Calgary Skeptic’s Society Blog

I understand - and laud - the news media’s desire for ‘fair and balanced’ reporting, presenting both sides of an issue. However, sometimes there really is only one valid side to present, and when the media has to reach into the fringe to present a ‘second side’ a great disservice to the public can be the result.

Case in point: I’m already displeased with the media for blowing the H1N1 influenza pandemic out of proportion. While almost all cases of influenza are currently due to the H1N1 strain, worldwide the number of deaths for which this strain is responsible for is around 5,000. This is of course, not a good number and steps need to be taken to protect the public. But why is the focus almost completely on H1N1 when historically endemic flu results in the deaths of 250,000-500,000 every year? Every year the seasonal flu is nearly ignored, but the current state of the H1N1 pandemic is front-and-center every evening on the news, it seems. It is difficult for the public to at all get a sense of scale when the reporting itself is out of proportion to reality.

But that’s being relatively pedantic compared to what occurred on CTV Calgary News the other evening (October 26) in which a half-hour special in which ‘the facts’ about H1N1 influenza vaccination were purported to be presented H1N1 – The Facts. Imagine my surprise (about midway through H1N1 – The Facts Part II video) when appearing next to Glen Armstrong (head of the Department of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Calgary) was Linda Miller, a – wait for it! – a homeopath!

Let me be perfectly clear about where the medical and scientific community stands: homeopathy is pseudoscience. There is no other way in which to put it. Any sugar coating would diminish this fact. Homeopathy is not based on any valid science, and whenever science has been applied to the claims of homeopathy, none have demonstrated any validity whatsoever. I was simply stunned that in the interests of ‘fair and balanced’ reporting CTV Calgary News invited a homeopath to sit beside an infectious disease researcher as if her opinion could possibly be of the same. What possible ‘facts’ could a homeopath, already demonstrating a lack of critical thinking skills and credulity by accepting a belief based on pseudoscience, bring to the table? What could the producers at CTV Calgary News have possibly been thinking?

On the one hand, I was gratified that in their zeal to ‘present the other side’ it was necessary for CTV Calgary News to reach across the rationality spectrum way into the woo fringe to find Miller. Why not a crystal healer while we’re at it? Yeesh. But I also realize that the lay public will simply not see it that way. What they see is a homeopath being given equal standing with someone who is intimately knowledgeable with pathogens and active in the scientific research community. To a public for which woo is not necessarily seen as being woo, this situation can only be construed as ‘double-plus ungood’.

We know from literally dozens of studies that vaccines are safe (and certainly far safer than the diseases they are designed to protect the individual from) and are effective, the H1N1 vaccine currently being distributed no exception¹. In countries where immunization for a particular disease decreases, rates of incidence increase and decrease when immunization goes up. As if we needed reminders of this, fear of immunization in Britain (mainly due to the phantom MMR vaccine-autism scare) has directly resulted in a recent resurgence of measles, a disease which was under control only a few years ago. A resurgence of polio has also recently occurred in some African countries when people there stopped immunizing their children because of a fictitious rumor that the US was attempting to infect them with AIDS via vaccines.

Contrast this with Miller’s suggestion that we should be using ‘nosodes’ instead of vaccines. A ‘nosode’ is a homeopathic remedy prepared from pathological tissue or directly from the pathogen with the philosophy (totally unsupported) that a little bit of a bad thing is actually good for you.

No study on the efficacy of ‘nosodes’ that Miller suggested using in place of vaccines has ever been performed. Not one study. My first question to Miller would be, “How do you know ‘nosodes’ even work?” I suspect the answer would involve anecdotes, but we all know that the plural of ‘anecdote’ is most certainly not ‘data’. Or we should. So we might want to answer this question before anyone advocates their use, particularly if it is being presented as a viable substitute for immunization.

There was one thing this homeopath was correct about. There are no preservatives, etc. in ‘nosodes’. In fact, there is nothing contained within any homeopathic remedy which can be demonstrated to be anything other than water! They are prepared using successive dilutions and ‘potentized’ at each step (read: ‘abracadabra’) to the point where it would require a container larger than the Earth to find one biologically-active molecule. There is absolutely no measureable biochemical activity in homeopathic preparations, which means it can have no effect (aside from possibly producing a thirst-quenching effect) on the person receiving it. Advocating the use of ‘nosodes’ is in effect advocating the public to be completely unprotected from the H1N1 virus, which is utterly irresponsible from a public health perspective. Shame on Miller!

To place a homeopath beside an infectious disease expert is neither fair nor balanced reporting. The consensus of the medical community with regard to the efficacy and safety of vaccines is based on years of carefully controlled and monitored testing at various levels, from the Petri dish to clinical trials. It is a robust and rigorous system that has evolved over time to become exceedingly good at weeding out unsafe medications. What CTV Calgary News has done is to further erode the public’s trust in a system designed with its safety and health - and only its safety and health! - in mind by suggesting that there is some controversy, some valid dissenting opinion which claims that vaccines aren’t safe. But there is no controversy other than the one which CTV Calgary News manufactured, and new seeds of doubt have been planted in people’s minds already biased towards anti-intellectualism and uncertain about safety and efficacy issues of the H1N1 vaccine.

Don’t get me wrong - doubt is good. But not for the wrong reasons!

What CTV News has done by giving a homeopath equal time with Glen Armstrong, someone who spends his entire career studying pathogens in the laboratory, is elevate a fringe opinion to the same level as that of evidence-based medicine. This is not balanced reporting. In fact, this is completely <em>lopsided</em> reporting. All CTV Calgary News has done is muddy waters which were already turbid rather than accomplish the stated goal of clearing up questions which the public has about the H1N1 vaccine. I fail utterly to see the point of having anyone other than a medical expert appear and be interviewed to answer questions the public has about the H1N1 vaccine. The medical community is of a consensus that immunization is the most important weapon in our in fighting influenza.

I am deeply disappointed.

1. Foxhall K. New NIH Studies Support Effectiveness for Single-Dose H1N1 Vaccine. MedScape online. http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/708794?src=rss. Retrieved Oct. 18, 2009