There is a huge "discussion" taking place at the moment over at
The Skeptics' Book of Pooh-Pooh, official blog of Dr Rachael Dunlop.
Last week, Dr Rachie announced news that a free Australian magazine, The Child, had refused to accept advertising from The Australian Vaccination Network (
AVN, AKA "Anti-Vaccination network). At the time we had to take Dr Rachie's word for this as it was not public knowledge.
That changed however when Meryl Dorey confirmed the situation on the AVN''s blog. Meryl has asked AVN supporters to email the magazine and express their concerns about the advertising decision. And supporters, it appears,
are doing that in droves with many of their emails republished on the AVN site.
Science-minded people should consider
emailing the magazine and offering support and congratulations.
On the Skeptics' Book blog, AVN supporters demand repeatedly that there are two sides to the vaccination issue and that the AVN is a reliable source of information for people who don't blindly accept the mainstream view. Dorey, we are supposed to accept, is just telling it like it is based on years of investigation and research into the matter.
Dorey readily admits to having no qualifications beyond her own self-education, so how well does she read information and statisitcs and is she a reliable source of advice?
Here's the opening from one of her
blog posts, with Meryl's summary of comments by Paul Offit [my bolding]..
If anyone thinks after reading this that Paul Offit isn’t pushing an evil policy, re-read the last paragraph in this piece – “Offit suggests one way to raise vaccination rates is to make it harder for people not to get themselves or their children vaccinated. This could mean, for example, attending educational classes that teach the public what the safety profiles of different vaccines are, before they are allowed to opt out of vaccination. “You have to convince people that a choice not to get a vaccine is not a risk-free choice; it’s just a choice to take a different risk.” ”
What he is talking about is re-education – the same re-education that was described in the excellent novella – the Children’s Story (by the same person who wrote Shogun – James Clavell). He is describing a process whereby the government takes what they consider to be wrong-thinking people and forces them to change their thinking by re-educating them along government lines. This was done in China, in the Soviet Union’s Gulag and in many other places in just about every Communist or fascist regime. Brainwashing is another name for this tactic and it is insidious. Considering its use in a democratic, informed nation is no more than a pathetic attempt to take back the power over our health and lives that Western medicine sees slipping away.
What Offit is clearly calling for is information about risks to be put into perspective and for people to be made to understand that not vaccinating their children is not a risk-free alternative to vaccinating.
Indeed, what Offit was explicitly recommending is exactly what the AVN claim to want - to
give parents both sides of the story on vaccination. Tell parents the risks of vaccination, and no one denies that vaccination does carry risk, but also tell them about the risks of not vaccinating. How is that a communist or facist conspiracy? But then, it often seems everything is a conspiracy in the AVN's world.
If that's a bit subtle for you, then here's a couple of
comments from that same blog article. The first is from a supporter (
I assume),
"ann", and the reply by "
shotinfo", is from Meryl [my bolding again]...
ann says:
March 24, 2010 at 2:00 pm
I would really like to know how Dr. Offit explains the mumps outbreak going on right now in New York in New Jersey, where AN AVERAGE 88 PERCENT OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE MUMPS HAVE BEEN FULLY VACCINATED and in some cases with the children, 93 percent have been fully vaccinated (those figures come straight from the CDC,which is considering thinking about adding another booster to the series.) For all the possible dangers of the MMR, it’s pretty obvious it doesn’t work!!
shotinfo says:
March 24, 2010 at 3:13 pm
You make an excellent point! With any other form of treatment, failure of the therapy in 88% of those who received it would lead to its withdrawal. Such a spectacular failure of a vaccine however simply leads to calls for more vaccinations. There is no logic or science in this – simply a need to protect profits.
Of course Ann never said that 88% of vaccinated people got mumps. To clarify, here's that brief discussion in simple paraphrased English:
Ann: 88% of people with mumps were vaccinated.
Meryl: 88% of vaccinated people got mumps.
See what she did there? This is a complete mangling of the statistic mentioned by Ann (
a statistic that tells us little of use anyway in isolation). To illustrate Mery's "logic", let's look at the following argument:
1: 100% of Labradors are dogs
2: 100% of dogs are therefore Labradors.
It's syllogism. It's an absolute failure to comprehend what's written resulting in a conclusion that bears no resemblance to reality. In academic circles, from primary school onward, it would be stamped "FAIL".
Has she been doing this with statistics all throughout her self-education on the evils of vaccination?
Of course all of this nit-picking of Dorey's commentaries has been made all-but redundant ever since she
uncritically linked to a conspiracy article by David Icke, a man who insists the world is run by a secret society of shape-shifting lizard people. Icke argued that the swine flu shot was part of a conspiracy to implant recipients with a microchip and, ultimately, to kill off large parts of the world's population. By linking to it without comment, Dorey gives the impression she agrees with it. Her syllogism pales into insignificance by comparison.
Any magazine that would publish advertising by a group that promotes such nonsense is surely not a magazine that should be trusted by new parents. Dorey's conspiracy theories aside, The Child is to be congratulated for putting parents' and children's interests ahead of a chance to make a few dollars off a new advertiser.
