to know that she plainly didn't know much..., a person would have to "know" a long term history of vaccination, and immunable diseases in New Zealand.  A real investigative journalist would have asked much more searching questions.

There were comments by an Infectious Diseases Specialist, Tim Blackmore, that measles is a terrible disease (1.52) which caused chronic lung disease, blindness and deafness.  In all the NZ literature for decades, such emotive language has not been used before.  Perhaps if Tim Blackmore had seen measles in the days when parents actually knew how to look after their children, he'd have a different picture of it.  His description, "measles is breathtakingly contagious" is ... breathtaking. He said, "You only have to walk past the room of somebody with measles in it, so it can spread literally like wildfire.... the only thing that protects us from infections like measles is people vaccinated under the age of 40 or so." Read Full Blog

Yesterday, in the Far North, Dr Jonathan Jarman had high blood pressure because he feared that 28 cases of measles in the last two months, in pakeha homeschooling, alternative life stylers in Hokianga, could trigger measles cases and deaths left, right and centre. His advice to health workers was to bail up everyone unvaccinated, born after 1969, and shoot’em up with an MMR vaccine, and to rope in anyone who hadn’t had an MMR, and see to it that they were injected. Not in that kind of language, but given information passed on from Kerikeri, the hard word tactics have already started.  Read Full Blog