THEY’RE facing an opponent dosed up on state funding, but Freo’s anti-vaccinators have shown they’ve still got a pulse.

Two giant posters put up in South Fremantle by the Immunisation Alliance WA were vandalised last week, with supporters of the Australian Vaccination Network scrawling its web address across them.

The AVN is the hub of the anti-vaccination movement in Australia. It’s currently embroiled in a legal battle with the New South Wales government which has ordered it to change its name to reflect its anti-vaccination stance or face deregistration.

None of its local members would go on the record, citing concerns about being bullied if they expressed their views.

There’s an irony in that, as the creator of the I Immunise campaign, Coolbellup‘s Katie Attwell, says it was grief from her “alternative” friends over her decision to vaccinate her son Chas that led her to come up with the idea. It gained momentum when she wrote a Thinking Allowed for the Herald in 2011, bluntly chiding her peers for dismissing “herd immunity”.

“What I don’t understand, is how opposition to vaccination seems to be packaged as part of an alternative lifestyle,” she wrote back then.

It gave her an idea for a campaign targeting that demographic, and with Freo’s immunisation rates falling to the eighth lowest in the country the state government was keen to invest in her idea. The campaign was launched three weeks ago.

Pharmaceutical company Sanofi was also interested in helping out, funding an Immunisation Alliance research project into marketing its message.

Dr Atwell is now employed part-time to run the campaign.

The billboards feature locals boasting of their cloth nappies, homebirths—and immunisation.

Ms Atwell says she hasn’t noticed any converts within her circle of friends yet, but says supporters have become more empowered about speaking out, which is an important step.

“And the graffiti only shows why it was needed,” she says.

“They were threatened and tried to shut it down.”

The vandalism actually presents Dr Atwell with a bit of an moral dilemma.

“I don’t necessarily disagree with political graffiti, but I do hope it can be cleaned off, as they were very expensive and we wanted to cover them and store them to bring out later.”

The AVN website dismisses herd immunity on the basis that people given a live virus vaccine can be infectious for up to 90 days afterwards. The medical community acknowledges this is theoretically possible, but says vaccines are developed to minimise this possibility, and it’s extremely rare.

The AVN also claims there are natural alternatives for preventing and treating infectious diseases which are unapproved but have “stood the test of time”.

But Dr Attwell disputes this, particularly in relation to homoeopathy which is regularly used by people opposed to vaccines.

by STEVE GRANT