Fraser Health officials say they’re taking no action after a website with a similar address to the health authority’s began redirecting traffic to an anti-vaccination site.
Unlike Fraser Health website fraserhealth.ca, the domain fraserhealth.com is owned by Surrey resident Jessie Bains, who set it to redirect to the site vactruth.com.
It warns parents that vaccines contain “toxic chemicals and dangerous biological agents” – claims broadly rejected by public health authorities.
“I don’t like vaccinations myself and that’s all I can say,” Bains said when asked about his motivation. “I think people should have the choice.”
He declined further comment.
Vactruth.com is run by Fort Collins, Colorado father Jeffry John Aufderheide, who claims his son is “vaccine-injured” with severe developmental delays.
Aufderheide said he had no knowledge of the fraserhealth.com redirect.
“What we do is encourage parents to look at the vaccine ingredients, what’s being injected into their children, to look at the adverse reactions that can come from vaccines,” he said.
Fraser Health medical health officer Dr. Michelle Murti said the health authority had not had any complaints about the .com web address and said she believes most people find the correct .ca site through web searches.
Fraser officials have warned in the past that anti-vaccination sentiment can reduce the immunity of the population in some areas and increase the risk of disease spread.
That’s believed to have been a factor in the recent measles outbreak of seven confirmed cases.
“We had a cluster of measles in Fraser East that was largely in a community that does not believe in vaccination,” Murti said, referring to the Abbotsford-Chilliwack area.
“Fortunately the illness that we’ve seen there has been mostly contained to that community and we have not seen it spread to surrounding areas.”
Murti called the Fraser region’s vaccination rate “quite high” with 80 per cent or more of children in school in most of the region having all required immunizations.
“There are some areas that can improve,” she said. “Our concern is providing people with good validated information.”
Fraser Health officials say Bains has not attempted to sell the domain to the health authority.
They said the domain has redirected to various other websites in the past, sometimes linking to the NDP’s website.
