Freedom of Choice - Freedom of Information: are they worth fighting for?
Almost 12 months to the day after Ken McLeod, a prominent member of Stop the AVN (SAVN) filed a vexatious and spurious complaint against the AVN, the HCCC has handed down a decision which states that the AVN must put a notice on our website to say that we are anti-vaccination.To quote from our final response to this organisation:
"The HCCC has based its entire ‘investigation’ of our organisation on our website and, in particular, on a single page of our website – one called 10 Reasons Why Parents Question Vaccines. Were statements on these pages, spoken at a public meeting, or indeed voiced in a book, it is the considered opinion of the AVN that there would exist no legal means of censuring them. In our opinion the same rules apply to the internet as apply to other forms of communication and it is our opinion that unless there exists a crime or an incitement to a crime of some kind, no organisation in Australia has the right, the power or the legal authority to censor the opinions or information of an organisation or an individual."
The HCCC have said that we use misinformation, quote selectively from research and pose a danger to Australian parents because we only show one side of the vaccination issue. They feel that we need to provide the government's information in addition to our own despite the fact that neither the government nor the medical community is forthcoming about the risks or ineffectiveness of vaccines, indeed, actively suppressing any debate on the benefits or safety of this medical procedure. In opposition to these statements, I say that:
The AVN is a multi-faceted organisation operating throughout Australia since 1994. No serious investigation of our organisation can possibly be conducted based purely on the contents of our website.
Neither the AVN nor myself, Meryl Dorey, can be considered to be under the jurisdiction of the HCCC. I am not a health educator since conducting seminars outside of an institution of learning does not qualify me to be an educator; nor does the AVN provide an educational service since simply sourcing and distributing information found in the public arena is not the same as teaching.
The AVN is not anti-vaccine. To be anti-vaccine, one must oppose all vaccinations in every possibly combination for every potential use. To be anti-vaccine, one would be advising others not to vaccinate. The AVN does none of this. We simply provide a balance to the blatantly pro-vaccination, anti-choice stance of the government and a large proportion of the medical community. This does not make us anti-vaccine.
The AVN has never provided medical advice. For the HCCC to include this information in their Public Statement disregards the many statements they have made in previous communications to state that they have never found any evidence that the AVN has ever provided medical advice.
The AVN provides carefully researched, fully-referenced information from peer-reviewed sources to provide a balance to the often unreferenced, poorly-researched data to be found at the majority of government and medical venues and websites.
The AVN links to and refers parents to doctors, council clinics and government health departments in order to enable them to make a fully-informed vaccination decision. We remind parents that vaccinations are not compulsory in Australia and that the choice to vaccinate fully, selectively or at all must always be theirs and theirs alone.
The Party Line
The HCCC says that our selective use of the medical literature is evidenced by our refusal to refer to research papers whose results we consider to be suspect (such as many articles that have been fully-funded by the drug companies involved in producing the drug or vaccine they were supposed to be investigating) and because we point out the instances where the raw data comprising the body of an article does not agree with either the abstract or the conclusion of the article. It appears to me that the HCCC is of the opinion that it is somehow incorrect to critique research unless one agrees with everything the doctors involved have said.
Information ignored
Out of the hundreds of hours that I have spent responding to the various communications from the HCCC, most of the information I have provided them with has been ignored or disregarded with the same questions being asked of me over and over again despite fully-referenced answers being provided. The HCCC has never answered many of the questions I posed to them, including very detailed requests regarding the legality of their investigation into the AVN seeing as we are not health practitioners or health educators. In a move that can only be described as extraordinary, the HCCC added on a second complaint by Toni and David McCaffery - the parents of Dana McCaffery - the little girl on the North Coast of NSW who died at 4 weeks of age from pertussis. McLeod's complaint was received by the HCCC in July of 2009 and my first and second responses were submitted to the HCCC in September 2009 and December 2009. The McCaffery's complaint was received by the HCCC in mid-December 2009 and the first mention of this event was the unannounced addition of their name to the communications from the HCCC in February 2010. Despite the fact that I was not allowed to see this complaint, I was expected to respond to it - a true denial of natural justice. To quote from the AVN's final response:
In what must be a very unusual move, the HCCC has tacked a second complaint on to this original case. Even more unusually, I am unable to view the actual complaint and instead, need to try and reply based only upon what the HCCC has chosen to share with me.
As a government department, the HCCC would be required to uphold government policy which is pro-vaccination. It is therefore no surprise that they have found against the AVN - a body that questions government policy and urges informed choice on this issue. Again, to quote from our final response:
"By allowing this investigation to proceed past the assessment stage, the HCCC has demonstrated either a serious lack of judgement or a desire to be complicit with this hate group [Stop the AVN] for some unknown reason at a huge expense to the taxpayer and the government of Australia. In allowing this investigation to continue, the HCCC has placed itself in the middle of a scientific debate that has been raging for over 200 years. Unfortunately, however, they appear to lack the necessary expertise to enter into this debate. If the preliminary findings of the HCCC proceed as they have stated they will, the Commission will clearly be saying that it supports censorship and that further, it believes that hate groups who oppose freedom of communication and the legal rights of others to make their own health choices, have a right to impose restrictions upon, change, or even delete certain information simply because they do not agree with it."
The AVN's Response
The AVN is examining all of our options and seeking the best possible advice from a wide range of experts in this area. We believe that preserving freedom of communication and free health choice as well as opposing discrimination against those who have made a decision not to vaccinate or to vaccinate selectively (as is still their legal right in Australia) is of vital importance to all Australians - regardless of their opinion on the vaccination issue. We will definitely be fighting against any efforts to censor, suppress or stop the distribution of our information. As a consumer-run, membership-funded public-health watchdog, it is essential that our political, moral and ethical rights to communicate freely are upheld by our democratic government.
We note that in the second reading speech for the Health Care Complaints Bill [the Bill which saw the establishment of the HCCC] made in the NSW Parliament by the Hon. R. J. Webster (Minister for Planning, and Minister for Housing), on behalf of the Hon. Virginia Chadwick on Thursday 18 November 1993 the objective of the Bill was expressed to be "to facilitate the dissemination of information about clients' rights throughout the health system" [at page 5642]. It is submitted that the role that the AVN plays in the political discourse is precisely that, to give people information that they may not be getting from other sources in the health care system. To seek to silence the voice of the AVN is shameful and disappointing.
Chronology Below are links to the complaints and communications between the HCCC and AVN since the beginning of this case last July. These can all be downloaded to read now or later and I suggest that if you only have limited time, you download the final response to the HCCC (entitled Health Freedom in Australia: A Critical Refutation of the Preliminary Findings of the HCCC’s Investigation of the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) ) and the HCCC's determination (which are the last files in this list apart from the 3 Appendixes which you can download or not as you choose).
Initial Complaint against the AVN by Ken McLeod
Reply to initial HCCC Complaint Decision Letter - AVN
AVN again asks for information on Jurisdiction
Second HCCC response - Feb 1, 2009
Response to the HCCC - March 2009
Final AVN response to the HCCC