Lee's Blog

The broadcast by that lackwit Jeni Barnett (*spit*) has probably been done to death by better folks than I, but I have yet more comments about it. I particularly have a comment about this part, with the homeopath Tracy:

Barnett: Tracy, let me ask you this. When measles–if there’s a case of measles at the kids’ school, or if there’s a case of mumps or chickenpox-what do you do?

Tracy: I say, “Great! Come on kids — let’s go get it”. Because children get childhood diseases for a reason. It’s to boost their immune system so that later on in life when they come into contact with those diseases, it doesn’t affect them so severely. And that is why they are called childhood diseases

So the homeopath is saying that children should be deliberately infected with the disease so their immune system will be able to resist it later.

If you’re going to deliberately infect a child with a disease, it seems to me that it might be a good idea to seek out a weak strain of the disease to infect them with. I mean, we know that some strains can be very virulent and others not so bad. If we want to expose the children for their later protection, I think we’d want to expose them to the least dangerous strain we could find. Of course we’d still worry that a child’s immune system wouldn’t be strong enough to fight off the weak strain of the virus, but — if the child couldn’t fight off the weak strain, he sure couldn’t fight off the stronger strains he might encounter in school.

In fact, while we’re at it, suppose we tried, not only to find a weak strain, but also to expose the child in such a way that disease will have a difficult time gaining a foothold, while the child’s immune system has the maximum chance of building a defense. Do you think that might be good? After all, even the homeopath acknowledges that the child might get very ill:

The only reason children get really, really ill and perhaps, you know, suffer serious side-effects are if: a) their immune system is not strong enough to fight off the virus, or b) they are being suppressed by drugs or in some other way.

And how would a loving parent know if the child’s immune system wasn’t strong enough to handle that case of measles at the school, except by exposing the child and seeing what happens? That doesn’t sound terribly safe.

Maybe we ought to have a way of exposing the child to a strain that we know to be weak, and in a fashion that we know will make it hard for the virus to get a foothold. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? That’s what all those allopaths ought to be working on!

It seems that LBC has circled the wagons around Jeni Barnett (*spit*). Dr. Goldacre reports that they have complained to him that people outraged by her and their behavior have been sending abusive emails to her. That’s pretty rich of them, considering that he also says of email complaining to him that “I do feel – like everything I’ve had from him – it was rather intemperate and unkindly written”.

I don’t approve of abusive emails, and it goes without saying that I did not email anyone about this. In this blog I called her a “radio creature”, an “ignorant moron”, and “arrogantly ignorant”, but that’s as far as I went. Considering what other people have called her, I think I have been quite temperate.

Now that I have cooled down a bit, I think I shall explain why I react so vehemently to her personally, and why I didn’t just respond to the issues as Dr. Goldacre requests.

I owe my life to modern medicine. I don’t mean that in a vague, hand-waving sort of way: “half of all children used to die before reaching adulthood, so in the absence of modern medicine there are even odds that I would have done the same.” No, I mean that I literally, personally, unquestionably, would be dead without modern medicine.

I am an asthmatic and in my first major attack came within a hairsbreadth of dying before getting hold of my inhaler (my face had turned a most disturbing shade of blue and there were increasing dark splotches in my vision). On several more occasions my inhaler kept me going long enough to go to the emergency room for more treatment. Finally, I suffered through half a dozen bouts of bronchitis, all of which required antibiotics to resolve but never quite reached the point of being life-threatening, and on two occasions I became desperately ill and without question would have died rather quickly without antibiotics.

Furthermore, I come from a medical family. I grew up around medical people; I went to school with doctors’ kids; some of my classmates grew up to be doctors. I know doctors, nurses, and other medical people personally. They are not the hated and despised “other” to me.

It offends me, at a level more deep than I can possibly express, to hear some creature like Jeni Barnett (*spit*) deliberately slander the entire medical community. She accuses them of willfully and knowingly injecting poisons into babies for absolutely no reason other than to make money; she implicitly denies that they have any interest whatever in seeing children survive (what does she care if one in fifteen dies? she isn’t the one in fifteen, after all — I guess she figures they are equally indifferent to human suffering); she claims that the only reason parents allow children to be immunized is because the parents are acting as mindless herd animals or are bullied by self-interested doctors.

You know what? She’s nothing but a bigot. She might as well be quoting from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I despise her. And if the poor widdle bigot is getting hateful emails, well, I don’t approve of the people who send them, but it’s hard for me to feel the slightest concern for her feelings.

When I was a child, I read everything I could get my hands on. I preferred science, science fiction, and fantasy, but if I couldn’t get them, I’d read whatever came to hand. So among other things, I read murder mysteries.

I didn’t enjoy murder mysteries and, since I was just a child, most of them simply puzzled me, as I had no idea why people would behave the way they did. But I tend to remember stories that puzzle me, and there is one murder mystery that has apparently stuck in the back of my mind all these years, to be brought to the forefront by the flap over Jeni Barnett (*spit*).

I do not remember the characters’ names, so let’s just say the murder victim was named Mary. The police were quite puzzled by her murder since there seemed to be no motive — she had no enemies. The break in the case came when a witness recalled seeing her talk to a stage actress, let’s call her Anne, backstage not long before the murder. The witness remembered this especially because Anne had had a very odd look on her face after the conversation. But Anne and Mary did not know each other, though Mary was a great fan of Anne.

Questioning of the witness revealed that Mary had been burbling on to Anne about what a great fan she was and how she had come to see her backstage the previous year, even though Mary had been developing rubella at the time. Further investigation revealed that Anne had been pregnant the previous year, had caught rubella, and as a result had lost the baby — it was still-born or miscarried, or perhaps born terribly damaged. The logical conclusions, which proved to be true, were that the odd look on Anne’s face was the result of her putting two and two together and realizing that Mary had killed the baby through her irresponsible behavior, and that Anne had murdered her in retaliation.

I will note that the police thought Anne was precisely correct — Mary had killed the baby — but they didn’t think Anne should exact her own vengeance. The police in the story knew what everybody used to know: rubella kills and maims babies if the mother catches it early in pregnancy.

I did not, of course, note the copyright of the book and wouldn’t remember it if I had, but I would lay odds that it was written in the mid 1960s, during or right after the rubella epidemic that killed an estimated 30,000 babies, and injured 20,000 more, in the United States, and that Anne’s motives were completely comprehensible to Americans at the time. They knew very well that rubella is not “harmless.”

You might wonder why this story came to my mind. Just this quote from Jeni Barnett (*spit*):

I was sitting next to Nick Owen on the settee at TV AM when his children were incubating rubella which is measles, and I was pregnant!

Given her age (she was born in 1949), I suppose that she had already had rubella and so was immune; thus her action in exposing herself to the disease while pregnant was not desperately irresponsible. Still, given her claims that these diseases are entirely harmless (unless you’re the one in fifteen who dies of them, in which case who cares about you?), it seemed like she was encouraging young women, women who hadn’t had rubella or been immunized, not to make any effort to avoid exposure to rubella during pregnancy. That strikes me as appallingly irresponsible.

If you casually google

“jeni barnett” mite

the very first result is HolfordWatch quoting … me.

Someone was looking very, very hard to come across my little blog.

In thinking about this, I thought of a couple of stories that the radio station, LBC Radio, should have thought about before launching their legal thuggery.

First, there is the story of Ray Bradbury and EC Comics. EC Comics adapted a couple of his stories into a comic. They were quite blatantly violating his copyright, but instead of hiring a pricey legal firm to threaten immediate legal action and ominously “reserve their rights against him,” he wrote them a very nice letter, complimented them on their work, and added that it seemed that they had inadvertently omitted to send him his royalty check. He knew, and they knew he knew, that they had not intended to pay a royalty, but it cost him nothing to be polite and give them a way to back down gracefully. They sent the check forthwith, but moreover they continued to adapt his stories, giving him some additional royalties and also exposure to an audience that might not otherwise have heard of him. It was a good relationship for both, which could never have come about if he’d charged in with all legal guns blazing.

Second, there is a story which I remember from history class but couldn’t find in a quick search online. Shortly before the American Revolution, the British Parliament declared, in several Acts, its right to impose on the colonies such laws and taxes as it should see fit, as it was the sovereign. I believe it was Benjamin Franklin, but I may misremember, who agreed that Parliament had the right and power to impose such laws, but sometimes it is wiser not to use your right and power. Parliament didn’t listen, and we know the result.

So, even though LBC Radio had the right and power to use their legal thuggery to force Ben Goldacre to remove the audio clip (which as I understand it really did violate their copyright), it would have been wiser not to. Had I been in their shoes, I would have sent him a polite letter or email, from a higher-up in the company, not a hired legal thug, to this effect:

We have seen your website and your comments on the recent broadcast by Jeni Barnett. We appreciate your concerns and will revisit our policies on such controversial issues. We understand your reasons for posting the entire 44 minute audio clip, since you wanted your readers to have the full flavour of her idiocy [okay, so maybe they wouldn't go that far], but our solicitors [or whatever the correct British term is in this case] tell us that you have posted more than is covered by fair use, so we must ask you to remove the clip. We welcome a debate on the issues raised, but in fairness to our investors, we must also protect our rights to our intellectual property.

Thank you for your interest in our programmes, and we hope for a fruitful exchange of ideas on this matter.

See how easy that is? If he doesn’t immediately take down the clip (but he would have, I have no doubt), then they can send in the thugs. But more likely, he will comply by taking down the clip, then post the letter or email, making the radio station look good and fair-minded. There might even be a real debate, in which people from the radio station could even participate, giving them favorable publicity instead of what they’ve got. And in the future, when he hears of one of their broadcasters being a moron, he might comment on it as a sad falling-away from their standards as opposed to just the sort of idiocy we expect as a matter of course from such slime as these.

It is sad that everyone’s first recourse these days is to threats and hostility, instead of the civil actions exemplified by Ray Bradbury. There is always the mailed fist inside the velvet glove, we know that, but it isn’t necessary to start smashing in the doors with the mailed fist as your first move. You could try a polite knock, first.

There is a storm in the science blogosphere about a dim but shrill anti-vax radio creature named Jeni Barnett (*spit*). She broadcast a thing on the radio (lacking a better term) containing a full set of standard anti-vax nonsense but with some idiocy all of her very own to boot. Links to the transcript (made by a small group of dedicated science bloggers) are at the link above.

Ben Goldacre, of Bad Science, wanted people to know exactly what she said, but was concerned that if he merely quoted her, he would be thought to be taking her words out of context and making her look bad. So he posted the entire audio. Her lawyers, understandably wanting to prevent anyone from processing the thing as a whole, and listening to each idiocy with care, threatened him. He took the audio down, of course, but the blogosphere has picked it up and spread it far and wide. Like the legal thuggery of Clifford Shoemaker (*spit*), this legal thuggery has had the effect of making people all over the world aware of what would otherwise have passed pretty much unnoticed. Certainly I would never had heard of it if not for the legal thuggery which was reported by Orac.

People with a lot more intestinal fortitude than me have posted extensively about this radio creature’s stupidity. But I will mention my favorite parts of the transcript:

Now back in the day (and that’s an expression I’ve learned from my [unclear] son), back in the day, children got measles, children got mumps. I’m not suggesting – I am not suggesting – that we got backwards where some children, where we have one in fifteen children die of it. And that one person in fifteen is the one we have to be looking at and wondering why and dealing with it.

…

Is there something wrong with having mumps, is there something – you know is it – most people aren’t that one in fifteen.

Well, duh (speaking at a radio creature level).

I mean, anybody who is in a position to listen to her isn’t that one in fifteen. Not only that, but we aren’t even descended from that one in fifteen. All of our ancestors managed to live past their childhoods, at least into very young adulthood, or they would not have had children and thus would not be our ancestors. Why should we care if one child in fifteen dies? They aren’t us after all. And I’m sure it’s a great consolation to their parents to be told that we don’t care if their children die, so why should they?

An actual practicing nurse, the sort who deals with dying children, called in. You can read the transcript of the conversation here. The radio creature calls Yasmin vicious, but I don’t see anyone being vicious in this segment but the creature herself. Yasmin says the broadcast is extremely irresponsible, which is true; that it is not based on any facts, which is true; that people like this radio creature are responsible for the on-going measles epidemic in England, which is true; and that there are children who can’t get immunized or whose immune systems are weak because of something like chemotherapy, who are at risk of dying of measles caught from unimmunized children around them, which is true. Her most cogent comment are these:

So you really need to think about what you’re doing here and why you’re doing it.

…

You should think about what you’re doing in this programme. You’re doing a lot of damage. A lot of damage.

Of course the response to the second comment was, “Well, maybe. I don’t think so.” Yeah, well, that’s because she’s an ignorant moron spouting assertions that she doesn’t understand and that she learned from other people just as ignorant.

I will add that this radio creature claims to be merely arrogantly ignorant instead of actively vile::

I am not a scientist, I would not claim to be a scientist. When tested on the contents of the MMR vaccine I told the truth. I did not have the facts to hand. Was I ill informed? Yes.As a responsible broadcaster I should have been better prepared as a parent, however, I can fight my corner. I don’t know everything that goes into cigarettes but I do know they are harmful.

As a professional should I have been better prepared – YES – but the discussion took off in a direction I hadn’t expected when I received a vicious phone call from a Nurse I was utterly thrown. I won’t get thrown again.