Jeni Barnett On LBC 97.3FM UK Radio – Vs John From Epsom

From about twelve minutes in to about nineteen minutes in of the interview previously blogged about – a transcript:

JB: You just heard from Tracey, four kids, became a homeopath on the back of thinking of whether she should have her first child immunised.

And this is on the back of us being the ‘Dirty Land’, really. We are the dirty land of Europe; a new study has documented that we are now up there with the best of the them, with more cases of measles than we should have. They wanted to banish measles from Europe by 2010.

“There are many other ways of doing it, rather than jabbing people! And I am a responsible parent!” This is from Kay (that was the mail address) – “my son was fully immunised with MMR; I did not let my younger daughter have the MMR booster. They have been fine until this summer.

My fully immunised son got the mumps, mildly and everyone thought that my daughter would get it worse – guess what, she didn’t get a single symptom! Interesting – that the doctors did not know what to do with the mumps, it had been so long since they’d seen it – they had to look up in their computers or in the manuals to answer my questions about incubation or staying out of circulation.”

Now, you heard what our young homeopath said – you’ve always got to hear two sides, you’ve got to make an informed decision – your children will not be the same as anybody else’s children. But I can remember my brother getting mumps and him getting swollen glands and him being given jelly and ice-cream and I can remember running around and NOT getting mumps! And I can remember my mother saying ‘we’ve got to be careful, because he’s a boy and you know what happens with mumps …’ – I didn’t know what happened with mumps, who knew? Something to do with the testicular region, well, I didn’t know.

But the fact is that the more we sanitise society and the more we become absolutely – what’s the word – hypocritical about stuff – you cannot support letting our children run riot and not converse with each other and not play and all the other stuff that we’re doing… and then get up in high dudgeon when we don’t put drugs into their body!

Stick the kids out running in air, ban cars on the road, make them have six hours a day PE at school give them an hour every single day where they’re running around playing rounders and walls and not just – a few! My daughter’s beautiful boy Nathan, he’s a footballer and he gets an infection and he falls over – he gets better, because he’s always running and jumping and doing star-jumps or whatever you do!

We have to look at the source of this, and it’s not good for you – you listened to that clip from Nick Ferrari’s program – if you scare-monger, people don’t know how to make clear decisions about some things.

Do you want your kids to have an inoculation or don’t you? Don’t make people feel guilty if you make the decision that they don’t want to have drugs put into them; when I was out in American, eighteen months ago, the only cases of polio that were coming across were the ones where the children had the polio vaccine. And most doctors who were out in the States were not letting their children have it! What does that say to you?

It’s empirical! Empirical wisdom! Experience! [Phone number] How do you make decisions on behalf of your children?

John in Epsom – talk to me.

John: Afternoon Jenny. I’m not a medical expert, but I listen to the radio and I listen to LBC – I listen to your competitors quite a lot. Every single medical expert that you’ve ever had on LBC, always said MMRs are a good thing and all the evidence against them have been refuted.

JB: …yeah.

John: So?

JB: Does that make it right??

John: Well, yeah! I pretty much think it does, actually! Yeah!

JB: How come?

John: Well, you sound like… when you say ‘My four kids, this ladies’ four kids’ – you sound like one of those people who say ‘My Aunty Flo lived to be a hundred and ten and she smoked a hundred cigarettes a day’! There’s always going to be someone, but in general…

JB: Uh, but wasn’t Aunty Flo ALLOWED to do that?

John: She was, but would she have done it and would you have let her do it, and would the world been happy for her to do it, if we knew now…

JB: What we knew then?

John: What we know now?

JB: But that’s precisely why I didn’t want my kids and my granddaughter and I don’t know what Zowie’s choice is going to be, but that’s precisely because we do know what we know now, that I don’t want to go anywhere near drugs! I’m sixty in eight months time and people ask if I’ll go on HRT – no! Do I want plastic surgery? No! But the media and the drug companies would like to make me unusual!

John: Do you not feel that all this information that’s out there, it is being weighted in a certain direction…

JB: Yeah, to frighten us!

John: No, not to frighten us – look there’s this fellow who was on James O’Brian’s program this week, who’s written a book called ‘BAD SCIENCE’…

JB: Right.

John: …and he went on about all the things – like, your previous lady was a homeopath, and with all due respect, the guy talking about BAD SCIENCE was talking about all kinds of things that people regard as remedies, and this guy who is a doctor was laughing at the, um…

JB: [interrupts] Listen, let me put this to you…

John: …the lack of evidence…

JB: John, let me put this to you – there’s a good point and I take your point. But let me put this to you – my nan, if you had an ear infection, would have put salt in a sock, heated it up, somehow (she didn’t have a microwave), put it behind your ear and good golly, Miss Molly, that ear infection would slow down in some way.

Now, there’s not a lot of science in it, but it blooming well worked!

John: You don’t know that there’s a lot of science in it Jeni?

JB: No, but what I’m saying is that

John: It might be down to heat on the back of the ear…

JB: … of course it is! But you said it yourself, John, scientific evidence and the media, we all weigh things in a particular way, so that we come up with the answer that we want to come up with – if you are funding a vaccine as a drug company, you are going to want to frighten people into having to take it! Because somebody wants to make the money out of it! And it’s all about – it’s all about economics.

And I’m delighted that you listen to LBC, it’s wonderful, because it means that you are listening to both sides.

‘Bad Science’? Absolutely! And you know, Darwin was born a hundred years ago this week and there’s a lot of people who thought Darwin had it wrong.

Things change, John!

Amanda’s in Hayward’s Heath, talk to me, Amanda….

Tagged as: Bad Science, immunisation scares, Jeni Barnett, LBC, LBC 97.3FM, MMR, myths, scandal, Talk Show, transcript, vaccination, vaccines