Covered up in plain sight

When Mick and Kirsten Button bravely went public with the story of how their daughter, Saba, had been profoundly brain-damaged by the flu vaccine in Western Australia last year, it was a decision that they thought long and hard about.

What finally made them decide to be vocal about their situation - a story they had kept quiet for over a year while they worked full time to keep their daughter alive and tried their hardest to enable her to recover - was the government's intention to recommend flu shots for all children between 6 months and 5 years of age. Saba was 12 months old when she got her shot in a similar campaign last year - a campaign in which parents were not informed that their children were being used as guinea pigs with a brand new and untested vaccine.

This family who has been through so much, just wanted to make sure that parents knew what they themselves had gone through so that they could investigate this issue before choosing whether or not to vaccinate their own children against influenza. Health authorities this year are assuring parents that things will be different and that, as opposed to the vaccine last year which was supposed to be perfectly safe but was anything but - this years shot would not cause these problems.

Mick and Kirsten's story is a precautionary tale - a story that all parents need to hear and that deserves broad national coverage.

With television coverage on Channel 9 and newspaper articles in a major West Australian newspaper, this story seemed ready to go national.

Enter the WA government which proceeded to put pressure on newspapers, leading to the story being pulled by several websites where it had previously been listed. The excuse given - legal issues.

Now granted, there is a court case pending on Saba's injuries, but can you imagine the newspapers refusing to report on any other issue simply because there was court action pending?

For example, in the US recently, Toyota was forced to recall millions of cars because of faulty brakes. For years, they had denied that the deaths and injuries being caused in car crashes in which brakes had failed were their fault. Finally, due to a string of lawsuits, they were forced to issue the recall. Had the newspapers in the US given in to pressure from Toyota (and I'm not saying that Toyota exerted this kind of influence, this is merely an example), would the papers have listened and as a result, might the recall never have occurred and would people still be dying today because of the faulty brakes?

And a search of Google using the terms "lawsuit against the West Australian government" pulls up media articles on the first page alone regarding lawsuits by Aboriginal groups, a successful defamation case, the Dr Habib torture case and lawsuits against 2 hospitals in WA due to negligence in the deaths of children (unrelated to vaccination).

So pulling these articles simply because there was a lawsuit pending is nothing more then an attempt to stop the bad press that the medical community and the WA government are current copping - with good cause - due to their lack of a duty of care in last year's flu vaccination campaign.

Will this year be any different? Since the same age group of children is being targeted and since we have not done any double-blind studies on this vaccine, nor have we tested it for either its safety or effectiveness in combination with the other vaccinations these children get in the real world, I see no reason to assume - as the government has - that this shot is any safer then the one last year that caused seizures in as many as 1 child in 100. And it takes more than platitudes from government flunkies to convince today's savvy parents that this shot will be safe. Where are the studies? Where is the evidence. Before one more child is sacrificed before the idol of vaccines, we need to have independent information - not just lip service.

Parents need to know this information. The media needs to stop bowing to pressure and start doing their job of informing the public.