Vaccines and foetuses (23/7/2005)
One of the lies told by anti-vaccination liars is that the ingredients used in vaccines include parts of aborted foetuses. One of the materials used in the manufacture of rubella vaccines is a cell line derived from a legal abortion carried out in 1962. This is a tissue culture, very many generations removed from its source, and could only be considered aborted foetal tissue in the minds of people with, well, no minds at all. It is used to grow the organisms used to create the vaccine and is as much an ingredient of the vaccine as the acid used to prepare the sheet steel before pressing into body panels is a part of a car. None of these facts are of interest to anti-vaccination liars, of course, as their objective is to find anything which can possibly be used to frighten parents out of vaccinating their children.

In 2003 the anti-vaccination liars joined forces with the anti-abortionists to request a ruling from the Catholic Church about this use of the products of abortion, with the obvious expectation that they would receive an immediate knee-jerk condemnation of the practice and would therefore be able to threaten vaccinating parents with an eternity in Hell. What really happened was that the Church spent a long time considering the matter and talking to scientists and people who might know what they are talking about. The Pontifical Academy for Life has just released its findings. No, the Church does not like the use of anything to do with abortions and recommends that alternatives be sought, but that doesn't mean that Catholics can't vaccinate their children. This is how the ruling finished:

• To summarize, it must be confirmed that:
  • there is a grave responsibility to use alternative vaccines and to make a conscientious objection with regard to those which have moral problems;
  • as regards the vaccines without an alternative, the need to contest so that others may be prepared must be reaffirmed, as should be the lawfulness of using the former in the meantime insomuch as is necessary in order to avoid a serious risk not only for one's own children but also, and perhaps more specifically, for the health conditions of the population as a whole - especially for pregnant women;
  • the lawfulness of the use of these vaccines should not be misinterpreted as a declaration of the lawfulness of their production, marketing and use, but is to be understood as being a passive material cooperation and, in its mildest and remotest sense, also active, morally justified as an extrema ratio due to the necessity to provide for the good of one's children and of the people who come in contact with the children (pregnant women);
  • such cooperation occurs in a context of moral coercion of the conscience of parents, who are forced to choose to act against their conscience or otherwise, to put the health of their children and of the population as a whole at risk. This is an unjust alternative choice, which must be eliminated as soon as possible.

To summarise the summary, it says that while the Church does not like it, in the absence of any alternative it is permissible for Catholics to continue to vaccinate their children because of the overarching responsibility for the welfare of children. That is what the words "morally justified as an extrema ratio due to the necessity to provide for the good of one's children and of the people who come in contact with the children" mean. And are the anti-vaccination liars lying about this? Of course they are. That is what they do. The Australian Vaccination Network issued a media release with the deceptive title 'Vatican says, "Parents must oppose vaccines from human foetal remains"'. Other liar sites have similarly misrepresented the Church's ruling.

Yet another person wrote to me during the week trying to claim that the anti-vaccination liars are not opposed to vaccinations. That person was mistaken. There is nothing that is too evil for these people to do in the pursuit of their deranged objective of placing every child in the world at risk of death or serious injury. It is almost incomprehensible to sane people that anyone could hate children so much.

Where were you 40 years ago?

During July it was hard to miss the hype about the fortieth anniversary of the first moon landing.

In July 1969 I was in the army stationed at Holsworthy, west of Sydney, and on the day in question most of the battalion were somewhere else, with only a skeleton crew left behind. My job that day was to man the boom gate at the entrance to the camp in case the Viet Cong advanced down Heathcote Road. Suddenly the word went round the camp that we were all invited to the Sergeants' Mess to watch something on television. It had to be something very special, because there is strict segregation of social activities in the army and this was a building exclusively for the use of non-commissioned officers. We were a bit out of touch with world news at the time and I imagine that some of us would have secretly hoped that we were going to see the Prime Minister announce that the war and conscription were over and we could all go home.

What we saw instead was something so amazing that it I can't imagine how anybody could forget where they were when they saw it. We saw incredibly brave men do what no human had done before - stand on the surface of some place in the universe other than Earth.

But were we being told the truth? Was what we saw on television real? Was it just another clever piece of science fiction presented as truth by the media, like Orson Welles' famous 1938 radio play, The War of the Worlds? Could it have even been something more sinister - a government plot to deceive the Russians and to raise the spirits of the American population by letting them know that John Kennedy's 1962 promise to do the hard things had been fulfilled?

Almost as soon as those blurry images appeared on television there were those who claimed that the whole thing was a hoax, a conspiracy maintained until this very day to deceive everyone. It was a very good conspiracy, too, because it required the continued silence of approximately half a million people who worked on the Apollo project in some capacity. Presidents Nixon and Clinton must have wished that they had been as successful in keeping secrets, but as every conspiracy theorist knows there are some secrets protected by levels of security beyond even those available to the President of the United States.

The most commonly proposed location for filming the hoax television show is the famous Area 51 in Nevada. I have my own theory which involves large subterranean chambers carved as part of the Snowy Mountains Scheme, but discussion of that option can be left for another day. As I am drinking coffee from an Area 51 mug even as I type I will stick with the conventional theory.

So what arguments have been offered to counteract the hoax theory? Let's look at three anomalies pointed out by the moon landing skeptics and see what the scientists have to say.

The first one is the waving flag. Everyone knows that there is no air on the moon, so what makes the flag flap after it is positioned? The flapping must have been caused by a breeze, so the flag planting must have happened on Earth. Well, say the scientists, with no air to damp the inertia of the flag material it would keep moving for a while even in a vacuum.

The next two have to do with photography, and both are illustrated by the famous photograph of a suited Neil Armstrong taken by Buzz Aldrin. Where are the stars in the dark sky behind Armstrong? If they are in space there should be stars. Scientists offer some weak explanation about exposure times and taking photographs in bright light. Then there's how Armstrong's suit is brightly lit but there is no shadow of the photographer. The scientists ramble on about "infill" and something about how the surface of the moon is so reflective that you can read by the reflected light 350,000 kilometres away.

In the latest attempt to refute the skeptics, NASA has released some photographs allegedly taken from something called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and supposedly showing the remains of the Apollo lunar lander on the Moon, plus some photographs of footprints.

The immediate reaction of the "skeptical" community was to point out the capabilities of the software program PhotoShop, but this is a case where the skeptics are definitely wrong. I have it on good authority that budget cuts at NASA have rendered PhotoShop too expensive, so these pictures were made using Corel PaintShop Pro. You can trust me on this because I read it on the Internet. And I have this Area 51 coffee mug ...

Good work, Buzz! (14/9/2002)
Almost everybody who has ever owned a car has had that sinking feeling of hitting the starter and having the thing fail to start. Just yesterday I was on my way to buy petrol because the tank was low when I was stopped on a steep hill by a red light. I immediately found out how low the tank was because the engine cut out and wouldn't start again - the steep slope had taken the remaining fuel to the back of the tank and the pickup was breathing air. This was a minor inconvenience as I was only a couple of hundred metres from a service station where I could get a can of petrol to get the thing started again. Imagine, however, how it would feel to know that if your engine stopped and you couldn't start it again you would certainly die, even though millions of people knew exactly where you were, you were in constant radio contact with friends, and there was no immediate threat to your life. The only resources to sustain your life were what you were carrying yourself, there was no possibility of getting any more food or water, nobody could get to you to help, and all this was happening on television. This was the situation facing the men who walked on the moon, and the bravery of these men is almost beyond the imagination of the rest of us, particularly the courage of the first, who could look to no precedent of anyone having done it and survived.

Contrasted to these heroes is a group of idiots who claim that nobody has ever gone to the moon. On September 9, 2002, one of these clowns, Bart Sibrel, accosted Buzz Aldrin and demanded that Aldrin swear on a Bible that he had really been to the moon. Buzz decided that an appropriate response to some lunatic coming up to him in the street and calling him a liar was to settle things quickly because there was nothing to discuss, so he punched Sibrel's lights out and then went on his way. Sibrel (who is 37) is now whining to anyone who might care that a 72 year old man beat him up. Fortunately, nobody is caring. I usually don't condone violence as a means of settling arguments, but in this case I will make an exception. I didn't think I could have a higher opinion of Buzz Aldrin but now I have. He should be congratulated.