Ben Goldacre is being sued…again

Ben Goldacre is being sued. . .again – This time it revolves around anti-vaccinationist nonsense. Goldacre posted a clip of a radio program where UK anti-vaccinationist Jeni Barnett spouted out a whole lot of stupid, so now she wants her own words silenced before her reputation is destroyed. And so the suit seems to revolve around Goldacre’s supposed unauthorized use of copyrighted material. Oddly, nobody seems to mind terribly that millions and millions of ordinary joes on the internet do this all the time. No, only when someone wishes to bully a critic with unnecessary litigation.

But of course now we live in the internet age and so now that so much attention has been put on it, you can find the clip all over the place, such as here and on YouTube beginning here thanks to Rachel Dunlop. Enjoy. And please save a copy of the clip because it’ll probably go down again. If enough people copy the audio file, every time it goes down, more will spring up like the heads of a hydra. You can also find the full transcript here. Here’s an example of one of her little gems of insight:

I want to know from some kind of expert what measles is and what is in the vaccine, and why people have a reaction to it, and really my question is: what is wrong with childhood illnesses? Is it – to hark back to the first hour – because we don’t have parents at home looking after the children? What’s going on? Is there something wrong with having mumps…

So let’s be perfectly clear as we analyze what she said here. She doesn’t know what measles is, or what’s in the vaccine, or what’s wrong with childhood illnesses, or what’s the problem with mumps… but she goes on the radio railing against vaccination?

Then she actually suggests that flu vaccines are supposed to prevent the common cold. This perhaps more than anything else illustrates her utter ignorance of that which she is talking about.

And she’s still yammering on about this BS on her blog, as Orac reports, while still admitting herself that she has no scientific or medical training and thus doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

Of course this comes after a new report shows that measles cases rose 36% in 2008 over the previous year, from 990 to 1348. And of course despite Jeni Barnett’s claims that measles are perfectly safe, it can lead to pneumonia and encephalitis.