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Anus Maximus Award 1999Comment and Opinion

Shaken Babies or Vaccine Damage?

That was Dr Scheibner's original site at Nexus magazine, but the pages have been removed following a reorganisation. She now has three sites at:

This site won the Anus Maximus Award for 1999. The citation read:

This page belongs to Principal Research Scientist (retired) Dr Viera Scheibner PhD. When I tell people about this site, they don't believe me and have to go and see for themselves that someone is actually claiming that brain damage, dislocated retinas, bruising and other damage observed in some young children is caused by vaccination, with almost no possibility that it might be the result of abuse. I don't know what she says about the broken bones, cigarette burns and genital injuries that some of these children exhibit, but I have no doubt she could link these to vaccines as well. It was bad enough when this evil woman just increased the distress of parents mourning the loss of children through SIDS by lying about its cause, but the venality of whoring as an expert witness for the defence of child abusers indicates a hatred of children that can only be a mystery to those of us who are sane.

See what someone else had to say about Dr Scheibner here.

But wait, there's more ... (1/12/2000)
I awarded the 1999 Anus Maximus prize to not-a-medical-Dr Viera Scheibner for her claim that shaken baby syndrome was really caused by vaccination. You would think (and hope) that there wasn't room on this earth for another person so mad and evil, but I have found another one. It seems that this is the latest piece of folklore being peddled by the child killers. Why do these people hate children so much? Sane people want to know.

The two sites mentioned above are included in the site of Nexus Magazine. The editor of Nexus was not pleased, and wrote to me:

Subject: Are you serious?
Date sent: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 21:22:08 +1100
From: nexusmagazine

"Shaken Babies or Vaccine Damage?


The above snippet was taken from your website. I noticed considerable venom in your tone - you obviously feel strongly.

Assuming you have any integrity whatsoever, I challenge you to read the articles published by Viera. She draws only upon peer reviewed literature (something you people are incapable of it seems).

I think once you actually do some research into this subject you will find yourself eating your words.

But then, judging from the lack of any research on the rest of your site, I am sure you do not really give a stuff about abused kids at all. Otherwise you would check what you publish.

I am sure you fascists really get your jollies off by ridiculing what other people in this free, democratic society choose to believe, but the topic of babies dying from vaccine reactions is going to make you eat your words one day.

Are you aware that formaldehyde, mercury, aluminium, and other solvents are injected along with the vaccines? I bet not!

Tell you what Einstein, phone the Poisons Information Centre (want the phone number?) and ask them what is the minimum safe amount of formaldehyde to inject into babies. Or ditto for mercury, aluminium hydroxide etc.

Oh, don't take my word for it - check with the doctors administering vaccines, and ask them what adjuvant is in their batch.

Your arrogance, and ignorance is only going to help kill more kids, and jail more innocent parents. That's right - YOU are the scumbags this time.

Prove me wrong. Just look into it and try to prove me wrong.

Heck, you may even bother to read Viera's books or articles - but I think you would find the language and terminology way above your comprehension. Try reading them and see, her articles are at my website, for free.

Isn't it ironic how much you have now become the same as those you seek to ridicule.

I await a reply from someone with a braincell capable of reading Viera's article.


Duncan M. Roads
Editor, NEXUS Magazine
PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia


Someone else who was not pleased:

Date sent: Fri, 06 Jul 2001 15:03:23 -0600
From: Scott Hunter
Subject: Scheibner

Are you guys for real? This woman is trying to save countless children from the stupefying medicine of corporate America. Come talk to someone who's felt the pain of vaccine damage first hand and felt the unbelievable audacity of the pharmaceuticals salespeople in physician's clothing...are you truly that daft?

Pomposity is something you obviously know too well...stop taking up space on the web.

In 1997, Viera Scheibner was awarded the Bent Spoon Award by the Australian Skeptics. The announcement of the award and something I wrote at the time appear below.


The 1997 winner of the Australian Skeptics Bent Spoon Award, presented annually to the Australian "perpetrator of the most preposterous piece of pseudoscientific piffle", was announced at the 1997 national convention in Newcastle. The unanimous choice of the judges was Dr Viera Scheibner for her high profile anti-immunisation campaign which, by promoting new age and conspiracy mythology and by owing little to scientific methodologies or research, poses a serious threat to the health of Australian children.

The Bent Spoon AwardI usually take my scepticism with a light-hearted attitude. Most of the irrational beliefs around do no harm in themselves, although acceptance of too many weird ideas can sabotage clear thinking.

I make an exception in the case of medical fraud, and I take particular exception in the case of the anti-vaccinationists. If someone were to suggest that the appropriate response to a child asking "where do I come from" was to provide sex education in the form of immediate penetrative incest with the child there would be community outrage and lynch mobs in the streets, but we are polite to people who claim, from some apparent authority, that it is alright to kill and maim children because of some loony ideology.

Awards like the Bent Spoon or the Ig Nobels are an excellent way of pricking the balloons of pomposity which surround much paranormal, unscientific and ratbag ideas, but some matters are just too serious for parody or satire. Very few people would see the joke if the nazis were awarded a prize for population control, and I feel the same about the award to this lying child-abuser.

While I was writing my book about the Internet, I had to research pornography and other "offensive" things because it was obvious that I would be asked about this in most, if not all, promotional interviews. Nothing I found then saddened, upset or angered me as much as a web site devoted to Scheibner and the Vaccination Awareness Network, where, in perfectly rational and calm language, parents were advised to kill their children with measles and cripple them with polio. It was the closest I have ever come to being converted to the cause of censorship.

As you can see, the lies of the anti-vaccination campaigners have concerned me for some time. The Vaccination Awareness network has since changed its name to the Australian Vaccination Network. I can only assume that this change to a more neutral name was made to deceive people into thinking that the organisation was about vaccination, not about preventing children from getting it. It was this change of name and the resurrection of their web site which triggered the creation of The Millenium Project.

Continuing the tradition of awarding the Bent Spoon to people with no concern for the lives of others, the 2000 award went to the ghastly Jasmuheen.

Apology to the world (2/12/2006)



It's become an industry (22/8/2009)
Once upon a time the horror of not-a-medical-Dr Viera Scheibner's anti-vaccination campaign against the health of children was confined to the pages of kookery magazines like Nexus, where her association with UFO nuts, hollow Earth believers and assorted conspiracy theorists provided a context which allowed thinking people to evaluate her ideas. Now I find that she has not one but three web sites promoting her insane ideas about vaccination, each a little bit different to the others. Why she needs three is a mystery as most people manage to get by with one and just own different domain names to protect themselves against imposters. I am reminded of that old army marching song which contained the lines "Second verse, same as the first. A little bit louder and a little bit worse".

  • A link check at the start of 2019 showed that all of these sites have disappeared.
    The world's childfren are now much safer.

Anti-vaxxer misrepresents the truth. So what's new? (14/11/2009)
I was wrong about something! There, I've said it. Her Majesty told me that there was a letter by not-a-medical-Dr Viera Scheibner in the local paper and I said that there would be five lies in it. I was very wrong, because there were more than five. For those who might not have met Dr Scheibner, she is not a medical doctor although people reading a letter from her in the paper might come to this misapprehension when she uses the honorific "Dr" while commenting on medical matters. Her doctorate is in micropaleontology, and while tiny fossils are very interesting things, knowledge of them doesn't qualify someone to claim that vaccines cause SIDS or Shaken Baby Syndrome. Dr Scheibner was the very first winner of a Millenium Anus Maximus Award, and you can see some more about her here.

Scheibner in the paper   Scheibner in the paper

I need to assemble some facts before I write to the paper in response, so I have sent the following email to the editor of Australian Doctor. With luck, I will have an update to this story next week.

In a letter to my local paper anti-vaccination campaigner not-a-medical-Dr Viera Scheibner made the following claim:

"An online poll on Australian Doctor website (September 4, 2009) disclosed that 46 percent of GPs will not take the swine flu vaccine themselves, 25 percent were unsure and only 29 percent agreed to get it, the reasons given being prior exposure to the virus, concerns about side effects, and the use of multi-dose vials".

I'm preparing a response to the letter and I would like to confirm what not-a-medical-Dr Scheibner said. There are several other "inaccuracies" in the letter and I would like to establish whether her reporting of the Australian Doctor poll is more accurate that some of her citings that I have seen in the past.

Thank you.

That terrible swine flu vaccine (21/11/2009)
This is my full response to Dr Viera Scheibner's letter to my local paper, as mentioned last week. It will be sent off shortly with a covering letter giving some of the background of my long battle with the anti-vaccinators. I suspect that it will be too long for the letters page, but maybe I will get a feature article. I can only hope.

Worrying issues
Swine flu vaccine in hands of GPs (7.10.09).

An online poll on Australian Doctor web-site (September 4. 1009:1) disclosed that 46 per cent of GPs will not take the swine flu vaccine themselves, 25 per cent were unsure and only 29 per cent agreed to get it, the reasons given being prior exposure to the virus, concerns about side effects, and the use of multidose vials.

There are about 24,000 general practitioners in Australia. At the time the poll results were published in Australian Doctor there had been 222 responses to the online poll (the number increased slightly before voting was stopped). There was no way of restricting the poll so that only doctors voted and I can think of several ways that people could vote more than once (this wouldn't matter as much if there had been thousands of votes). Here is the poll as it appeared:

Australian Doctor poll

Respondents were not asked to give their reasons for how they voted, and the reasons suggested by Dr Scheibner appeared elsewhere in the Australian Doctor article and did not relate to this poll.

The results mirror polls of UK GPs which found as many as 60 per cent would refuse to be vaccinated, with some feeling that the vaccine trials had been rushed.

Apart from anti-vaccination web sites, the only references to polling GPs in the UK I could find were to a poll in Pulse magazine which suggested 49% of GPs might not get vaccinated (I have no way of establishing the validity of the poll) and a poll in GP Magazine in which 29% of respondents said they would definitely opt out. I'm not sure how you can honestly use the expression "as many as 60 percent" when referring to either 49% or 29%. Also, the wide range of results would cause a statistician to be quite suspicious of the findings.

The vaccine should just stay in GPs hands and not end up being injected in their patients, while the GPs would not get it themselves. Indeed, GPs should advise their patients not to get it;

Come on Dr Scheibner, why don't you just come right out and say that the vaccine should not be used in any circumstances?

the US swine flu vaccination debacle in 1976 resulted in a great number of deaths and Guillain-Barre ascending paralysis and other serious reactions, and cost the US Government some six billion dollars in compensation.

It is 33 years since 1976 and the vaccine proposed in 2009 is nothing like the one used back then. There were twenty-five deaths from Guillain-Barre in 1976 attributed to the vaccine. The rate of occurrence of GBS was about 1 in 100,000 people vaccinated and the vaccination program was stopped as soon as the problem was identified. I have no idea where Dr Scheibner got the figure of "some six billion dollars" from but I suspect that its source is, like much of the information coming from anti-vaccination campaigners, either myth or thin air.

The biggest medical insurance company in Ireland advised doctors not to administer the swine flu vaccine with so many unanswered question marks about its lack of safety and ineffectiveness.

I can find no reference on the web to any Irish insurance company giving any such advice. In fact, the only references I could find relating to swine flu and Ireland showed overwhelming support for vaccination. Perhaps Dr Scheibner should provide actual names of companies when she is making such claims.

The disease (whatever it is) is mild and eminently treatable with sufficiently large doses of sodium ascorbate and the benefit of acquiring natural immunity.

The disease is a form of influenza caused by a new strain of the H1N1 virus. There you are Dr Scheibner, now you know what it is. I am sure that the relatives and friends of the several thousand people who have been killed by it would dispute the claim that it is "mild". The idea that it can be treated with Vitamin C is absurd and irresponsible.

Tamiflu and other antivirals even according to their product information (MIMS Annual) carry the risk of many serious side effects, including death.

I don't know why Dr Scheibner feels the need to mention Tamiflu here as it is an antiviral treatment for the flu, not a vaccine. In fact, vaccination will reduce the need for medications such as Tamiflu.

But let's look at some facts about Tamiflu. I'm not about to pay $330 for a look at MIMS, so I found a place that uses MIMS data as a source. The web site lists the following side effects of Tamiflu:

Common side effects are those that occur in more than 1% of patients given Tamiflu. These include:
Abdominal pain
Upper respiratory tract infections
Uncommon side effects of Tamiflu:
Side effects that occur in less than 1% of patients given Tamiflu are considered rare. Patients do not necessarily experience any of these side effects, so do not become alarmed by this list:
Allergic reactions
Neuropsychiatric symptoms, mainly occurring in children (e.g. abnormal behaviour, hallucinations, delirium)
Raised liver enzymes
Aggravation of asthma
Swollen lymph nodes (lymphadenopathy)
Tympanic membrane (eardrum) disorders
Bleeding of the gastrointestinal tract
Very rare side effects associated with Tamiflu use include:
Stevens-Johnson syndrome
Erythema multiforme
Toxic epidermal necrolysis

Pretty scary, but remember that anything reported during clinical trials can be listed as a possible adverse reaction. What is missing from the list is death. Another source of data is the documentation filed with the Therapeutic Goods Administration by the manufacturer Roche which describes the clinical testing and after market surveillance of Tamiflu. Again, no deaths are reported.

I realise that there was an attempt once by Australian anti-vaccination campaigners to have all deaths in Australia notified as possible adverse vaccine reactions if the person dying had ever been vaccinated for anything at any time in the past. Thankfully, this idiocy was ignored by the authorities, but perhaps the suggestion that deaths can be attributed to Tamiflu is a subtle way of reviving the campaign.

I refer the BM Gazette's readers to a great number of Rapid Responses in British Medical Journal (; 339: b2879 October 16, 2009 is a good start) on the many worrying issues surrounding the swine flu vaccination project.

Dr Scheibner is somewhat notorious for the quality of her citations and references, and this is no exception. Firstly, the referenced paper was in the BMJ on July 15, not October 16. Its title was "GPs will lead UK's swine flu vaccination campaign" (which is strange if "as many as 60 percent" reject it, but I will let that one pass). There were four Rapid Responses, which is hardly a "great number", and of those, two were not about the vaccine but were about the use of ibuprofen to treat fever. Of the other two, one said very little and the other came from someone who runs an anti-vaccination web site that still perpetuates the lie that vaccines cause autism (and offers cures for autism, of course). These are hardly a "good start" and the only "worrying issues" addressed are those spouted by innumerable anti-vaccination campaigners and web sites.

Dr Viera Scheibner PhD

It is not the usual etiquette to put "Dr" in front of a name and "PhD" behind. The convention is to use the form "Dr Scheibner" when introducing someone or referring to them (as I have throughout this piece) and "Viera Scheibner PhD" in a signature or when the actual qualifications are relevant (as in formal publications). In our society, "Dr" in front of a name in print is assumed to mean medical doctor. Dr Scheibner has a PhD in micropaleontology, and while she might know a lot about very small fossils this does not qualify her to give medical advice.

So what has Viera got to hide? (10/4/2010)
Principal Research Scientist (retired) Dr Viera Scheibner PhD, well known to and highly respected by the anti-vaccination liar community, has several web sites which she uses to peddle her variety of child-damaging misinformation. When I did a recent link check my checking program reported that her sites were returning a "Not authorised" response. I had a look and found that you now have to register to get in to see the idiocy. Well, of course I immediately registered, and got this email message in return:

Hello Peter Bowditch,

Thank you for registering at Your account is created and must be activated before you can use it. To activate the account click on the following link or copy-paste it in your browser: activation=~~~~~~~~~~~~~


username - ratbagsdotcom
password - ~~~~~~~~~~~

Imagine my surprise when I tried to access the site a few days after successfully activating my logon and got this:


It looks like the powerful juju of my name has struck again. I wonder what is on the site that she doesn't want me to see. Surely if she believes what is there she can't have any problem with a potential critic looking at it. There is also the question of why registration should be needed for a site like hers anyway. If she had a private members' area where anti-vaccination liars could lie to each other that might make some sense, but the entire site? I can't imagine being so paranoid that I wanted to vet everybody who came to my site and only let my friends in.

I am set straight (1/5/2010)
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that shortly after I had been granted password access to the web sites of noted anti-vaccination campaigner Dr Viera Scheibner I was denied access to the sites with an error that indicated that my user ID and password were invalid. Someone has now told me that nobody can get to the sites. I don't really care if I can't get in if it means that nobody else can read the lies there either. Wins all round.

From: "Paolo Just"
Subject: You and Anti Vaccers
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2010 09:39:58 +1000

You act?

Pardon? If you mean "am I a professional actor?" then the answer is "yes", although I don't see what that has to do with anything.

You have some IT knowledge and some other credentials which are at the very least suspect, yet you seem to know everything about health vaccinations and why you can't access a website.

In what way are my credentials suspect?

You think because you get a 404 message you have been banned, with that sort of paranoia it is a wonder you manage to get through life at all.

Actually, I got a 403 error (access refused because of authentication failure) not 404 (page not found). There is a difference.

If you just did a simple check on Viera Schiebners website you would see that all 3 sites are down, why?

Who knows? Who cares? Perhaps there really is a God.

Simple, the servers that these sites are on are down, and have been down for as far as I am aware a very long time.

They were working on April 4. The fact that they are down now is encouraging, because while these sites are unreachable (for any reason) there is less possibility that parents might see them and be deceived into avoiding vaccination for their children. Put another way, while these sites are off the air children are safer.

I can't even access the site and get the same message as you, so get your facts right before you post your uneducated rubbish.

Paolo Just

Anti-vaxxers on the TV (11/6/2011)

The Parsnips!reason I'm a bit late getting this week's update out is that I had to wait for the Sunday night showing of the program 60 Minutes on my local television. I had been engaged in conversation with some of the people involved in making the show and I knew it was not going to be very favourable to anti-vaccination liars. Until I watched it I didn't know how unfavourable it was going to be, but I have to say I heartily enjoyed it. Two of my favourite people, David and Toni McCaffrey, were on it, but the real jewel was two other people I have had dealings with in the past - Viera Scheibner and Bronwyn Hancock. Watch for Dr Scheibner's melt-down and the way she turns on poor Ms Hancock. I almost felt sorry for the target. Almost, but then I remembered that Bronwyn Hancock has said that it is impossible to harm a child by shaking it so all cases of SBS are vaccine damage.

Enjoy! And see if you can work out why the word "parsnips" became an integral part of the Twitter discussion which followed the show.

(The video was removed from YouTube following a spurious copyright claim from some using an obviously false name. The same "person" also made a claim against a second video on the same day. Not only was the name obviously false, but the liar claimed to be acting on behalf of two different TV networks. Attempts to sort this out with YouTube simply resulted in a warning that the next copyright "violation" would see my account deleted.)

Suck on this, YouTube and the anonymous and gutless "Gold tv Dr. Hans-peter Steinrück".

Perhaps these people really are mad (25/6/2011)
One of the lies told by anti-vaccination liars is that they are not opposed to vaccination and real medicine, but they just want everyone to be properly informed. We know this is a lie because they continually do and say things that reveal their true agenda and prejudices.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned Dr Viera Scheibner, doyen of Australian anti-vaccination researchers. Dr Scheibner holds a PhD in micropaleontology so the "Dr" in front of her name has nothing to do with medicine (or even anything human), but it is always included to add credibility to her utterances on medical matters. She achieved a certain amount of transient fame for the bizarre meltdown she had on television when her views were challenged. The meltdown included a savage and unprovoked attack on her best friend who was left dazed and wondering what she had done wrong.

Dr Scheibner has several web sites which each take a slightly different approach to lying about vaccines and health, and one of them is currently displaying the survey at left. As you can see this is a balanced poll attempting to obtain scientific data about people's use of and attitude to real medicine.

This is just the sort of thing that gets me going when I hear some supporter of quackery start on about "complementary medicine". I've been told that nobody uses the expression "alternative medicine" any more because it is really "complementary". No, it is not. When you see things like the "survey" over there or hear people ranting on about "Big Pharma" and the "needless deaths in hospitals" and how real medicine is the leading cause of death you know that they have no intention of complementing or working with real doctors and manufacturers of real medicines. They lie. They want us to return to the days before medicine, back to the time when the leading cause of death in women was childbirth, when a large proportion of children never reached puberty because they died before that of now-preventable diseases, when surgery was performed by the local barber, and when witchcraft was the only treatment for disease. I would say a pox on them, but the most appropriate pox would be smallpox and real medicine has removed that scourge from the world. Real medicine, done by real scientists, not magic spells cast by any alternative.

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