Anti-Vaccine Propaganda Lands in New York City
An excellent review by Orac of an insidious anti-vaccination propaganda film: scienceblogs.com
I’ve heard it said (actually, I’ve said it myself) that if you don’t have the science and evidence to back up your point of view, in order to persuade someone, make a movie. At least, this seems to be the philosophy of a number of cranks who have produced movies promoting pseudoscience over the last five years or so. The first one of these movies that really caught my attention was an anti-evolution, pro-“intelligent design” creationism documentary narrated by Ben Stein and released in 2008, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie was pure creationist propaganda, complete with Ben Stein visiting Auschwitz and Dachau, the better to try to link “Darwinism” to the Holocaust.
Movies promoting religious pseudoscience such as intelligent design creationism are not the only kinds of pseudoscience propaganda films that cranks make. Indeed, medicine is rife with them, and Wally Sampson has referred to this particularly pernicious genre of documentary as “medical propaganda films.” During the existence of this blog, we’ve reviewed a few such films (or at least written about what we could find out about them without paying for the DVD). For example, I’ve written about The Beautiful Truth, a paean to the Gerson protocol for cancer, complete with coffee enemas, and reviewed Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days, a film dedicated to the claim that you can cure almost everything (including not just type II but type I diabetes) with a raw vegan diet. There’s even a film out now praising Stanley Burzynski and his highly dubious “antineoplaston” therapy that I’ve been meaning to review. I finally found a free copy of it to watch, and perhaps I’ll get to it before the end of the month. The problem, of course, is the neuronal damage I’m likely to suffer by sitting in front of my computer and watching the film.
In the meantime, I couldn’t help but notice that another medical propaganda film is making the rounds. Indeed, the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism is promoting a screening of this film that’s scheduled for tomorrow in New York. This documentary, The Greater Good, has been making the rounds of various film festivals and as of today has made it to New York, where it is opening at the IFC Film Center on Sixth Avenue. Now, I could simply say here that all you need to know about this movie are that Joe Mercola has hosted the movie streaming on his website in “celebration” (if you can call it that) of what he and Barbara Loe Fisher dubbed “Vaccine Awareness Week” and that one of our favorite bands of anti-vaccine cranks, the Center for Personal Rights, sponsors of a pathetic failed anti-vaccine rally in Grant Park in Chicago in 2010, is sponsoring two screenings tomorrow, one at 4:10 PM and one at 8:05 PM. After the films, audiences will then be treated to a panel discussion by anti-vaccine luminaries such as Louise Kuo Habakus, Mary Holland, and Kim Mack Rosenberg and also “special guest” Emily Tarsell, the last of whom is billed as the mother of a girl who died from the Gardasil vaccine and also, not coincidentally, is the Director of Gardasil Network Development for the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC). I’m guessing there’ll be some really helpful medical information being passed around at these screenings.
Yes, that’s sarcasm. I realize it’s a bit obvious.
I’m going to tell you more, though, because I’ve actually managed to sit through the whole thing.