A billboard promoting education before vaccination, posted alongside an Auckland motorway is set to be taken down just one day after it was erected because numerous people complained about it. The billboard shows a man holding a baby and the question: “If you knew the ingredients in a vaccine, would you RISK it?” ¹ (A fair question.)

It was put up on October 1st by the Warnings About Vaccine Expectations (WAVES NZ) organization for Vaccine Injury Awareness Month.

(There have been anti-vaccine billboards in Perth as well. See video below.)

Advertising Standards Authority chief executive Hilary Souter said they had received “a significant number of complaints”²about the billboard so it would be removed by Tuesday afternoon, which Immunisation Advisory Centre research director Dr Helen Petousis-Harris was happy about. She called the billboard “misleading” because it perpetuates the “myth” that people don’t know what’s in vaccines, something that it has the potential to “hugely” impact public health.³

She went on to “clarify” that when “people talk about chemicals in vaccines, these are chemicals present in the environment that we come into contact with daily, and that we are born within our bodies.”⁴ She further claimed that the minuscule amounts of those chemicals in vaccines pose no risk whatsoever to humans. A categorically false statement. And one clearly not backed by science. Or by the thousands of people currently seeking recompense in vaccine court. Or by the children who were irrevocably damaged or died after receiving a vaccine. 

WAVES NZ spokesperson Truly Godfrey said they had received a total of 151 complaints but that:

“Despite the removal of the billboard, we will be defending the complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority, because we believe that broad reading, including medication datasheets and the ingredients of every drug, or vaccine, should be the very basis of informed consent in any medical procedure.”⁵

He also said, “In the wake of the tragic deaths of two babies in Samoa and the revelations that no safety reports have been provided since 1986 in the United State... we are asking … [would