PhD Thesis - ResearchSpace@Auckland - The University of Auckland

wish to immunise on these grounds. Nevertheless, the Department needed to maintain
public confidence in immunisation in order to keep up immunity levels within the
community. The Health Department consistently responded to attempts by the BUAV
to undermine its position, by demonstrating to parents the inaccuracies in the
organisation’s statements, and by reassuring them constantly in various ways that
immunisation was safe.
Future events at the BUAV favoured the Health Department however. The head
office of the organisation was in London, and it was likely that its policy directives
were sent from there to all branches, including those overseas, such as Auckland and
Wellington. The BUAV had had a strong anti-immunisation focus when Dr Walter
Hadwen was President until his death in 1932. Successive presidents, although
concerned about immunisation, shifted the focus of the organisation more towards
anti-vivisection. In 1946 the National Health Service Act was passed in Britain which
amongst other things repealed the practice of compulsory vaccination in Britain which
the BUAV had long campaigned for. In addition, in 1947, the BUAV and other anti-
vivisection groups in Britain lost their charitable status, which meant they were now
subject to tax and had much less revenue with which to promote their cause. 139
By the late 1940s anti-vivisection became the main focus of the BUAV rather than
anti-immunisation as had been the case in the past. It is likely that the repeal of
mandatory immunisation and loss of revenue led head office to the conclusion that
anti-immunisation was not the priority it had been and hence other issues took its
place. This change in emphasis for the organisation was passed on to the branches,
both in Britain and overseas. As a consequence, by 1955, the BUAV had dropped out
of the anti-immunisation scene in New Zealand to concentrate on anti-vivisection.
The space left by the BUAV in opposing the Health Department on immunisation
issues was not filled for another 30 years, until the 1980s with the advent of another
opposition group. 140
139 E. Hopley, Campaigning against Cruelty. The hundred year history of the British Union for the
Abolition of Vivisection, London, 1998, p.56.
140 See Chapter 9 for a full discussion, pp.279-82.
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