Recently, as a result of Katie Couric's irresponsible report on concern about HPV vaccinations, there have been a number of diaries in which commenters have raised concerns about the safety of vaccinations. Unfortunately, a few of those commenters have cited John Scudamore's site whale.to (deliberate decision on my part not to make it a link) as evidence for their concerns.
The problem is that whale.to is simply a compendium of wild conspiracy theories. It is no more credible a source than, say, Alex Jones's Prison Planet. Orac from Respectful Insolence wrote a great post describing how far removed from reality Scudamore's site is (just one example: it cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, not in the context of showing it as an example of a classic piece of propaganda, but as reality).
Some people here have concerns about vaccine safety. Some people here don't think every decision President Obama made was the right one. One can have reasonable debates about those topics. But a debate ceases to be reasonable when some of the debaters start questioning whether Obama meets the "natural-born citizen" requirement of the Constitution and start citing conspiracy-theory sites. And the same thing applies to vaccine-safety debates. Certain assertions simply aren't up for debate anymore than "birther" or "truther' claims are.
There's an Internet principle known as Scopie's Law that says that any argument that cites whale.to is presumptively invalid (it's similar to Poe's law, which says that any parody of fundamentalist doctrine is indistinguishable from the real thing). It's well-accepted. If some assertion on whale.to just so happens to be true, you will also find support for it on other, more credible sites, and you can cite those instead of whale.to (analogy: it's conceivable, but not very likely, that Paul Cameron could one day come up with a valid assertion about gay men. However, his track record is so awful (among other things, he originated the claim that we stuff live gerbils up our rectums for sexual pleasure) that nobody in their right minds would even consider accepting it unless some completely independent source was able to report it and properly cite it).
Finally, let me address one concern that perennially pops up in vaccine debates the way that Communist Party of the USA candidate Gus Hall used to pop up in Presidential elections when I was a kid (I'm showing my age here), namely that "Big Pharma" and/or the "medical establishment" claim that vaccines have absolutely zero risk. That claim is simply false. If an executive with a pharmaceutical company were to assert that there were absolutely no risks associated with that company's vaccines, the FDA would impose a substantial fine on that company, and the SEC would insist that the company's Annual Report would include mention of a "charge" to cover the costs of the fine. In fact, if you've gotten a vaccine, or your child has gotten one, you will have been presented with a legally-required statement detailing the potential risks that have been identified, or even merely claimed, associated with that vaccine.
An extremely common anti-vax trope is the mother who never received such a statement before her kid was vaccinated. Somehow, that story never includes the outcome of her filing a complaint with either the FDA or her state's medical board, even though failure to provide such a statement is a slam-dunk violation of several laws and regulations.
In short, we've got anti-CT rules here for a good reason. If you want to stay within them, don't cite whale.to and don't bring up straw-man arguments.
