It turns out that there are 2 new medical journal articles about antivaccination web sites. I wrote about one before. The other is in a BMJ journal and has an abstract here.

Both of the articles complain about the availability of so-called antivaccination web sites which present information that differs from what is presented by the official medical authorities. But ironically, neither article is freely available on the web! I think that if these folks want to compete with the medical info that is on the web, then they should put their papers freely on the web also.

At least the BMJ paper disclosed its list of 100 antivaccination web sites. (The JAMA article did not.) Both lists are here. Of the 100 sites, several are duplicated and about 20 are dead or have moved. Others are really just single essays that can be found elsewhere. I tried to fix most of the broken links.

The BMJ paper complains that the first 10 hits on Google for "vaccination" are all antivaccination web sites. But that's not true. Not any more, anyway. The first Google link is to this directory listing of 23 web sites with a balanced set of opinions. Furthermore, many of the antivaccination web sites are really not opposed to vaccination but merely provide information and advocate an informed choice.

It is amusing how the medical establishment has a low tolerance for criticism. Medical criticism does not just come from fringe web sites. Just in the last week, the NY Times called the 30-year AMA attack on the Dr. Atkins diet a big fat lie and called a popular knee surgery a sham. Most alternative medicine web sites do not even use such strong language.