I tried one of these "Angela Wrangle" journalist pieces for this week's Newsjack. Obviously it didn't get in, but it was something new for me and I enjoyed doing a different type of thing even if you don't like reading it. I'd appreciate your views though. Cheers.
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ANGELA WRANGLE:
So, the doctor who made those claims about MMR (I can't be bothered to check his name but let the sub-editors earn their corn) has been given a ticking off by the General Medical Council for acting unethically. Well, if the MMR vaccine didn't cause children to be born with no head (or whatever it is that autism is), what did? Measles infections might have sky-rocketed since the MMR scare, but measles has never killed anyone has it? Has it? I shudder to think what a local outbreak might do to house prices but other than that where's the harm in getting a bit spotty and avoiding sunlight? I should know - having a teenage daughter who has now apparently gone "goth" - and if she can get by then the weasely-measly can as well.
No, the biggest concern for me about Measles, Mumps and Rubella is this Rubella business at the business end. We used to call it German Measles back when we were proud to call ourselves Great Britain, so by rights it should be the MMGM vaccine. But it seems that the reward for actually winning the war against Nazis was to agree never to offend the Germans ever again, and the consequence of that is a scare about MMR that was entirely avoidable. Hitler's probably laughing from his grave.
Still, no wonder we're so confused when these so-called experts can't make up their minds. One minute it's white wine that's good, the next minute it's red, and before you know it I've got a white wine stain on my ethnic African rug from ethnic Africa that I've just made worse with half a glass of pinot noir.
The anti-homeopathy bandwagon is just as bad. Did you see them taking overdoses in branches of Boots this week, to "prove" that homeopathic cures don't work? Of course they didn't work – these protesters weren't even ill in the first place! I'm no scientist, but I was brought up on a healthy diet of common sense. Yet these so-called people go on and on about the placebo effect when they haven't had a hit in years and the only one I can even remember is Nancy Boy (which isn't me having a go at gays before the PC brigade jump on my back again).
Of course it's easy to blame the boffins on both sides of the argument, but the real culprits are the media who report all this mumbo jumbo, by which I mean the BBC, or as I call them the B-B-C where the B and the B stand for what they usually do and the C stands for cancer - which we'll probably all end up with if the scaremongers don't stop.
Our so-called Government doesn't help. Now they've come up with a "strategy" – A.K.A all sorts of nanny state interventions - to halve the number of smokers by 2020. Correct me if I'm wrong but if smoking really is as bad for you as they say, isn't the number of smokers going to be halved or quartered or something by 2020 anyway?
Oh – I need a fag! And I'm not talking about gays again! When will people just look at my opinions and agree?
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