Can children be considered collateral damage

How many children are we willing to sacrifice before the altar of vaccination in order to 'protect' society? Is even one child an acceptable cost and if you answer yes to that question - acceptable to whom?

Saba Button's future was forfeit to a vaccine experiment gone horribly wrong. That isn't anything new - it happens all the time. We just don't hear about it because usually, these 'studies' are generally run in developing countries where annoying things like ethics committees don't cause unnecessary bother with all of their nasty rules and regulations.

Enter Western Australia - testing ground of choice for this part of the world, thanks in part to the aggressive commercialisation activities of the Telethon Institute in Perth. The head of this Institute and a former Australian of the Year, Prof Fiona Stanley, was quoted in a recent media interview as saying:

"But there's been a really good  we've had a very good relationship with big pharma, some of which has just been, 'Here's the money. We're interested in anything you produce.' That's a very good relation that Pat Holt has had with GlaxoSmithKline.

"We've had a lot of funding from the big pharmaceutical companies that make vaccines  we've had about, oh, probably 80 vaccine trials since the 1990s, where we've done everything from the evaluation of new vaccines to looking at whether the vaccines can be given together, to look at novel ways of delivery of vaccine. We're doing trials on HPV as well as bird flu  you know, it's huge. Peter Richmond heads up a lot of that, but we always try to add some scientific questions to our vaccine trials."

Saba Button was part of a flu vaccine trial - but her parents had no idea that their little girl was being used as a guinea pig. They were kept in the dark about the experimental nature of this vaccine just as the other 240 parents whose children were admitted to hospital in WA had no idea. And these were only the reactions we know about. Since only between 1 and 10% are reported, chances are the number of children in WA who were injured by this shot is far higher.

Last week, in response to the government's push to introduce mass vaccination of all children 6 months of age and older against influenza despite last year's disaster, Saba's parents went public for the first time about their experience. The AVN issued a media release afterwards and it was picked up by several outlets - amongst them, Howard Sattler from radio 6PR in Perth.

Howard has interviewed me before and has always made his stance on this issue very clear - he is pro-vaccination but believes wholeheartedly in the right to freedom of speech in a democracy. He also trusts his fellow Australians to be able to listen to both points of view on issues and then, make up their own mind.

Below, with the kind permission of 6PR, I have included audio files of my interview with Mr Sattler followed by his interview with David Mountain, head of the Australian Medical Association of WA.

Your comments are welcome.

[buzzsprout episode="23351" player="true"]

[buzzsprout episode="23353" player="true"]