To finish up the year that was, we’re going to bring you the 14 most popular Mamamia posts of 2013. It’s like a countdown, an advent calendar of sorts, but one that gets your through the post-Christmas blur and into the new year. We’ve been lucky to have some truly wonderful writers join us to share their thoughts on Mamamia this year. This is the very, very best of what they had to offer. Enjoy.
From the Mamamia team:
The issue of vaccination is a major hot button right now – and shows no signs of being eradicated any time soon.
Not while people are continuing to expose others to misinformation -either deliberately or inadvertently.
Sugar-free author and blogger Sarah Wilson faced a tsunami of opposition last year when she went on Sunrise and made some wildly ill-informed and inaccurate comments about vaccination, claiming research about the safety and efficacy of vaccines was “not conclusive”.
She also claimed that “the gold standard studies, right, that are done to really absolutely conclusively prove things, the double-blind placebo cross something or other tests have not been done”.
Those two arguments are very familiar to those who campaign against the lies and fear-mongering of the anti vaccination lobby – they’re utterly false.
But clearly, the anti-vaxxers have been alarmingly effective in sewing seeds of doubt in certain pockets of the community. Particularly among those who are interested in alternative medicine, diets or lifestyles such as Sarah.