Another win for science.
Fran Sheffield is an Australian homeopath known for holding a series of controversial, sometimes dangerous views.
She’s claimed that homeopathy is better than chemotherapy at treating cancer. She’s claimed that homeopathy can cure autism. She’s created a Change.org petition calling on the World Health Organisation to treat the Ebola epidemic with — you guessed it — homeopathy.
And she’s promoted and sold “homeoprophylaxis,” so-called natural “vaccines” that she claims can prevent whooping cough, despite any convincing scientific evidence to that effect.
Ms Sheffield has written online that the whooping cough vaccine is “unreliable at best” and “largely ineffective”; As Lateline reports, she also previously claimed on her business website that homeopathic immunisation is effective against polio, meningococcal, cholera and other serious diseases.
But now, in a win for science and common sense, Sheffield and her company Homeopathy Plus! have been banned from advertising their all-natural “vaccines” for whooping cough.
Fairfax Media reports that the Tuggerah, NSW woman has been banned from selling the questionable products for five years, and that she and her business have been fined $138,000.
Ms Sheffield will also be forced to pay the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s costs from the case.
Justice Melissa Perry of the Federal Court said Ms Sheffield’s deceptive claims had “the potential to divert consumers from immunising themselves and those in their care, with potential risks to their health and to the broader community”.