Anti-vaccination books are being sold on Amazon and the websites of Waterstones and Foyles, amid calls for warnings on items to combat the spread of misinformation.
Top-selling books on Amazon include Anyone Who Tells You Vaccines Are Safe and Effective Is Lying, and Vaccine-nation: Poisoning The Population, One Shot At A Time.
Shadow health minister Alex Norris told Sky News: “Getting our population vaccinated is a massive priority and it is very sad to see these things so freely available.
“We would hope that retailers would act responsibly and have a look at whether they want to be associated with such products and whether they want to be seen to be profiting off such products”.
Anti-vaccine books also regularly appear in the top 10 bestsellers in the children’s vaccination category on Amazon.
One recent screenshot taken by Sky News shows the contentious books making up half of the top 10 bestsellers in the Children’s Vaccination & Immunisation category.
One of the most popular books in that genre is Anyone Who Tells You Vaccines Are Safe and Effective Is Lying, which is also available on Foyles’ website.
The author of that book, Vernon Coleman, stridently denies that he is anti-vaccine or that he publishes any medical misinformation, and claims he is publishing truths that are being suppressed.
Amazon and Foyles do not provide any annotations to suggest Mr Coleman’s book contains disputed claims.
This lack of a “health warning” is something Mr Norris has called for.
“I don’t think it would be a solution to burn the books or throw them all away because actually I think the mystique would grow in that. But instead, we’d really welcome a sense of proportionate health warnings as we’ve started to see emerge online.”
Amazon also sells his anti-vaccine book Vaccine-nation: Poisoning the Population, One Shot at A Time – a top seller in the children’s category.
COVID conspiracy books are also being sold.
In response to our findings, Waterstones and Foyles said selling a book does not mean the company approves of its content, while Amazon said it encourages customers to read official sources of information and will remove any products that breach its guidelines.
Source: Sky News