Saturday, August 18, 2012

Facebook and the anti-AVN

A few days ago I was looking at my facebook page when I noticed an ad in the right-hand sidebar for a Facebook entity called 'Stop the Australian (Anti)Vaccination Network, a site apparently set up to oppose the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN). (All links are below this post.)

Now I've never actually browsed the AVN (Australian Vaccination Network) page before today, or had any interactions there beyond once 'liking' a post another of my friends had liked (from memory it was something innocuous like a call for better information on adverse reactions, or something like that). I'm not an AVN robot. I've simply been through something that exposes possible holes in our government/corporate chain of statements about autism (what it is, what may cause it and what may help).

Indeed the first time I'd ever looked at an AVN video was when I navigated to Stop the A/AVN! My response to that video was that the woman speaking sounded quite fair and reasonable.

Stupidly, I began to talk on the Stop the A/AVN page about my girl's nightmare, her chelation, the astonishing results (a swallowing turnaround in 2 days; a lopsidedness turnaround in 2 weeks; myriad other turnarounds). I say 'stupidly' because it resulted in a mostly unpleasant discussion and at one point I was effectively called 'friggin' dumb'. One of my comments (questioning whether the page was a Big Pharma troll site) was reported to Facebook, and the entire discussion was swiftly removed.

What I didn't realise is that I'd joined an ongoing war. I was just saying what happened, sharing information I thought others might find interesting. I can't help feeling my discussion was removed from the Stop the A/AVN site because it made sense!

Here is the AVN's Facebook page:

Australian Vaccination Network


Here are a few of the Facebook pages linked to on Stop the A/AVN that run the same or similar campaigns:

Informed Parents of Vaccinated Children

The Real Australian Vaccination Network

Stop the Australian (Anti)Vaccination Network

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