Update: Mamamia have now covered the Woodford Folk Festival issue. The comment section is open - and it's busy.
Reasonable Hank warns about one of the speakers invited to this year's Woodford Folk Festival, Dec 27-Jan 1.
For some reason, unfathomable to me, the event organisers have decided to invite Meryl Dorey, of the misnamed "
Australian Vaccination Network", to speak at the six-day music festival.
The promotion piece for her talk reads...
Investigate before you vaccinate is the motto of the AVN. Having collected reports of thousands of Australian families whose children have been killed or injured by these shots, Meryl knows that the benefits of vaccines don't always outweigh the risks. Her information is sourced from medical data and is necessary for anyone who has a family or is thinking about being vaccinated.
Some of Ms Dorey's information might be "sourced" from medical data but I have serious doubts that is
necessary for anyone to hear her selective re-interpretation of that data. Indeed, in my experience, she lacks the skill or qualifications required to interpret even the simplest information (
she is not a doctor nor is she formally trained, to my knowledge, in any science) and would, in all likelihood, be incapable of understanding, let alone re-interpreting, complex medical research.
Despite this, the organisers of the musical event presumably think Meryl Dorey has something worthwhile to offer event-goers on the subject of vaccination. Perhaps they share her views on medical conspiracies and the evils of "toxins". I don't know. Perhaps they simply think their target audience will be sympathetic to and supportive of Dorey's often-bizarre ideas about vaccination and medicine in general, though I'd disagree that this, in itself, is reason enough to feed such delusions.
Following are just some of the bizarre thoughts, opinions and ideas that Ms Dorey has displayed publicly. If you're thinking of attending Woodford, ask yourself if this a "target audience" you want to be associated with...
Meryl Dorey has, in the past, promoted David Icke's notion that
vaccination is a tool of the Illuminati who use it to control the population through the injection of microchips which can also be used to remotely perpetrate genocide with a view to mass culling the population. Mr Icke also believes the world is controlled
shape-shifting reptilian aliens (lizard people).
I shouldn't really need to say any more about her but there is more. Lots more.
Ms Dorey regularly displays errors of simple logic and arithmetic.
In once case concluding that if 88% of a group of infected children were vaccinated, then 88% of vaccinated children must have become infected. No one with even a basic grasp of maths or science would make this syllogistic error (
if all dogs have four legs, then all things with four legs are dogs).
In another case of blatant misinterpreting of simple data sets, Ms Dorey said "
There are 10,000 unvaccinated children in California – a state with a population of over 36,000,000. That means that less than .03% of California’s population is opting out of vaccination." In fact, the number of unvaccinated
children in a population tells us nothing useful about the total number of unvaccinated
people in a population. Indeed,
as I showed at the time, the true rate of vaccine avoidance was closer to 24% - 800 times greater than Ms Dorey's figure. Sure, it's a simple mistake for the average person to make by conflating two exclusive data sets - but average people don't hold themselves up to be scientific experts or speak at folk music festivals about the serious issue of child health.
Further to this,
the article Ms Dorey got the figures from stated, clearly, that "exemption" was as high as 50% in one school. Even if her "whole-of-population" exemption calculation had been even almost-close-to right, it would still have been irrelevant when the exemption rate in specified areas of concern was incredibly high. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of statistics would surely know this.
And, if that isn't enough, Ms Dorey claimed in October this year that one childhood vaccine was contaminated at the level of 9-10 parts per million with mercury. She was quickly corrected and accepted that the correct rate, from the research, was in fact expressed in parts per BILLION. She was wrong by a factor of 1000. It's bad enough that she made this simple error when she claims to be expert enough to re-interpret "raw data" in ways different to the scientists who carry out research, but she
repeated the "parts per million" claim in a more-recent Facebook comment.
In another comment, on ABC Radio, Ms Dorey claimed that
"...the fact is that in the United States they are actually blaming the use of the whooping cough vaccine for this outbreak that's occurring in countries where the vaccine is being used." This is something of a serious
oversimplification of the research which showed, in fact, that the vaccine works very, very well but doesn't last as long as we'd like leaving vaccinated people vulnerable to infection sooner than expected and reducing herd immunity as a result.
But there are other problems with the message Ms Dorey sells - and rest assured she does sell it, with regular suggestions to her Facebook followers to buy this or that from the AVN shop, an online store that includes a
lot of things for sale that are available for free download elsewhere.
In January this year Ms Dorey, who claims not to be anti-vaccine, equated vaccination with rape
"with full penetration".
Is Ms Dorey not "anti-rape"?
In June last year, Ms Dorey
told Perth radio host Howard Sattler that TB vaccination had
never been part of the Australian vaccine schedule. She was wrong. Blatantly wrong, as millions of Australians could attest.
I could go on. There are lots more examples but I'll finish with the fact that the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission had the following to say about Ms Dorey's
Australian Vaccination Network (AVN)...
The Commission’s investigation established that the AVN website:
- provides information that is solely anti-vaccination
- contains information that is incorrect and misleading
- quotes selectively from research to suggest that vaccination may be dangerous.
That's really all that should need to be said.
Although I do worry about the error-riddled advice and information Ms Dorey is almost certain to offer attendees at Woodford, I'm not going to attempt to convince the organisers to rethink their decision to invite Ms Dorey. I have a feeling that would involve having them rethink their own views about vaccination first (
I hope I'm wrong).
Instead, I'll ask you, if you were thinking of going along, do you feel it's okay to use folk music to help spread dangerous misinformation about children's health? Is this something you really want to support?
If you don't support her views but still choose to attend, because folk music runs through your veins or something, then maybe you can at least keep an eye out for any sort of
AVN fundraising activity and, should you see it, report it to the appropriate authorities.
UPDATE:
More
here and
here.
And there's a growing list
here.
PZ Myers
has weighed in.
I am neither a doctor, nor a scientist nor even a statistician. Neither is Meryl Dorey. Do not trust either of us with the health of you or your children. See a doctor - a real doctor who doesn't think the world is run by lizard-people.
