WARNING: This article refers to dangerous misinformation.

It’s 6 o’clock on a wintry Melbourne evening and I’ve just received the venue address for a “secret screening” of the anti-vaccination film Vaxxed. I walk into a long, narrow room in Hawthorn Arts Centre with a table of books at the back. One children’s book, Melanie’s Marvelous Measles, tells of a girl who isn’t vaccinated but avoids the disease because she eats lots of raw food and boosts her immune system with positive thoughts.

I don’t have kids, and I’m here purely out of curiosity. In the morning’s press, a doctor described it as one of the most dangerous films he’d ever come across. In the month that followed, health ministers would slam it in the media, one of the film’s producers would be banned from the country, and a complementary medicine GP who attended this screening would be under investigation for helping anti-jab parents avoid vaccinations. How could a 90-minute movie be such a threat to public health?

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on 2 September 2017 as League of vaccinations.