Controversy surrounds vaccine forum set to take place Tuesday

You don’t often find flag-waving parents loudly voicing their support for vaccinations, but with 93 per cent of B.C.’s children complying with the recommended schedule, they are clearly a silent majority, until you ask for their opinion.

The vaccination debate is once again front and centre as SFU Harbour Centre gets ready to host a forum on Tuesday organized by the Vaccine Resistance Movement.

The group opposes vaccines and claims it causes autism…despite the fact that research has been retracted and declared a fraud.

So when members of the medical community heard about the event, they sent a letter to SFU, asking it to stop the event from taking place on university grounds.

“We were really worried that by giving space to this group, they were lending tacit approval to their message,” said Ethan Clow with the Centre for Inquiry. “When scientifically speaking, their claims have been widely debunked and it’s not a controversy anymore. 99.9 per cent of scientists agree that vaccines are needed, there are major health benefits, and there is no controversy about vaccine damage.”

The president of SFU has stated it is an issue of freedom of expression and is allowing the conference to go ahead.

But even the organizer agrees it’s tough to separate the two issues, and the controversy has actually been a huge boon to his cause.

“I think the line has been blurred here,” said Joel Lord with the Vaccine Resistance Movement. “I think this has escalated into something larger than I anticipated, but we’re really coasting on the momentum of this.”

And experts say that is unfortunate because documented side effects are extremely rare and there is irrefutable evidence vaccines work, saving millions of lives.

“We’ve had an outbreak of measles in Quebec last year with over 700 cases,” said Monika Knaus with the BC Centre for Disease Control Immunization Program. “We experienced a similar type of outbreak the year before. I think that it’s important for those types of events to occur almost periodically because it reminds people vaccine preventable diseases have not been eliminated. If you stop vaccinating, we’re going to have a return to the pre-vaccine era.”

The conference organizer says there will be police present on Tuesday because they are expecting a raucous evening, with proponents from both sides of the debate.