Focus: Syndey – Tilting at the immunisation windmill

Until recently the anti-immunisation lobby in Australia has received only a fraction of the media coverage of those promoting vaccines. Most of this coverage has been concentrated in two sylvan rural regions where accusations of medicopharmaceutical conspiracies find fertile ground among enclaves of people with alternative life styles.

Last year, however, the anti-immunisation cause received a huge boost when a prestigious national TV science programme, the ABC's Quantum, broadcast two programmes that framed immunisation as a controversy with the proverbial two sides. The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health published a special supplement attacking the programmes' claims. Nevertheless, …