All medications have side-effects.

It is a sad and sorry thing that a prescribed drug cannot always descend straight onto its targeted ailment and quickly destroy it. But medicine is imperfect, less like a helicopter and more like a wide-belly cargo plane landing at night. It might wiggle and veer. A wise patient might want to read reliable government reports on an airline’s safety record before booking the flight, if they’re available, or even exist.

The Gardasil vaccine story reported Thursday by David Bruser and Jesse McLean of the Toronto Star was about information, and access to it. It was not about the drug itself — it is safe and effective — but about parents and girls not always being told what they need to know in order to make informed decisions, and being dismissed by doctors when they became terribly ill.

Many hundreds of thousands of teenage girls in Canada have been safely given the three-dose vaccine but since 2008 at least 60 have suffered convulsions or disabling pain afterwards. It’s not clear why but it is worth noting and investigating, as the story said repeatedly. Their suffering matters. These girls are worth listening to.

But some people are saying the Star shouldn’t have run the story because it might help the anti-vaxxer cause. This overreaction is a sign of our agitated times, proof that people will react to a phrase or a sentence rather than reading an extended list of facts. On Twitter, I and others warn people not to retweet something without reading it first in its entirety. Do they do this? No, they do not. I have to leave Twitter. I will.

Tweeters complained about things the Star story did not say. They said it was overblown — what’s the pain of a few teenage girls? — and ill-timed in the midst of news about a measles epidemic caused by panicky anti-vaxxers, mostly in the U.S., who say the MMR vaccine causes autism, which it doesn’t.

It’s like saying we shouldn’t report close calls in the air because most planes land safely.

The Star can’t censor itself to suit an alarmist news agenda. To do so would be to assume its readers are stupid, and that is how journalism self-harms. We live in a country of silence and official secrecy, where institutions from governments to medical colleges are obliged to reveal almost nothing about spending, competence and safety. Information, invariably extracted slowly with tongs, is always good.

On Thursday, Public Health Ontario revealed that the fifth person in Toronto to come down with measles was fully vaccinated. Vaccines don’t always work. I am on my third whooping cough vaccine and know to my cost that whooping cough is a terrible illness in adults. It can kill infants. The flu vaccine this year didn’t work according to plan as viruses mutated, and there is the puzzling fact that the vaccines seem to have made some people more vulnerable in subsequent years. The human papilloma virus, against which Gardasil protects, also mutates.

Vaccines are not perfect. They wane. Their effects may vary.

But it is troubling that stories about the anti-vaxxer panic also have a social element, meaning that there is rage about some wealthy clueless Californian parents obsessed with hygiene. It’s appropriate to be angry about parents who refuse to have their children vaccinated but as the anger spreads online, the anger itself mutates.

For instance, a Queen’s University instructor (with an MA in “Social Factors Which Influence Canadian Women’s Participation in the Shot Put” of all things) is spreading anti-vaxxer opinions in a first-year bird course. Does this matter? It has enraged people and rightly angered students, but it’s part of another story, the one about academic decline.

But it’s part of the news stream now, which is always binary. You’re either for vaccinations or against them, never mind the grey areas. This is Tea Party thinking, to react with alarm rather than reason. It has brought us mandatory sentencing, anti-choice clinics that lure young pregnant women, climate-change deniers and men’s rights. It is a fact-free zone, and when it intersects with Canadian life, it makes it much more difficult to make rational decisions.

And the vaccine debate is one we shouldn’t even be having. The loony American right’s obsession with non-science, in the face of all the facts, should not spill over into Canada.

I cannot take Twitter to the Supreme Court of Canada for a humane ruling, more’s the pity. Twitter and aggregator sites are how libel and damaging rumour spread. Here’s a tip: don’t read a website run by a rural doctor whose slogan is “wielding the lasso of truth.” Don’t read media rivals sniping at each other, it’s bald men fighting over a comb.

The news that Twitter has signed a deal so that tweets will now show up in Google search results means that Twitter’s short info and opinion skims will now make good information even less reachable on Google. Twitter, where every minute is a new adventure in truthiness, is water that boils the smart and the lunatic in the same pot.

I’m reading doctor and science writer Ben Goldacre’s new book, I Think You’ll Find It’s a Bit More Complicated Than That, about the widespread misunderstanding of research and results. For a year now, I’ve been trying to teach myself about statistics and science so as to find a way through the fog.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

It’s quite dull to explain so I’ll turn to the latest thrill. This North Carolina senator says restaurant workers shouldn’t have to wash their hands after going to the bathroom, it’s infringing. Cue a new anti-washer movement. Let loose the hounds of E. coli.

Read more about: