Outspoken entrepreneur Dick Smith is “horrified” that the website bearing his name is selling assorted anti-vaccine books.
Dick Smith Electronics — which Smith sold in 1980 — has been entirely online since 2016 and now operates as an online marketplace where third parties can stock their items, similar to Amazon. Titles including Vaccine-nation: Poisoning the Population One Shot At a Time, Anyone Who Tells You Vaccines Are Safe and Effective Is Lying and Raising a Vaccine Free Child, along with what appear to be many other pieces of vaccine-sceptical literature, are being sold by external companies such as bookseller The Nile.
Smith said the flurry of anti-vaccine literature available on the Dick Smith website was “horrifying”.
“I hope … they’ll do something to de-list it because that’s the last thing we want to be published,” he told Crikey.
There is a particular irony in anti-vaccine literature turning up on the Dick Smith website given Smith himself is a long-time campaigner against vaccine misinformation. Back in 2009, Smith funded ads in the nation’s newspapers urging parents to ignore campaigns by Australia’s longest-running anti-vaccine group the Australian Vaccination Network (since renamed the Australian Vaccination-risks Network).
“Misinformation about vaccines is an ongoing concern that I’ve known of for the last 20-30 years,” he said. “I’ve always campaigned against it”
He agreed that Dick Smith has a responsibility for its platform even if the store isn’t stocking the products.
We asked Dick Smith Electronics what kind of vetting the company does of the products it sells, what kind of material the company would refuse to sell, and whether it had any plan to de-list the anti-vaccine material currently on the website. The company did not respond to our questions before deadline.
