Thinking is Real

AVN - the comedy continues

2012-01-31T23:27:00.001+08:00

I've been reading the blog of the Australian Vaccination Network recently.

I have just one response...

Does the AVN support conspiracy theories?

2012-01-24T21:21:00.006+08:00

Following are some excerpts from a comment that was allowed through moderation and posted on the Australian Vaccination Network's (AVN) blog this morning. Before you read it may I point out that, as I write this, the comment has been there for over 12 hours and remains unchallenged by blog host Meryl Dorey?

Ms Dorey was presumably the person who authorised the comment to appear on her blog. It's worth remembering that Ms Dorey repeatedly claims to not be anti-vaccine yet while she has posted a response to two other comments, she has not responded to this comment in any way - not even a giggle or a "don't be daft".

It's also worth remembering that the AVN claim to be a resource for concerned parents seeking information about vaccination.

(note also, for what it's worth, that the full comment is actually a copy of a post from "thinktwice")

I've bolded some of the best bits for you...

...In fact, most parents would be surprised to learn that the government has a secret computer database filled with several thousand names of disabled and dead babies, children who were healthy and alive just prior to receiving the vaccines.
[…]
Vaccine production is a disgusting procedure.

[...]
What happens next, once this foul concoction — live viruses, bacteria, toxic substances, and diseased animal matter — is created? This witch’s brew is forced into the healthy child.

Satanic Rituals:
Dr. Robert Mendelsohn often criticized modern medicine for its sanctimonious doctrine. He argued that “doctors are the priests who dispense holy water in the form of inoculations” to ritually initiate our loyalty into the larger medical industry
[…]
Others see a link between vaccinations and satanic rituals or witchcraft, where animals are sacrificed and their organs brewed in a hellish concoction of horrid substances: voodoo medicine by 21st century mad scientists. Sadly, our children are their unwilling subjects as society is slowly devoured by their insatiable appetite for human experimentation.

And Ms Dorey wonders why people accuse her of supporting conspiracy theories?!?!

Oh, and the comment concludes with this...

SECRET DATABASE!
Every year, the FDA receives thousands of reports of adverse reactions after vaccines. These include brain damage and death. This information is now available at the following link: VAERS Database...

So VAERS, a well-publicised database of post-vaccine events is, apparently a SECRET DATABASE! It's so secret the government hide it on a publicly accessible website and invite people to lodge reports of suspected adverse reactions to vaccination. In fact, you don't even have to suspect a vaccine connection. From the report form...

Please report all significant adverse events that occur after vaccination of adults and children, even if you are not sure whether the vaccine caused the adverse event.

And to reiterate, the mere existence of a VAERS report about an adverse event does not indicate that the reaction was due to vaccination. Anyone in any doubt about that just needs to check VAERS...

When evaluating data from VAERS, it is important to note that for any reported event, no cause-and-effect relationship has been established. Reports of all possible associations between vaccines and adverse events (possible side effects) are filed in VAERS. Therefore, VAERS collects data on any adverse event following vaccination, be it coincidental or truly caused by a vaccine. The report of an adverse event to VAERS is not documentation that a vaccine caused the event.

It couldn't be much clearer could it?

Well, actually, it could.

Consider this account by Dr James Laidler...

The chief problem with the VAERS data is that reports can be entered by anyone and are not routinely verified. To demonstrate this, a few years ago I entered a report that an influenza vaccine had turned me into The Hulk. The report was accepted and entered into the database.

Because the reported adverse event was so… unusual, a representative of VAERS contacted me. After a discussion of the VAERS database and its limitations, they asked for my permission to delete the record, which I granted. If I had not agreed, the record would be there still, showing that any claim can become part of the database, no matter how outrageous or improbable.

That's VAERS, the SECRET DATABASE!

Again, these are excerpts from a much longer comment that was passed through moderation and posted on the AVN's blog without a response from the blog host.

But, whatever you do, don't mention the lizard people or people will think you're all nuts!

As usual, I will conclude by expressing my absolute dismay that any parent would consider the AVN to be a source of useful information about vaccination and child health.

Meryl Dorey & AVN - must be anti-vaccine

2012-01-23T20:06:00.004+08:00

Meryl Dorey of the anti-vaccine lobby group Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) has repeatedly denied that either she or her AVN group is anti-vaccine.

And yet today, on her Facebook page we get this...

It says...

Everyone is entitled to a second opinion on health issues. Check with your doctor-then check with the AVN. Get both sides.

Both sides?

So, if the doctor is pro-vaccine, as is most likely to be the case, and therefore gives the pro-vaccine "side" - the other "side", the "side" the AVN is on, must surely be the anti-vaccine "side". Mustn't it?

There are several AVN FB admins and the one who wrote this isn't identified, but Ms Dorey gives AVN contact details later in the thread, so I assume she agrees with it.

In another thread, Ms Dorey gives advice on how to find anti-vaccine information...

I just did a google search using the words "why not vaccinate?" and got heaps of articles that are fairly general. Reasons not to vaccinate as a search brought up even more.

This leads me to think that pro-vaccine bloggers need to flood the market with a raft of cross-linked posts titled "reasons not to vaccinate". We can then direct the reader to useful information inside the post - or make it clear that vaccinating is usually a pretty neat idea.

We could start by linking to the following page, which explains in stark detail why a parent might choose against vaccinating...

"Reasons not to vaccinate"

Fellow bloggers, can I suggest we all link to that page, using "reasons not to vaccinate" as the link text?

Meryl Dorey - immune to reading?

2012-01-21T11:23:00.004+08:00

Meryl Dorey of the misleadingly named the Australian Vaccination Network, an anti-vaccine lobby group, has posted a comment, copied to her Facebook page, on a vaccination story published at thestar.com.

I'll ignore the issues of immunity and herd immunity as misrepresented by Ms Dorey. I'm interested only in her seemingly slanderous accusations about how vaccination law is represented in the article.

I've bolded a few of the more-interesting bits of her comment...

No vaccine is mandatory in Canada! Is Dr Finkelstein truly that ignorant of the laws of Canada or has the Toronto Star misquoted him? Vaccination is not compulsory in Canada and he should know that. Thankfully, Canadians do have the right to choose whether or not they want to be vaccinated or have vaccines administered to their children. It is time for your paper to correct this gross misrepresentation of the law.

Here are opening paragraphs of the news article. Again, I've bolded some bits...

Toronto’s public health unit wants the province to consider expanding the list of mandatory vaccinations for Ontario’s schoolchildren.

The report — to be tabled Friday at a meeting of Toronto’s Board of Health — calls on the provincial health ministry to consider updating the group of immunizations required for school attendance to include more publicly funded vaccines.

Although there appears to be growing opposition to vaccines among some parents, the school-mandated vaccination program has been so successful — achieving almost total compliance — that the public health unit wants more vaccines added to the list.

Now, I didn't even have to do any research outside of the article in question to see who was committing the gross misrepresentation.

Here's some other bits from the same article. As always, I've done some bolding...

Currently, elementary and high school students must be vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, diphtheria and polio.

But the law requiring schoolchildren to be immunized was written 22 years ago…

The best way to achieve that, according to their stats, is to make it mandatory through the school system.

For Dr. Astrid Guttman, a pediatrician at Sick Kids Hospital, the success of the school-mandated program is actually symptomatic of a larger illness…

“Currently, (the school system) is the only point in time where public health gets any vaccination data,”

As the bold text shows, the article is not about Canada as a whole, nor is there any implication that it is about Canada as a whole. And it is not about across-the-board compulsory vaccination. It is very clearly about a school-based program, that does actually, really, seriously exist - in Toronto.

It's surely impossible for anyone who actually read the article to conclude anything other than the fact it is about a school-based program in Toronto.

Toronto is in Canada. Toronto is not Canada. Like Sydney is in Australia but, although Sydney-siders might not realise it, Sydney is not Australia.

And even in Toronto, vaccination is not mandatory outside of the school program. Nowhere in the article is any claim made to the contrary.

The only way in which Ms Dorey can be considered to be correct is to the extent that the system apparently allows for exemptions. But nothing in the article implies otherwise.

Ms Dorey is tilting at windmills.

Again.

Once again I find myself wondering why people would risk their baby's life by giving any weight to the advice of an organisation that demonstrates no ability to properly understand any issues, even simple ones.

Does Anti-Vaccine = Bad Maths?

2012-01-14T20:54:00.008+08:00

I've blogged a few times about Meryl Dorey's difficulties with high-school level mathematics.

There was the incident where she suggested that if 88% of a group of infected people are vaccinated, then 88% of vaccinated people must have been infected. The claim remains on her blog, in a comment.

There were the times where she confused parts per million with parts per billion, a one-thousand-fold error. One was "corrected", but it was repeated soon after on her Facebook page and not, to my knowledge, corrected.

There was the time when she concluded that 10,000 unvaccinated pre-school children in a news story were the only unvaccinated people in California. This meant, according to her arithmetic, that only 0.03% of the population had not been immunised. The actual figure is likely around 800 times higher than Ms Dorey's "estimation".

These are the just the few that spring immediately to my mind. I'm sure there's a lot I've missed.

But she's done it again. Apparently ~~disinterested~~ unconcerned with vaccination today, Ms Dorey has now turned her attention to fluoride. On her Facebook page, she wrote...

"Fluoride in concentrations as low as 1:60 PPM is toxic."

Which makes no sense.

Is it one part in 60, as suggested by the 1:60 ratio? Or is it one part in one million as suggested by the PPM? Or is it 60 parts in one million (60ppm)? Or is it one sixtieth of one part in one million (0.016ppm)?

Frankly, I don't know what she's on about and nor do I particularly care since there's a fair chance it would be just another "they're trying to kill us all" conspiracy theory. And, even if we get the maths sorted out, we will still be left with questions of whether the chemistry is properly understood.

What does concern me is that, despite her regular public failures on matters of relatively simple maths and science, she claims to be able to re-interpret scientific papers better than the scientists that wrote them – and people like the organisers of the Woodford Folk Festival treat her like an expert and give her a platform to spread seemingly dangerous misinformation.

If I was concerned about my baby's health and well-being, or "wellness", then, at the very least, I'd ignore the advice of people who can't do simple maths and science.

HT Deb & Sue @ SAVN

UPDATE:
I forgot to mention that Ms Dorey's comment included a link to brasschecktv.com, which appears to be yet another conspiracy website, similar to whale.to but video-based. Along with a large collection of health-related conspiracies, they also carry stories on "chemtrails", President Obama, 9/11 and "The Secret Government". I could be wrong, but this doesn't look like the sort of place a medical expert would usually go for information.

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.

Meryl Dorey, Woodford FF, PR lessons

2012-01-14T17:02:00.000+08:00

Chrys Stevenson has posted a video compilation of events leading up to the appearance of anti-vaccine lobbyist Meryl Dorey as a speaker at the recent Woodford Folk Festival. The video features an audio interview with Ms Stevenson on Peter Bowditch's podcast...

Vaccine ingredients - do your research

2012-01-13T10:13:00.004+08:00

The anti-vaccine lobby repeatedly crows "do your research" to anyone who they see as not being strongly opposed to vaccination.

Ordinarily, I ignore their advice because, well, they're mostly idiots with too much hubris and too little education. But today I decided to follow their advice and find a comprehensive list of ingredients commonly found in all vaccines. I was shocked...

COMMON Vaccine Ingredients:

Phemaldehyde (listed in comments here)
Water (a major cause of death)
Sucrose (a major cause of obesity)
Glycerin (a major source of glycerin)

Mercury
Venus
Saturn
Pluto
Goofy
Mickey and Donald
Anti-freeze
Aunty Mabel
Monkey kidney
Dog kidney
Steak and kidney pie
Formaldehyde
Informal-dehyde
Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
Salt (heart disease anyone?)
Pepper
Egg protein
Bacon protein

Elephant snot
Snigs and Snails
Puppy dogs' tails
Girl germs
Boy bugs
Nuclear waste (it has to go somewhere!)
Pure evil
Eye of newt
Lost aglets
Pimple pus

McDonalds
Depression
Micro-chips
Micro-fish
Microsoft Windows
Un-used new year resolutions
Pages from Mein Kampf
Chernobyl sewage

ALL THIS IS TRUE...
...you've just read it on the internet so it must be!!!!

And all this is injected straight into your baby's bloodstream every day for the first three years of their life. And if doctors think we won't notice the effect these things have, they must be CRAZY!!!!!

I will add to this list as I continue to do my own research into vaccination.

Living Wisdom - a conundrum in a paradox

2012-01-09T23:19:00.017+08:00

I wrote before about my confusion surrounding Living Wisdom, a magazine sold via subscription by the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN).

At that time I noted that the magazine was apparently supposed to be produced six times a year but also that some of the subscription pages were ambiguous, to the extent that it wasn't always clear what time frame a subscription covered. With regard to "Gift subscriptions", I wrote...

More interestingly, unlike other magazine subscriptions, regular Living Wisdom subscriptions do not appear to come with a time frame.

But I also noted that some of the professional subscriptions were for a one-year period and supposedly included six issues of the magazine in both hard copy and digital format. The more I looked at the subscription options, the more I was convinced that there were supposed to be six magazines produced per year – but nowhere near that number has been produced for the last two years so I couldn't understand why subscriptions were still being offered.

In that article I added a note... "please, if I'm getting this all wrong, tell me now so I can clarify". No one corrected me so I assumed I was right, or that no one reads my blog. Either option was viable.

Today, however, the AVN's Meryl Dorey has cleared up my confusion with an explanation in her newsletter...

"...our memberships and subscriptions are tied to a specific number of magazines. So if someone renews their membership or subscribes for 6 issues, their membership or subscription doesn't expire until they have received 6 issues. This means in effect that any loss is borne by the AVN as members have not been expected to renew until all designated magazines have been delivered."

Ignoring the notion that something that has, presumably, been paid for but not delivered somehow represents a loss borne by the entity that holds the money, I think Meryl has answered my earlier questions.

Oh bugger, I can't ignore it. If you charge money up-front for a product or service that you fail to deliver in a timely fashion, how are you the one suffering a loss simply because you don't get any more money off that customer until you finally come through? You've got the money – the customer is the one out of pocket.

Anyway...

Subscriptions to Living Wisdom are for a given number of magazines and there should, presumably, be no expectation by purchasers that all six magazines will arrive within one year of subscribing. Which is fine, I guess. Weird, as magazine subscriptions go, but fine – I guess. At least we know now how it works so we can stop asking questions about it.

To confirm Meryl's explanation, I checked the AVN subscription order pages tonight and here's some of what I found (I have a bunch of screenshots saved)...

SUBSCRIPTION - 1 YEAR LIVING WISDOM HARD COPY
6 issues of Living Wisdom - printed format.
$75
SUBSCRIPTION - 2 YEAR LIVING WISDOM HARD COPY
6 issues of Living Wisdom - printed format.
$125
SUBSCRIPTION - 3 YEAR LIVING WISDOM HARD COPY
6 issues of Living Wisdom - printed format.
$180

So I think that makes it all very clear now. If you're unsure, follow me along as I try to explain it....

If you are a regular subscriber (not a professional) then, based on these order forms, you can pay either $75 or $125 or $180 for six magazines. The only difference seems to be the name of the subscription offer since they are called "1 YEAR", "2 YEAR" and "3 YEAR" respectively. So basically you pay a lot more if you choose the one called a "3 YEAR" subscription than if you choose the one called "1 YEAR" – but you still only get six magazines and, as Meryl Dorey made clear today, you'll get them when you get them because, remember...

...memberships and subscriptions are tied to a specific number of magazines. So if someone renews their membership or subscribes for 6 issues, their membership or subscription doesn't expire until they have received 6 issues.

Got it? Good. But wait, there's more...

SUBSCRIPTION - 1 YEAR LIVING WISDOM BASIC PROFESSIONAL SUB
6 issues - printed format
6 issues - digital format
$275
SUBSCRIPTION - 2 YEARS LIVING WISDOM BASIC PROFESSIONAL SUB
12 issues - printed format
12 issues - digital format
$500
SUBSCRIPTION - 3 YEARS LIVING WISDOM BASIC PROFESSIONAL SUB
18 issues - printed format
18 issues - digital format
$700

If you are a professional subscriber, you get six hard copy and digital magazines for a "1 YEAR" subscription, 12 for a "2 YEAR" subscription and 18 for a "3 YEAR" subscription – and the increasing price reflects the increased number of issues for each subscription type. I have to assume, again, that the "1 YEAR", "2 YEAR" and "3 YEAR" labels are meaningless since there haven't ever been six magazines produced in any single year as far as I can ascertain and, remember...

Only two magazines were published in 2010 and just one in 2011. I don't even want to calculate how long it might take for a professional subscriber taking up the "3 YEAR" option to receive the promised 18 magazines.

So, to summarise, regular subscribers apparently get six issues no matter how much they pay and professional members get different numbers of issues according to how much they pay – but neither type of subscriber should expect to receive their allotted number of magazines within any implied time frame.

Okay, so I'll confess to being just a little bit facetious above. I'm going to go ahead and assume that the "6 issues" listed for "1 YEAR", "2 YEAR" and "3 YEAR" regular subscriptions is an error. I assume, based on pricing, that they are supposed to include 6, 12 and 18 issues respectively. I can accept that errors occur in this sort of thing where templates or "copy and paste" are often used to create multiple pages of similar information. So please forgive my flippant treatment of the regular subscriptions.

But we are still left with a dilemma...

If Living Wisdom subscriptions really are based only on a specific number of magazines, why are they sold on an annual basis at all? And, even if we accept that this labelling is an error, a bizarre error to be sure, but an error just the same, then I have to wonder at the wisdom of someone signing up for 18 copies of a magazine that struggles to publish once or twice per year with no promise at all of what time frame you are signing up for.

And then, there are renewal options for current members and subscribers whose existing "...membership or subscription doesn't expire until they have received 6 issues.". Why would they be renewing when expiration would seem to be a long way off for anyone waiting to catch up on unfulfilled subscriptions.

I should make clear that I am not a subscriber to the magazine in question, nor will I ever be. I take an interest in consumer advocacy and I do have some concerns for people who subscribed to Living Wisdom with an assumption that subscriptions would be based on a normal "issues per year" basis, as is implied by the various subscription offers. But frankly, if you are one such subscriber, it is up to you to lodge a complaint - both with the AVN and with the appropriate authorities. The money you've given to this group, for a product you haven't received, is money you could have spent on your family and by not making a noise, you make it easier for others to follow the AVN's example.

If, on the other hand, people are taking up these subscriptions simply as a way to support the AVN, with no concern as to whether they ever receive their magazines, I think that's an issue the OLGR needs to be made aware of since the AVN is not allowed to engage in non-member fundraising.

Oh damn it, I had finished and published but I just had to go and do a Google search didn't I? And here's what I find...

To quote that website [my bolding]... "Living Wisdom informs and entertains its readers every two months with the most up-to-date information on natural healthcare, organics and the envirnoment [sic]. Its writers are the top experts in their fields."

"Every two months". Oops. Someone should tell them.

But back in 2009, the AVN themselves were claiming that, from November that year, the magazine would come out six times a year, albeit in digital format only, a policy which apparently changed in several ways [my bolding]...

Our production schedule will consist of bi-monthly publications so instead of Living Wisdom only coming out 4 times a year, you will get the magazine delivered to your inbox every two months or 6 times a year - making the information more current, more timely and more immediate.

And this current advertising rates page also claims the "The magazine is now published every 2 months..."

As always, I am open to correction on things I've got demonstrably wrong. But I have to say that based on the wildly disparate information relating to this AVN product, I would not be risking my child's health with any advice this group offers with regards to vaccination or any other health matter. I don't find them trustworthy.

More information on Living Wisdom subscriptions.

Natural immunity - is it better?

2012-01-07T12:52:00.008+08:00

I saw a comment recently in which a mother said she had made a lifestyle choice not to immunise her baby. Her argument was that she is a healthy person and her baby is healthy and, as such, has "natural immunity".

I think it's fair to say that almost every human has "natural immunity" if we accept a loose enough definition of the term.

Your immune system naturally responds to things that infect you and does its best to deal with them and remember them for the future. For example, if your baby comes into contact with the pertussis bacteria that causes whooping cough, its immune system learns how to defeat the bug and goes to work on it. The immune system then stores a bit of information away for future use so that if your baby comes into contact with pertussis again, it already has the tools to defeat it. It's important to note that the first infection is the riskiest one since the immune system does not have any idea at that point what whooping cough is and essentially has to work out how to go to war against the invader. And like any war, the good guys don't always win.

Even if the immune system does win, some damage is likely being done to your baby while its immune system works out what to do and while the battle is taking place – and that damage can be permanent.

Vaccination is a way of more-safely introducing our immune systems to potentially life-threatening or seriously debilitating bugs. In the case of whooping cough, the vaccine contains just those parts of the pertussis bacteria the immune system needs in order to build future defences against the real thing. It's like giving an army advance warning of the invading force's plans and capabilities - so it's a much easier battle for the good guys when they arrive.

For most people, the end result of either vaccination or actual infection from the wild bacteria is immunity. When it's derived via actual infection, some refer to it as "natural immunity". I'm not entirely certain this is what the woman I referred to earlier means by it as it seems some people believe that we can just be immune to things as a result of being healthy - almost like the immune system becomes magically primed to repel things.

But immune systems are not like force fields keeping pathogens out of the body, they are a response team that can only go to work once an infection occurs. We aren't typically born immune to every debilitating disease, even if our parents do live on a diet of lentil soup and acai berries.

Being "healthy" doesn't prevent disease-causing bugs entering your system any more than it will prevent mosquitoes from biting you. So the real question is whether your baby's immune system is always going to be able to defeat an infection before too much damage has been done.

If being natural means simply being a part of nature, then you must be willing to accept that nature simply doesn't give a toss whether predator or prey wins a battle. Sometimes gazelles get away from predators, but they die often enough to ensure the predators' survival and this is the case right through the food chain.

When it comes to disease, we are essentially the prey, not the predator.

Note: I am neither a doctor nor a scientist. I am not remotely qualified to offer medical advice. This is a much-simplified layman's explanation of immunity, nothing more. As always, I am open to corrections. If you're concerned about vaccination, avoid conspiracy theorists who deny basic science in order to demonise vaccination. Speak to your GP instead.

Whooping Cough in WA: No debate!

2012-01-04T16:33:00.000+08:00

Western Australia has found itself facing a whooping cough epidemic. This isn't much of a surprise with some parts of the state having among the lowest rates of childhood vaccination in the country. These pockets of low childhood immunisation combined with across-the-board low pertussis immunisation among adults, result in very low herd immunity, leaving babies susceptible to infection.

I've complained here before about the ABC giving anti-vaccine lobbyist Meryl Dorey a platform to spread unchallenged misinformation about vaccination but today I must give them credit for the coverage they've given to this story.

If you're into Twitter, you can join the conversation at #whoopingcough

Or you can add your thoughts to the the News Breakfast Facebook thread.

Interestingly, for all her bluster about wanting a public debate about vaccination, Meryl Dorey spends very little, if any, time in such public fora where she has no control over who gets to comment and where her ideas can be directly challenged with links to useful information.

Be nice to Meryl Dorey. Please.

2012-01-01T11:17:00.014+08:00

One of the things I hate about blogging, and social media in general, is that it is very easy to become personal about people we don't actually know personally. When dealing with seemingly controversial issues like vaccination, where some people bluntly refuse to engage in anything resembling basic science, or even simple maths, it's difficult to post rebuttals and refutations without getting personal and calling either their abilities or motives into question.

When these same people put themselves up on a pedestal, offer themselves up as experts, yet continue to repeat the same fundamental errors they've been making for years, with no hint of "gee, I just might be wrong about that bit", then it's very easy to drift into being outright mean when writing about them.

When a person seems hell-bent on supporting anything that demonises vaccination, whether as simple as a news report about genuine reactions of children to a flu vaccine or as outright crazy as a story about vaccination being a genocidal tool of lizard-people overlords, but then goes on to insist "I'm not anti-vaccine", it can be difficult to view that person as being entirely honest in their motives.

When a judge declares that a child at the centre of a legal dispute should be immunised, in keeping with her father's wishes but against her mother's, one expects that a pro-vaccine-choice campaigner would remain neutral on the issue since it's clear that in such a polarised dispute, only one side could win. So, when a very public lobbyist goes all hyperbolic and describes the judge's decision as "court-orderd rape - with full penetration" but still inists "I'm not anti-vaccine, I'm pro-choice", well, let me say again, it can be difficult to take that person at their word and it can be more difficult to write about such events without being just a little bit insulting about that person.

There are lots, lots more examples of why I struggle, at times, to not get personal. And it is a struggle. I have deleted several articles over the years after I look back and feel I'm getting too personal for my own liking. I have even put the blog on "hide" a couple of times for the same reason and I am likely to do both these things again in the future as I experience unease about my own tone.

However yesterday, on her blog, Meryl Dorey of the Australian Vaccination Network, an anti-vaccine lobby group, asked that people opposed to her often-outlandish anti-vaccine views start being nice about it [my bolding]...

I invite those members of the SAVN who have been attacking me non-stop for the last 2 1/2 to 3 years to do the same thing. Take a step back, consider moderating your language and let’s get back to playing the ball – not the person. Just because we disagree with each other on a scientific issue is no reason to continue the abuse.

Let’s disagree, and let’s communicate about that. Let’s accept that we may never reach a common ground but that in the end, the truth of the matter will emerge regardless of what we do today but understand that we are all concerned with the health of children and we all care deeply about our own families and our own choices.

I know that the real ‘die-hards’ of SAVN will just look at this and take it as a challenge to try even harder to continue the attacks. But I also know that there are many good people involved with that group who would not want to be associated with this type of behaviour and yet, they have been sucked in due to their commitment to the issue of vaccination.

There are better ways to get your point across – there are more productive methods of debate. I invite you to join in the conversation.

[SAVN is "Stop the Australian Vaccination Network" - a collective of people opposed to the AVN]

Now, let me say that my first response to Meryl's request was to almost choke on my coffee (I write that metaphorically and simply for effect as I neither have coffee nor am I ever surprised by Meryl's repeated calls for civility... from the pro-vaccine camp).

This is the very woman who described a court decision in favour of childhood vaccination as "rape... with full penetration". This is the same woman who barely tolerates any genuine vaccination discussion on her own Facebook page before banning those who continue to refute the anti-vaccine claims that reside there. "Conversation" is difficult when one side refuses to listen.

But I decided that I would begin 2012 by trying something new. And so I'm going to be nice to Meryl Dorey today and see if it makes a difference to "the conversation".

In that spirit let me say that in radio and TV interviews, Meryl Dorey is disarmingly convincing, even when she's demonstrably wrong. Meryl has a pleasing tone, charismatic perhaps, even with her American accent (I added that last bit for comic effect only).

For what it's worth, Meryl is pretty darned good at what she does. She's persistent and consistent. Consistently wrong, but consistent just the same. I don't agree with what she does and I don't like at all the way she does it but I have to agree that she does it pretty well.

I do feel a little better and so I call on other pro-vaccine bloggers to give it a try. It's cathartic.

Be nice to Meryl Dorey.

Meryl Dorey @ Woodford Folk - Vaccination Saves Lives

2011-12-29T15:41:00.006+08:00

It might seem odd to have Meryl Dorey and Vaccination Saves Lives in the same heading but there is good reason for it.

To cut a long story short, just go to Meryl Dorey visits Woodford Folk Festival and follow the collection of links there.

Listen to this special Token Skeptic podcast with Kylie Sturgess and get the full background to the Vaccination Saves Lives, "Operation Nutcracker" campaign.

Breaking News: Woodford/Meryl Dorey late change

2011-12-24T20:06:00.004+08:00

I saw rumblings a while ago on Twitter and now Jason Brown reports a change in the Woodford program.

It seems that the backlash against anti-vaccine campaigner Meryl Dorey being invited to speak at Woodford Folk Festival has had some effect and she will no longer be doing a solo talk on autism. She will now be taking part in a vaccine forum, alongside an immunologist. This is still disappointing.

Debates or forums in which one participant is entirely unqualified to speak on the issue at hand tend to legitimise that person in the eyes of average audience members. A forum like this could make it look like Ms Dorey has scientific qualifications those of the immunologist, when she does not.

Professor Suhrbier will need to be on his toes and be ready to counter potentially bizarre arguments and wildly inaccurate statistics that could well come out of left field.

Regardless, there's little doubt the blogosphere and Twitter will be alive with conversation after the event takes place.

Tim Minchin scrapped

2011-12-23T18:19:00.000+08:00

Apparently you shouldn't see this video performance. So please don't watch it. Okay?

Holistic Medicine

2011-12-15T22:08:00.000+08:00

If holistic medicine treats the whole person by energising the body to use its innate defences against dis-ease in order to restore balance naturally - why are there so many different holistic therapies and why do so many practitioners practise several of them?

Surely just one would be enough.

Meryl Dorey, Woodford Festival, Activism

2011-12-15T16:13:00.005+08:00

What an absolute blast the last couple of weeks has been.

Things started heating up when it came to light that a contractor employed by the Burzynski Cancer Clinic was sending threatening emails to bloggers who'd questioned the clinic's treatment claims. The international sceptical blogosphere went nuts and within days, the story had been told on over 100 blogs and was ultimately mentioned in the mainstream press. We should remember that the saga is ongoing. On that score, 17-year-old Welsh blogger Rhys Morgan has a write-up in The Guardian, republished in Australia's Brisbane Times and Sydney Morning Herald.

But, closer to home, all eyes have turned to the Woodford Folk Festival, a week-long music event that also includes individual speakers and speakers' forums. Among this year's speakers is Meryl Dorey of the misnamed "Australian Vaccination Network".

Ms Dorey is a renowned anti-vaccinationist. She denies being anti-vaccine and prefers to describe herself as "pro-choice" but here's a sample of her writing [link via The Drum Opinion]...

There will come a time – I pray to God that it will happen in my lifetime – when those who have pushed vaccines upon innocent, helpless babies – doctors, pharmaceutical companies, government officials – will be proven to have lied and cheated these instruments of death into our children's bloodstream.

Since vaccine choice isn't really an issue in Australia (it's not compulsory) and since she has also described vaccination as rape and sells t-shirts saying "...never inject them", it's difficult to see how she can be considered anything but anti-vaccine.

The Woodford website says the following about Ms Dorey...

"Her information is sourced from medical data and is necessary for anyone who has a family or is thinking about being vaccinated."

The NSW Health Care complaints Commission, on the other hand, says 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.

Spot the difference?

Meryl apparently has no qualifications in immunology or medicine or any vaguely related science. I'm unaware that she has any formal qualifications in any sort of science at all. Indeed, I've spent quite a bit of time blogging about her failure to get even the simple things right - things that most people would expect to learn in high school - and her apparent support for conspiracy theories, including the idea that vaccination is a tool used by lizard people to commit genocide.

So, Ms Dorey's inclusion on the Woodford Folk Festival speakers' list, and more-importantly, her being described as some sort of expert in vaccination, has resulted in a social-media campaign against the Woodford organisers. There have been calls for Woodford to retract her invite, for sponsors to pull out, for a right-of-reply from someone who actually knows some real things about vaccination or for sceptical activists to attend and counter her misinformation.

The backlash began on Twitter and Facebook but mushroomed after online magazine Mamamia published an article by Peter Bowditch. This story has now had a hearing in the mainstream and popular media, including

The Drum on ABC
2UE's Tracey Spicer
The Conversation
The Drum Opinion

Jason Brown has a much longer and growing list on his wiki.

What's truly surprising about this saga is the volume of commentary it has generated. As I write this, the two-days old Mamamia article has over 1500 comments from people supporting and opposing vaccination. Dr Rachael Dunlop's article on The Drum was published just this morning and already has over 320 post-moderation comments published.

So, while some people appear to think it was a bad idea to mount this campaign against Ms Dorey's appearance at Woodford, there can be no doubt that it has generated a lot of interest with some of the most-open public debate I think I've ever witnessed on an issue like this.

Mamamia, in particular, are to be congratulated for allowing anti-vax comments to stay and be eviscerated by a whole range of people who know what they're talking about. That thread, along with similar commentary on Dr Rachael Dunlop's October Mamamia article, will serve as a useful database for collecting anti-vax canards in the future.

UPDATE:

I think this VAIS article sums the situation up rather nicely.

Meryl Dorey - slowly roasted at Mamamia

2011-12-12T23:09:00.002+08:00

It is no secret that outspoken anti-vaccinationist Meryl Dorey of the misnamed Australian Vaccination Network is billed to appear at this year's Woodford Folk Festival. This has, obviously, ruffled the feathers of those people who support vaccination - and rational discourse - and blogs are starting to pop up about it.

Online parenting magazine Mamamia has published an article about the event and opened it up for comments. I recommend you take a look and maybe even add your own thoughts. Click the Woodford link above to get there. Meryl isn't really being slowly roasted though. She's been thoroughly toasted.

Read more about Meryl at Woodford here, where you'll also find links to other blogs.

Learnin proply

2011-12-11T18:38:00.002+08:00

A follow on from my last post - this time in rhyme...

it takes a gooder education
to see the troof of vaccination
but the learnin what you get must be specific

an conspiratorial tract
is better then an actual fact
or of anyfink remotely scientific

Education versus vaccination

2011-12-10T13:31:00.004+08:00

Spotted on the AVN Facebook page...

The first comment reads...

yes it is true - more educated parents are less likely to vaccinate at all. My sisters friend works at the day care centre at Sydney Airport and she said 90% of pilots children are not immunised

Now, I'm no literary genius but I was always taught that sentences should start with a capital letter. Also, my gut feeling is that yes it is true should really have a comma - Yes, it is true. I'd even be comfortable with a full stop after that but I'm open to discussion on that point (pardon the pun).

Next we have "more educated parents are less likely to vaccinate at all."

Now, unless this person is implying that the majority of educated people don't vaccinate, in which case he'd be demonstrably wrong, then I think he should be using a compound modifier so as to avoid ambiguity. Therefore, I suspect, he really should have written more-educated parents...

And then we get... "My sisters friend works at the day care centre at Sydney Airport and she said 90% of pilots children are not immunised"

I'm tempted to write my sister's friend's cousin works in an immunology lab and she said that 90% of all immunologists don't let their kids go in aeroplanes but I won't because I'm not deconstructing logic here - and it's not true anyway - but it could be.

Leaving aside the rather strange implication that pilots would know more about immunology than, say, immunologists, what we have in the sentence under scrutiny are two examples of the possessive case and yet there's not an apostrophe in sight. Surely that should be either sister's, if he's referring to the friend of just one sister, or sisters', with a trailing apostrophe, if he's referring to a friend shared by more than one sister.

And what about the pilots? Shouldn't that be pilot's or pilots', again depending on whether he's referring to 90% of just one pilot's children or 90% of the children of more than one pilot?

The first respondent to the comment went on to write...

‎75% of doctors dont vaccinate there own children...

I think the words she was looking for were don't and their. I'm also struck by the ambiguity of the statement and find myself wanting to ask "so who do they get to vaccinate them instead?"

I have no idea why she concluded with an ellipsis.

I love irony.

Oh, and my children are vaccinated.

Woodford Folk Festival - is it for you?

2011-12-10T00:36:00.007+08:00

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.

Wonky layout

2011-12-09T13:38:00.002+08:00

I've just noticed my blog layout has gone awry. If it looks odd to you too then rest assured I haven't meddled with anything so I guess something spontaneously broke under the hood. I'll leave it for a while to see if it's just another case of Google imposing dumb decisions on bloggers without notice (if so, I'm sure they'll tell me, somewhere, that the blog's never looked so good).

If it doesn't resolve itself I'll dig through the CSS and see what needs tweaking.

Dr Ken Harvey resigns from Labor over TGA

2011-12-08T20:24:00.003+08:00

Dr Ken Harvey is Adjunct Senior Lecturer of Public Health at La Trobe University. He is also a prolific lobbyist for better regulation of the Australian health system and has been the subject of two law suits this year as a result of those activities. While he has received awards for the promotion of reason, he is not remotely popular with promoters of quackery and snake oil.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) is a misnamed government authority that includes a lot of non-therapeutic goods on the lists it maintains (and "approves" in the minds of the average consumer) and which it doesn't seem to administer in a particularly effective way. As the federal regulator of "therapeutic" goods the TGA should, theoretically, make Dr Harvey's quack-busting efforts worthwhile. But, for the most part, it absolutely fails at this task as can be shown by a quick look at the shelves in your local pharmacy.

Homeopathy, weight-loss, detox, ear candles... the list of non-evidence-based "therapeutic products" is long. But the TGA doesn't assess efficacy for these products, it concerns itself only with an assessment of "safety". Since homeopathy (sugar pills or pure water for the most part), for example, won't directly cause you harm, the TGA happily sits by while it is sold as a form of medicine.

The TGA is a toothless tiger that takes almost forever to get around to doing anything at all and then, when it finally tells a snake oil salesman to stop telling lies about a product, the "directive" is often ignored. At this point, it seems, the TGA usually does nothing more.

It's a great system. It's like owning a car without an engine. Sure it still looks like a car and you can genuinely tell people you own a car but, as a mode of transport, it's worthless.

Today, the federal government announced its response to a review of the TGA. Here was an opportunity to put in place some decent rules and guidelines that would make it harder for people to just make up crap about a worthless product then advertise and sell it to naive or desperate consumers as if it were medicine. Here was a chance to give the TGA some well-funded teeth so it could pursue those who ignored the rules. But it seems the government has decided to do neither. Although they are making changes, it looks likely that nothing much will change as far as sellers of snake oil are concerned.

In effect, they're going to polish the car and add some pinstripes so it will look different - and they can honestly say they "made changes" - but it still won't get you anywhere when you need it.

It's a win for the heartless wankers in our communities. Regardless of "the big four's" deliberations over this week's interest rates announcement, the hucksters will continue to laugh all the way to their banks.

As a result of the announcement, Dr Harvey writes...

I’ve been a card carrying member of the Labor Party for some time. I worked hard to get rid of the Howard government and get Labor elected and I’ve sat on a number of the working parties and consultations that have made the recommendations outlined above.

But I can no longer be a member of the party when a Labor government fails to implement unanimous recommendations from its own working parties, and continues to procrastinate after a decade of calls for effective sanctions on advertising violations. I have today submitted my resignation.

The Croakey Blog tells us more about Dr Harvey's legal battle with SensaSlim - a battle that began as a result of him lodging a complain with the TGA - a body supposedly put in place for that very purpose.

The opinion expressed here is based on early reports. As always, I'm open to correction on the finer details.

Ballarat Independent - credible sources only

2011-12-02T11:05:00.003+08:00

The Ballarat Independent is an online news outlet set up, apparently, to offer an alternative to The Courier. Not living in Ballarat, I can't say I've ever read The Courier, but if the Independent's latest piece on vaccination is an example of an alternative viewpoint, the The Courier might well be the most rational newspaper in the country.

I could sit here for half an hour or more carefully wading through and challenging the near-endless stream of anti-vaccination canards but, frankly, I should only have to point out that the lengthy opinion piece (though it is not labelled as such) is the work of a couple of itinerant food reviewers.

Yes, they travel around eating stuff and The Ballarat Independent apparently feel this qualifies them to write on complex medical issues.

I don't think anyone at The Courier will be losing much sleep anytime soon.

Kinder, gentler scepticism

2011-12-02T10:05:00.004+08:00

As the Streisand Effect went into full swing over quasi-legal threats from the Burzynski Clinic against bloggers, Twitter was alive with commentary. Unfortunately, it seems some Tweeters decided to try and educate people who are, or want to be, Burzynski patients (I don't do Twitter so I picked this up from secondary comments).

This action [if it occurred] is despicable. The patients are not an enemy in this discussion. Few of us know how we would act if faced with serious adverse events with very few options for remedy. People who have been told that conventional medicine cannot deal with their ailment are rightly desperate and most likely vulnerable. They are not idiots - even if they do seek out "miracle cures".

As sceptics, our efforts can appear to be against the interests of desperate people looking for an answer. When we question or cast doubt on those we see as charlatans, whether they be psychic-mediums, perpetual-motion inventors, religious prophets or miracle healers, we are often seen to be also condemning those who see these same people as genuine.

This dilemma is outlined in some detail at The Twenty-First Floor.

There are some interesting yet differing views in the commentary...

This is an excellent blogpost, and brings up one of the awful sides of being a skeptic – in a situation like the one we’re in the middle of, the interested world splits into two ‘teams’ – on one side is the quack and the families he is treating, and on the other are the skeptics. The thing that we cannot give the families is the thing they get from the quacks – hope... [David H]

I don't know what the answer to the dilemma is.

AVN, Meryl Dorey: Unique data analysis

2011-11-30T21:43:00.026+08:00

In October this year, in an attempt to "take down" Dr Rachael Dunlop, Meryl Dorey wrote a blog article protesting that mercury had been found in "mercury-free" vaccines. Here's part of what she wrote [my bolding]...

In a recently-published study, it was revealed that the Infanrix hexa vaccine – a 7-in-1 shot that has supposedly always been completely free of thiomersal, contains between 9 and 10 ppm.[1]

She had initially written "Infanrix hepta" but eventually fixed it after being corrected almost immediately in the comments. The article, as you can see above, still says it's a "7-in-1 shot" though the average high school kid probably knows hexa (as in hexagon) means six, not seven. Indeed, Infanrix hexa is a 6-in-1 shot. That error, however, remains in the article today.

But that's not my real concern here.

The claim that the vaccine contains 9-10pmm (parts per million) mercury was based on a study in which eight different childhood vaccines were tested. One of them (one of them) showed a trace, but measurable, amount of mercury.

From the abstract of that study [my bolding]...

Seven of the 8 vaccines contained no detectable levels of Hg (less than 1 ppb); however, 1 vaccine (Infanrix hexa) tested positive for Hg at 10 ppb. The result was confirmed and validated by retesting the original sample. Follow-up testing was conducted on three additional samples of Infanrix hexa (one from the same production lot and two from a different lot). All three tested positive for Hg (average of 9.7 ppb).

The correct figure, from the study, is 9-10ppb - that's parts per BILLION - one thousand times less than Meryl Dorey's accusation! That might still be something the authorities should investigate, but it is not even remotely anywhere near the level of contamination Ms Dorey claimed.

When she wrote that article, she was not only advised about the "hepta/hexa" error but was also advised, by commenter Shelley, that she'd got the mercury concentration wrong by a rather large amount.

Ms Dorey even acknowledged the error saying...

"You are absolutely right Shelley – thank you for pointing this out and I apologise for missing that. I double-checked too. Serves me right to [sic] writing 2 long blog posts in one day."

Later in that same comment thread, Shelley asked if Ms Dorey would mind correcting the error in the article "so that readers aren’t misled by your post?" ~~Meryl commented five more times on that article over the following days but never made the change~~.

~~I checked immediately before writing this and the parts per million error is still there - uncorrected - still wrong - still out by a factor of 1000.~~ [A correction was added in a paragraph placed below the errant paragraph, rather than the text itself being corrected with a notation.]

Today, on the AVN Facebook page, Meryl Dorey wrote a comment...

Something in that comment caught my eye...[my bolding]...

...A recent study tested our current DPaT and found 9ppm of mercury in there when there is supposed to be none...

There it is again - 9 parts per MILLION. Once again, Meryl has got it wrong, claiming the contamination level of mercury is one thousand times greater than the trace levels found by researchers.

But it gets worse. Meryl also wrote...

And if you think that methyl mercury is safe when injected into babies - think again.

Thiomersal (aka thimerosal) is the product at the heart of the vaccine-mercury issue. Thiomersal is not methyl-mercury. Vaccines do not contain methyl-mercury. Tuna contains methyl-mercury, vaccines don't - not even those with thiomersal absolutely added on purpose. No sane person, to my knowledge, is injecting methyl-mercury into babies - that stuff is toxic! (as always, I'm open to correction by doctors and scientists on the finer details)

Anyone who's done even the most basic research on vaccination and the so-called "mercury debate" would know that Thiomersal is not methyl-mercury. It's one of the first things you learn when you take an interest in the issue. Well, it's one of the first things you need to learn if you're going to claim to have done your research - otherwise it can look like you have no idea what you're talking about.

But let's go back to that study that Ms Dorey based an entire blog article on - the study that found trace amounts (9ppb) of mercury in one childhood vaccine. Here's what the authors wrote about the mercury they did find [my bolding]...

Although the levels of Hg detected are substantially lower than any established exposure safety limits, the results of this study reveal that inaccuracies exist in public health messages...

It seems that even these concerned authors recognise that there are safe levels.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article about Meryl Dorey's apparent poor grasp of basic maths, when she stated that 3/5000 is just 0.0006% when it is, in fact, 0.06%. She was out, I noted, by a factor of 100. I noted in that article that such errors are not uncommon in the lay community but it was important for someone regularly doling out medical advice to get the basics right.

Embarrassingly, I made a simple error myself in that article. I wrote that 1/100 = 0.001 when it is, of course, 0.01 (I got the percentage right though). An anonymous commenter advised me of the error and I immediately corrected it and made a note about the change right there in the article. I was out by a factor of just 10, and I wasn't scaring parents about a significant health issue, but my article now stands corrected.

[You'll see similar corrections throughout this post. Humans sometimes get things wrong. The trick is to clearly fix the errors then NOT repeat them over and over]

I then thanked the person who'd highlighted the error and I added "I'd hate to leave an obvious error there forever, as if it were correct."

Looking back on it know, that last remark might seem somewhat prescient - except that I essentially knew it wouldn't be long before I'd see egregious numerical errors on an AVN page. No psychic powers required. You can almost set your calendar by them.

Frankly, I find it difficult to understand how anyone who claims to have "done their own research", can find any comfort in any "information" that comes from any AVN source. Even the simplest, most-easily-checked details are often incorrect - and then, even after errors are pointed out, they remain ~~uncorrected~~ [with a separate note pointing out the error] and get repeated.

And I'm only dealing with the simple stuff that a layman can grasp. I can't imagine the errors that must run rife through the complicated stuff.

Update: Added Freezepage link
More important update: I meant to include a link to a very comprehensive response to Ms Dorey's blog article. The comment by Ashley Locke is right there in the blog but Ms Dorey never bothered to address it. Indeed, it deals with some seemingly complex chemistry and analysis techniques - I doubt Ms Dorey could address it if she wanted to. It's way over my head, which is why I would trust actual scientists over a lay-person who has no apparent understanding of science at all.

I am neither a doctor, nor a scientist. 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.

AVN: Illiterate or mischievous?

2011-11-27T23:37:00.009+08:00

Trawling though the Australian Vaccination Network's Facebook page a couple of days ago, I found this comment from Meryl Dorey, which implies Pertussis (Whooping Cough) vaccination is "ineffective"...

She begins with a link to this news article the actual title of which is...

Acellular Pertussis Vaccine's Waning Immunity Caused California Epidemic

Dorey added the question "Waning or nonexistent?" to that heading for her subject line. She then injects her thoughts into a quote selected from the article [my bolding]...

‎"It [the ineffective vaccine] certainly caused the 2010 California epidemic, and it happened in Minnesota and Oregon, too. Waning immunity with acellular pertussis led to greater vulnerability in 7- to 10-year-olds,"

The words "the ineffective vaccine" do not appear in the article. That is Dorey's spin. She also failed to quote the next bit of the article [my bolding]...

"The durability of protection with the acellular vaccine is not as good as with the whole cell vaccine, but the problem with the whole-cell vaccine was that it was quite reactive," causing local reactions and fevers, she said in an interview.

"At this point, people would not accept the whole-cell vaccine," which means something needs to be done with the acellular vaccine, she said. Possible options include additional boosted vaccinations, or moving administration of the fifth childhood dose of DTaP from 4-year-olds to 6-year-olds."

So, the article actually does say the vaccine "caused" a 2010 epidemic in California but does it mean it in the way a casual reader might assume from Dorey's comment or is it just a poor choice of wording? And does the article go on to describe the vaccine as "ineffective" or its effects as "nonexistent"?

People familiar with Ms Dorey won't be surprised to learn that the article really implies no such things. Ms Dorey's implications against the vaccine can only result from a most selective reading of the piece (unless she's either semi-literate or willfully mischievous).

On Friday, ABC Radio station 612AM in Queensland decided to air Ms Dorey's views on the federal governments changes to Family Tax and immunisation Benefits [update: see complaint resolution here]. She took the opportunity to repeat her bizarre ideas on the pertussis outbreaks saying...

"...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."

The comment, which is wrong on several levels, went unchallenged leaving the average ABC listener with the impression that the pertussis vaccine actually directly causes whooping cough.

I'd hesitate to suggest that it was Ms Dorey's intent to mislead listeners but her intent is as irrelevant as her opinion. She's speaking out against something she apparently has little to no understanding about. Why is the ABC is even giving her a voice?

So, how is she wrong?

The Family Practice News article makes the relatively simple point that vaccine immunity wanes faster than expected so some fully-vaccinated kids range from being fully-immunised to underimmunised to effectively not immunised after a period of several years following their last vaccination. This means that community vaccination levels are somewhat lower than required for herd immunity, resulting in outbreaks of pertussis.

A casual reading of the article, by anyone with a half-decent high-school-level of education, informs that the vaccine is working – just not for as long as everyone would like. It even has a graph showing the rate at which immunity falls relative to the time of last vaccination. If vaccination didn't work at all, if it was "ineffective" or its benefits "nonexistent", there would be no immunity to wane – the graph would be flat.

It's also clear from the article that not vaccinating is not a better alternative. Here's a selected quote you won't find on any page controlled by the AVN [my bolding]...

Roughly 70% of the children who had received all five scheduled doses had received their fifth dose at 4 years, and about 30% received their fifth dose at 5 years, with less than 1% of the children receiving their last dose at 6 years. One percent of the control children and 8% of the cases had received no doses of DTaP.

That's right, unvaccinated kids are effectively eight times more likely to become infected. But you're unlikely to see that selectively quoted by Meryl Dorey.

The vaccine works. It is not "ineffective" and its effects are most certainly not "nonexistent". Its effects just don't last as long as desired – but whoever claimed that vaccines are perfect?

Arguing that immunity from vaccination is nonexistent if it isn't permanent is like arguing that grip from tyres is nonexistent if they don't last forever.

In July 2010, the Health Care Complaints Commission issued a public warning against the AVN claiming, in part, that the organisation "quotes selectively from research to suggest that vaccination may be dangerous".

Our national broadcaster has assisted them to do that again in this piece of on-air nonsense.

AVN & Living Wisdom - I'm confused

2011-11-27T17:03:00.009+08:00

This article began life as a postscript to a previous piece but it took on a life of its own...

I've read several times about problems with subscriptions to the AVN magazine "Living Wisdom" (problems highlighted by people opposed to the AVN). Today I decided to look for myself to see what the problems are. Here's my summary of the situation based on information taken directly from the AVN-Living Wisdom website...

Issue 1 - published October, 2008
Issue 2 - published February, 2009
Issue 3 - published May 2009
Issue 4 - published ? 2009
Issue 5 - published December 2009
Issue 6 - published March 2010
Issue 7 - published July 2010

So it appears four magazines were produced in 2009 then just two were produced in 2010. The website shows Issue 7, published in July 2010, as the current issue - so it appears that no issues have been published in the last 16 months. I'm beginning to understand why some people are expressing concerns over the repeated calls for subscribers (calls that are often met with replies of "done" and "thanks", which suggest that there are subscribers out there who, one would presume, should expect to receive the prodcut they've subscribed to within a reasonable time frame.)

More interestingly, unlike other magazine subscriptions, regular Living Wisdom subscriptions do not appear to come with a time frame. When I, for example, have subscribed to other types of magazines, I received a set number (usually 6 or 12), within a fixed period (usually one year). But a Gift Subscription to Living Wisdom magazine states only that it includes six printed issues.

I can't find any mention of how often regular subscribers should expect to receive each of their copies.

But it gets much more complicated (please, if I'm getting this all wrong, tell me now so I can clarify)...

A One-Year Professional Living Wisdom Subscription includes six issues (not copies, but "issues") of the magazine in printed format. But, looking through the back issues listed above (and even further back when the magazine was named Informed Voice and Informed Choice), it seems clear that there aren't six issues being published per year. Indeed, anyone who took up a one-year subscription in the few months prior to December 2010 will presumably not have seen a single "current" issue, never mind six - and their one-year subscription will have presumably elapsed by now.

A One-Year subscription to the online version of the magazine also claims to include six issues, which suggests, to me, that it really does mean "issues" and not "copies" because who would want six copies of a digital magazine?

With a current publication rate of less than one per year, it could take a while for the six-issues subscription promise to be fulfilled.

UPDATE:

Living Wisdom - the gift that keeps not giving

More information on Living Wisdom subscriptions.

AVN cashes in on Roxon changes

2011-11-27T11:39:00.007+08:00

As I predicted in my previous article, the federal government's changes to benefits, dropping the current immunisation supplement and tying some existing Family Tax Benefit supplements to vaccination status, will give impetus to the anti-vaccination lobby who will use the new rules to garner publicity and bolster support.

It has begun.

The following request from Meryl Dorey appeared this morning on the Facebook page of the Australian Vaccination Network (that link is not to the Facebook page)...

Here's the pitch [my bolding]...

Do you need the AVN? With the current government policies to penalise you for your vaccination decision, can you do without a strong pro-choice movement in Australia? If you believe that what the AVN is doing is important and necessary, please subscribe NOW - we need your support and you need us too!

It was just too predictable. Hopefully the Facebook page is irrelevant enough that few people will see the cry for cash but it won't end there. (***See note at end of article)

Things had been going poorly for the AVN for quite some time with the Australian media largely ignoring them after the HCCC issued a public warning declaring the AVN to be an anti-vaccination organisation that selectively quotes from research and promotes misleading information. That slide into irrelevance changed this week with AVN president Meryl Dorey turning up on at least two networks, including a sickeningly credulous effort on ABC radio,...

...and in one newspaper, expressing her views on the Family Tax changes. That's three appearances in 24 hours - that I know about! Dorey must think the gods have finally given her a break.

The Gillard government changes, announced by Nicola Roxon and Jenny Macklin, have made the anti-vaccination lobby group relevant again. Hopefully, while the government implements what is, it seems, little more than a cost-cutting exercise, "social media activists" will continue the hard work they've been doing to bring the AVN to account and to ensure such groups and their strongest supporters are seen as the fringe conspiracy theorists they are.

I repeat my view that this change, which was announced as a health initiative intended to increase vaccination around Australia, is a win for the anti-vaccination lobby. The best we can hope for is that it's a short-lived win.

***NOTE:

I was going to write a short note here about the confusing nature of subscriptions to the AVN's Living Wisdom Magazine - but the amount of confusion was such that I've made it a post of its own.

Burzynski meets Streisand

2011-11-26T15:43:00.001+08:00

Someone named Stanislaw Burzynski is currently experiencing the Streisand Effect after a person claiming to represent him contacted Andy Lewis, a sceptical blogger at Quackometer, with apparent legal threats.

Lewis had earlier posted an article critical of Burzynski's "cancer research".

JoBrody has posted days-worth of Tweets that demonstrate the exponential spread that occurs when the Streisand Effect gets going.

UPDATE:

Just had to link to this exchange that occurred mostly "behind the scenes" at Yahoo answers.

Govt fail a win for anti-vax lobby

2011-11-25T14:07:00.005+08:00

Last night I wrote about a change in the way the Federal (Gillard) Government will seek to promote immunisation by imposing a financial penalty on families who do not get their children vaccinated.

I expressed concern that, to me, it looked more like a cost-saving measure than a health initiative and I questioned if people would be able to avoid the penalty if they registered as conscientious objectors.

My concerns have been vindicated.

Carol commented with a link to the government FAQ on the new policy in which Family Tax Benefits are supposed to be withheld from families where children do not meet specified vaccination milestones.

The existing Maternity Immunisation Allowance allows for parents to claim a conscientious objection to vaccination and this loophole was widely reported by the anti-vaccination lobby who advised parents opposed to vaccination how to get the money without vaccinating. It is clear now that conscientious objection will remain in the new system.

The problematic part of the objection form is this statement to be signed by the parent after speaking with an appropriate health professional...

I have a personal, philosophical, religious or medical belief involving a conviction that vaccination under the National Immunisation Program should not take place. On this basis, I choose not to have my child immunised.

In other words, parents can opt out of immunising their kids simply because they want to and yet still qualify for a government benefit that, supposedly, should not be paid to parents who choose not to vaccinate.

I wonder if I can claim a conscientious objection to certain tax laws so that I can claim a negative gearing benefit, without having to suffer any sort of loss usually associated with such claims? Perhaps I can claim a tax deduction for uniform and travel expenses and charitable donations, without actually incurring those expenses due to personal beliefs surrounding them?

Why is the government making up penalties they have no genuine intention of imposing on people who are actually familiar with the system? It's madness on a grand scale. The only parents who will lose out are those who do not vaccinate, for some reason, but who are ignorant of the system and the available loopholes they could otherwise exploit or who find themselves in front of an unwilling doctor. This means groups like the AVN could become more relevant as they seek to reach and inform these parents of "their rights" (like this) and to promote sympathetic doctors.

The AVN should be cheering this decision, it's a win for the anti-vax lobby. The pro-vax lobby should not.

So I repeat my initial conclusion that this looks like little more than the dumping of the much-rorted Maternity Immunisation Allowance and I find myself tempted to agree with anti-vaxxers who think this might just be a political distraction.

UPDATE:

At least one ABC report has this all wrong, describing the change as $2100 in "extra benefits" and "increased payments". The government FAQ states quite clearly "Families will need to have their children fully immunised to receive the existing $726 per child Family Tax Benefit Part A supplement, replacing the Maternity Immunisation Allowance from 1 July 2012." There is no "extra benefit" or "increase" here - there's actually less money on offer.

The story accepts comments. Please feel free to set them straight. (Though no comments have appeared yet. I know at least one was sent.)

UPDATE:

Since writing this, I've seen/heard Meryl Dorey's views broadcast on two different networks. It seems this change has made her "relevant" again.

Vaccinate or lose out

2011-11-24T23:10:00.017+08:00

The following is based on a single news report and may not entirely reflect reality. Corrections may be made as things become clearer...

Since some parents are not convinced that the potential maiming or loss of their child to disease is enough reason to vaccinate against such disease, the Australian federal government is apparently set to impose financial penalties for not vaccinating.

Marianne Betts writes in the Herald Sun...

THE Federal Government will withhold more than $2100 in tax benefits for families who refuse to vaccinate their children.

The move is a drive by the Gillard Government to boost vaccination rates, with one in 10 Australian children not immunised.

She goes on to explain that the penalty will result from the withholding of a Family Tax Benefit supplement.

The supplement, worth $726 per child each year, will now only be paid once a child is fully immunised at one, two and five years of age, meaning more than $2100 could be withheld.

More interestingly, however, the report says [my bolding]...

The new arrangements will replace the maternity immunisation allowance which provides $129 for families who meet immunisation requirements when their child is two and five.

Hang on a minute...

The Family Tax Benefit part A supplement is currently $726.35 per child per annum. The Maternity Immunisation Allowance (MIA) is paid in two $129 amounts.

So if the FTB(A) supplement is to remain at the current level, it appears at first glance that all parents who would otherwise qualify for the MIA will actually be $258 worse off, per child. And this is a drive to encourage parents to immunise? Forgive my cynicism but "yeah, right!".

Now, I'm not suggesting the MIA isn't without its problems but, from where I sit, the biggest problem is the result of the government allowing people to claim it whilst having no intention of ever immunising their children despite having no sound medical reasons for not doing so.

It really is a case of..

A: "You have to immunise to get this money"

B: "But I don't want to"

A: "Okay then, here's the cash".

It's ridiculous.

That problem could have been solved by doing away with conscientious objector loopholes so that only parents who immunised or who could not immunise for medical reasons (some children cannot be safely immunised) could claim the payment. This would retain the carrot aspect of the program and ensure the money was properly targeted.

I'm not personally in favour of the withholding of general supplements to impose a financial penalty on parents who don't toe certain lines. These supplements are supposed to reflect the cost of raising children and it would be difficult to argue, simply, that parents who don't vaccinate do not endure the same costs of raising a family. Witholding a general payment comes dangerously close to compelling parents to do something that many people, even in the pro-vaccination camp, do not want to be compulsory.

It also adds yet another level of complexity and compliance to a system that already has some parents scratching their heads. What other conditions might the government impose to make the payments too difficult for average families to bother with.

If we want parents to vaccinate, then I'd prefer that we specifically rewarded parents who do vaccinate. It's a subtle but important difference, in my opinion, but it's also a position from which I could possibly be moved. (I'd also like an education campaign as to why we should vaccinate, and why groups like the AVN are a bunch of wallies, rather than leaving it to unpaid participants in social media to do the government's job for it - but that's another story. SEE UPDATE at bottom of this article)

So, while there might be some merit in penalising parents who are not acting in the best interests of their children or the wider community, according to the science-of-the-day, I think I see a cost-saving measure here being dressed up as a health initiative.

Either way, the anti-vax lobby will not be impressed as the loss of more than $2100 per child is going to sting a lot more than the loss of $258 per child - that they could always claim anyway. This assumes, of course, that the government don't continue to allow conscientious objection to immunisation in which case, this really is just cost-cutting - nothing more. After all, no matter what happens with vaccination rates, the government only stands to save money here - even if we hit an amazing 99.9% coverage.

We'll wait and see but, based on this report, I'll withhold my excitement.

HT to Carol Calderwood at SAVN.

Interestingly, I just checked the Australian Vaccination Network's Facebook page and there's still no mention of this story. Sure there's some nonsense misinterpreting a story about waning pertussis immunity in California and a conspiracy video featuring David "Lizards Rule" Icke (WTF?) and even something about mercury poisoning in the 1950s (WTF?) - but nothing about this significant change in Australian vaccination policy.

Way to keep your fingers on the pulse guys. (That's a medical analogy, so they might not understand it. Pfft!)

UPDATE:

The Age expands on the story and confirms my concerns but also offers some detail. I remain convinced, at this stage, that this is a savings measure dressed up as a health initiative. Tell me why I should buy a tinfoil hat if you disagree.

Read more...

Gillard, Roxon and Macklin save money but make anti-vaccination group relevant again

How the new vaccination rules promote the anti-vaccination lobby

Meryl Dorey, AVN: The simple things in life...

2011-11-18T14:26:00.006+08:00

There is an old saying that "the simple things in life are often the best". It was even used in an advertisement for breakfast cereal in the 1980s. However, for some people the simple things often appear to present unavoidable difficulties.

I've written previously about Meryl Dorey, president of the Australian Vaccination Network, and her apparent lack of understanding of relatively simple mathematical concepts. Specifically, in August last year, I noted her use of syllogistic reasoning when concluding that if 88% of people infected with a disease were vaccinated against it, then 88% of vaccinated people must be infected with that disease. It's akin to saying that if most dogs have four legs, then most things with four legs are dogs.

It was nonsense then, it's still nonsense now and yet her comment remains right there on her blog, without correction by her.

Today, as I leisurely strolled through the SAVN Facebook page, I saw reference to a thread on the AVN's Facebook page* in which numbers had reared their ugly head again. Immediately I thought to myself, "this can't end well". Sure enough, further down the thread, my prescience was confirmed as Meryl Dorey had another attempt at publicly wrangling some basic arithmetic - and lost.

Here's the important part of the comment in text format for you...

"...if it is only 3/5,000 who are not vaccinated, why are you guys so worried? Are vaccines so ineffective that your fully-vaccinated kids can be placed at risk when the rate of unvaccinated in the country is a mere 0.0006%? Sounds like much ado about nothing to me..."

I'm not a scientist or doctor so I'm not interested here in the validitiy, or otherwise, of the actual data set that lead to this mini diatribe, I'm just looking at the aritmetic.

Do you see the problem?

Meryl states that 3/5000 = 0.0006%...

3/5000 does indeed equal 0.0006 - that's pretty basic maths. It does not, however, equal 0.0006% (percent). In fact, it equals just 0.06%. Meryl is wrong by a magnitude of 100 times.

For example, we know that 1/100 is just one percent (1%) and that 2/100 is just 2%. And yet, if we divide one by one hundred (1/100), we get 0.01 (note: originally had the wrong figure here). To get this into a percentage, we must multiply by 100 - as most of us will have learnt in primary school.

So 1/100 as a percentage is ... 1 (divided by) 100 (times) 100 = 1%

Similarly... 3 (divided by) 5000 (times) 100 = 0.06%

Ordinarily, this sort of thing is inconsequential - after all, an awful lot of people struggle to get their heads around maths they perhaps learnt in primary school but have had little need for remembering since. But the AVN hold themselves up as experts in immunology and science, sometimes even claiming to have a better understanding of scientific data than the scientists who collected, tabulated or reviewed that data.

But they apparently can't do simple percentages properly.

If you don't understand primary-school-level arithmetic, then how can anyone trust your word on mind-bogglingly-complex issues like immunology or bio-chemistry? I wouldn't.

*My apologies for not linking to AVN websites. Frankly, they don't deserve the link boosts and I can't be bothered going into html-editing mode in order to paste a "no-follow" in every link.

HT to Sarah Norris at SAVN whose comment I noticed before writing this.

AVN: Facts and the law.

2011-11-07T22:05:00.002+08:00

YOUR VERDICT: Test your knowledge in my legal quiz.

You were held back at work one Friday evening and are now driving home. You have plans for tonight and don't want to be late. You choose to travel at 90kmh for part of the journey.

Options

You can drive at 90kmh because:

A. It's the weekend and you are in a hurry.

B. Your car is a red V8 and has mag wheels.

C. Your cruise control is broken.

D. None of the above.

Answer:

Answer A will be acceptable to many of your friends and colleagues who can sympathise with your plight but it does not constitute grounds for travelling fast. Answer B is a widely accepted stereotype but your domestic vehicle's specifications do not invoke any extension of special rights. Answer C is also not correct. A broken cruise control is more likely to land you with an infringement than be accepted as a reason for travelling at speed. The correct answer, therefore, is D, none of the above.

While I'm no legal expert, and not even more knowledgeable than most on road rules, it's absolutely clear from the above example that it is never acceptable to travel at 90kmh.

Am I right?

Or could it be that, while answers A, B and C are indeed wrong, there are other, unlisted, possibilities that make driving at 90kmh acceptable. For example, what if the speed limit on that stretch of road was 90kmh or higher?

Obviously you can do 90 on that stretch of road but that option wasn't part of my quiz and so, for the sake of this quiz, the correct answer remains D: none of the above.

This quiz was prompted by a similar quiz at Australian Doctor in which the author poses a list of options for a doctor wanting to refuse to sign an immunisation conscientious objection form.

These forms allow a parent or guardian to claim a federal immunisation allowance without actually having their child immunised - because they want the money without fulfilling the immunisation requirement for the payment. It's an idiotic situation, to say the least, but that's a separate issue.

The sample doctor quiz offers three options based solely on the doctor's personal feelings about the objection form and avoidance of vaccination. The only other option, as in my own quiz, is "none of the above" and this is given as the correct answer for the doctor quiz. There are no alternative reasons given why a doctor might object to signing the form or if and when such reasons might be acceptable.

Now, I'm not a doctor or a lawyer so I won't even dare to guess at whether there might be other possible answers but Meryl Dorey (also not a lawyer of doctor), from the anti-vaccine Australian Vaccination Network, has jumped on this quiz (yes, QUIZ!) as if it's the final word on the legal requirements of doctors to sign the conscientious objection form.

On her blog she says...

Written by Dr Craig Lilienthal, a practising GP, medicolegal consultant and a member of Avant’s Medical Advisory Council, it appears that there is a legal requirement for doctors to sign these forms. This is information parents need to be aware of and, if doctors do refuse to sign, it looks as though parents would be well within their rights to file an official complaint with the healthcare complaints commission in their State or Territory.

It's a quiz, Meryl, not a piece of legislation. It's a quiz, just like mine, with three limited options or "none" to choose from, just like mine. It surely does not cover all possible options, just three very narrowly defined options.

Again, I'm no lawyer or doctor (neither is Meryl), but I suspect the rules governing a doctor's rights in regards to these forms is just a little more complex that a three-limited-options sample quiz.

The cognitive dissonance must be head-spinning.

Now, it may well be that, under the law, no doctor has good reason to refuse to sign the objection form (I simply don't know) - but the quiz itself is hardly solid evidence of this, unless there's also never a good reason to drive at 90kmh because my online sample quiz showed that to be true.

If the law makes it clear that a doctor is obliged to sign the form on request then, Meryl, show me the law, not a sample quiz apparently designed to explain a limited point. If there's a law that compels doctors to assist ill-informed conspiracy theorists to undermine immunisation policy and gain a government payment under seemingly false pretenses, then I'd like to know about it.

Meryl also takes issue with the claim in the quiz that the objection form relates to "Family Assistance payments". She writes...

(please note – this information is incorrect since the conscientious objector has nothing to do with school entry or Family Assistance payments – only the two payments noted above)

Note that here she's openly questioning the knowledge of the very same person she's holding up as the expert whose word, she suggests, is final. The cognitive dissonance must be head-spinning.

She might just be in a pedantic mood but the Maternity Immunisation Allowance is paid under the Family Assistance section of the "A New Tax System Act 1999" which, in my book, makes it a Family Assistance payment. It's even listed under "Payments" on the Family Assistance website. So once again, it seems that Meryl is simply wrong.

I find it difficult to understand why anyone would trust the AVN as a source of information on something as important as the health (and life) of their child or children when even the simple things present major challenges to them - and when they apparently consider an online sample quiz to be rock solid legal advice.

I did my own research...

2011-11-03T13:42:00.016+08:00

One morning, about a year ago, I got in my car, turned the key and nothing happened! Nothing at all except that annoying sound of the other keys jangling against each other. The car was, it seemed, quite dead.

I went inside and called the local mechanic. He said "it sounds like the battery's dead, we did tell you before that it was getting pretty old and that your alternator wasn't exactly in great working order."

He offered to come out and check it over and to bring a replacement battery to get me going again. Or, if I felt capable, I could take the battery in, get it checked and get a replacement if need be. Idiot, how could I get the battery to him without a car?

Although no money was mentioned, clearly his real plan was to charge me a call-out fee - and then more for a new battery - and then he'd "advise" me to get the alternator fixed too. It's always about money with those guys.

I'd been conned for years by mechanics pulling similar tricks. Every time the car went in for a service or tune, there was a bill. Every fourth or fifth time, there was always something extra that needed doing. I mean, seriously, why is it that they put on new brake pads and yet they keep wearing out? If they only last a few years, then they don't really work at all do they? And clutches and oil seals and thermostats and radiators... the list of things they keep telling you to repair seems endless. It's always about money with those guys.

The problem, as I found out, is that mechanics all basically learn from "the same book" - and the books are written by the same people who make the parts that keep wearing out. Toyota write books about maintaining and repairing Toyotas. Nissan, Holden and Ford do the same for their own cars - and all of those companies base their advice on the standard advice given by automotive engineers so all those books are really just one book, with different logos on the cover. As a result, mechanics just blindly give the same advice they've been taught in colleges and read in these books respectively run by and written by the auto industry.

Replacing the battery didn't fix their oil leaks or brake issues.

My interests are not their interests. Their interests are profits (Toyota made over $11BILLION PROFIT in 2006!!!). My interest is to get my car to stop wearing out. It's always about money with those guys.

So, on that frosty morning I decided to stop being a sheeple and just assuming mechanics knew what they were doing. They don't, they're just sheeple too. I decided to do my own research and find a better, more holistic and natural way to get my car going.

First I asked friends about their experiences with cars. Quite a few had endured similar problems and despite replacing the battery, still had problems.Not always the same problem, but replacing the battery didn't fix their oil leaks or brake issues. It was just one thing after another.

So I turned to Google and what do you know - it turns out engines can run on water - not just petrol. So I filled my tank with water. Thousands of dollars a year saved instantly and the solution is one of nature's gifts. In fact, I installed a rainwater tank in the boot, so it'll never run out. And since I also found out global warming is a conspiracy, I know it'll never stop raining.

There are engines that, once started, will never stop.

And apparently cars can be powered by sunlight, another gift from the universe. Why do mechanics never mention this? Answer: "it's not in the book". So I went to K-Mart and bought a dozen boxes of little garden lights and put them on the roof of the car. That would sort out the alternator problem. Cheap too at $30 a box of ten. And pretty. And there's no formaldehyde and not one cent went to Big Auto - DOUBLE BONUS!

Did you ever have a pushbike? I had one for years as a kid and never, NEVER, replaced the little rubber brake things. Obviously these were superior quality compared with the brakes fitted by mechanics, so I put some of those on the front wheels of my car. I left the back wheels alone because, let's face it, if the front stops, the back will stop too. It's logical. Four sets of brakes just meant four times the expense. You won't find cheap and reliable pushbike brake pads mentioned anywhere in any Toyota car manual. It's always about money with those guys. I think I heard somewhere that one of the Murdochs sits on the board too - have you noticed the Toyota ads in newspapers? Now you know why.

Doing my own research has been amazing. I never realised how much information is actually out there because no one in the car industry or media - or politics - ever tells us about it. But there's heaps.

Did you know there are engines that, once started, will never stop? They don't even need sunlight or water - and definitely no petrol. This information is actively suppressed because industry can't make money out of something that needs no parts or ongoing additives. When I find someone who sells them, I'm getting one of these engines. A small mortgage should cover it - and then, no more money to Big Auto and no one getting rich by scamming me.

"And ye shall know the truth, and the Truth shall make you free." - John 8:32

I found that quote at whale.to. It's so true. Whale is a website dedicated to telling the truth about almost everything that others won't tell you about. Did you know the world is run by lizard-people aliens? Neither did I until I did my own research. Whale has the evidence. It's amazing what you can learn when you avoid mainstream education and go and get the information and FACTS for yourself, from independent sources. Whale has amazing secret advice about vaccination and cancer cures too - information you won't find anywhere else.

I asked him to name every chemical used to make automotive paint - he couldn't name ANY!!!

So, one year later, I've done a lot of research into cars and I've learned a lot that my mechanic was clearly never going to tell me. I don't think he's dishonest by nature, I just don't think he even knew half of this stuff himself. He works hard (not for free, mind you and I suspect he gets kickbacks from recommending brake pad replacements every few years or so) but he's stuck in the wrong paradigm where each problem is diagnosed and treated individually rather than holisitically. If the brakes don't work, he fixes just the brakes. If it's the radiator, he repairs just that. Same with wiper blades and spark plugs. Not once has he suggested just giving the car a good, thorough wash with bio-degradable, organic soap to solve all the problems at the same time. I was so gullible to trust him.

It's been a tough year too. Plenty of sheeple friends and various sheeple mechanics I've spoken to about the problem insist "change the battery!", as if there's only ever one way to fix things. I stood firm but they treat educated people like idiots if we dare to question their particular kind of "knowledge". I just tell them now, "I did my own research" and when I lay out the facts, they're speechless!!!

I'm still doing my research but I already know more than my mechanic, which is a good feeling. I asked him to name every chemical used to make automotive paint - he couldn't name ANY!!! And yet I'm supposed to trust his advice. They contain cancer-causing volatile hydrocarbons, by the way, so I sanded all the paint off my car so it's is less toxic now and has taken on a wonderfully natural, all-over earthy colour. Plus, it hasn't had issues with the brakes for a whole year.

I'll be honest with you too - some of the things I've tried haven't been entirely successful - I need to believe in them much more as it's clear my cynicism is messing things up.

My car still does nothing at all when I turn the key but I'm getting there. I'll have the answer pretty soon and I've only spent a few of thousand dollars so far on alternative technologies - like the mini-wind-farm - but none of it on petrol or mechanics, so I'm saving money all over the place. If you have any useful advice, I'm open minded, ready to learn and willing to try anything.

Just don't tell me to change the battery, I'm not that gullible.

**UPDATE:

A friend said I could borrow a spare battery. He put it in and the car started first time. I'm glad the solar lamps have finally worked. I guess it took time for them to charge up. I'm also glad I didn't fall for the "change your battery" mantra.

But now it's making a coughing sound and it's stopped - must be my friend's battery causing trouble, like I knew it would. I'll put some more rain water in the fuel tank and see if that helps.

***Inspired by this article which should probably be read with this article on guaranteed cancer cures and this one on more guaranteed cures - in case the other guaranteed cures don't work.

AVN in WA: Politically incorrect

2011-11-02T23:23:00.006+08:00

Barry Hasse, MHR, has spoken out against the Australian Vaccination Network and parents who fall under their spell.

This has naturally got under Meryl Dorey's skin.

Before I begin, let me say that where Meryl could have picked on Mr Haase, and where she might have found some support from me, is in the MP's labelling of some people as "tree huggers" and "hippies" as if these are the sole constituency of anti-vax-central.

According to a West Australian article, vaccination rates are low in areas of metropolitan Perth - areas not renowned for hippies but more likely the "blue rinse set". Places like Cambridge, Mosman Park, City Beach and Mt Claremont. I could stand corrected but unless things have changed since I left, these are not suburbs noted as hippie hangouts and they are somewhat devoid of forests.

Mr Haase has got some parliamentary campaigning to do if he's genuinely concerned about vaccination rates.

But Meryl was upset, in part, because Mr Haase wrote...

"Recent reports state the Australian Vaccination Network, an anti-vaccine lobby group; have been holding meetings in Western Australia. I find it illogical that sane parents would pay $15 to hear why they should not save the lives of their children."

Indeed.

Logic is not strong in a group that takes the incredibly small risks actually associated with vaccination and inflates them well above the much greater risks of infections.

Logic is, by definition, not strong in a group that applies syllogistic reasoning to simple data sets then expects us to believe they can assess complex scientific data.

Logic is not strong in a group that insists, repeatedly, that mortality, rather than incidence or morbidity, is the only way to assess the efficacy of vaccination.

Logic is not strong in a group that insists that if just one vaccinated person becomes infected with a disease, that the vaccination is therefore useless even if thousands of vaccinated people, exposed to the same contagion, don't become infected. See "Nirvana Fallacy"

I'll leave the question of sanity alone as that would require individual diagnosis by a qualified person.

But Meryl Dorey, as so often happens, has missed the point again. In a letter to Mr Haase, she wrote...

"As for the huge increase in cases of whooping cough – the current epidemic is now in its 4th year and the number of cases has increased exponentially despite a record high level of vaccination. The vaccine is simply not working but yet [sic], the unvaccinated are deliberately vilified."

But Ms Dorey knows, or should know, that the overall vaccination rate is irrelevant in places like Denmark, in WA, where vaccination rates are reportedly as low as 73% and where whooping cough is at an all-time high.

If you live in a suburb where a high percentage of people regularly drink, drive and speed, then you are at much higher risk of accident than people who live in quiet suburbs - in other states! So while overall road safety awareness might be high, statistics in your suburb will suck and screw up the national road toll. In the very same way, if you live in an area where vaccination rates are low, below the level considered adequate for herd immunity, then it makes no difference to your children that other places in Australia have incredibly high rates of vaccination. Your region is going to contribute heavily to infection stats and your kids might be among those statistics.

Vaccines can't work adequately where large groups of people are refusing them. Expecting otherwise is also not logical.

I was originally going to poke fun at Meryl's failure to correctly post a link to the Kimberley Page article (she posted a "mailto" link instead) but thought it might seem petty. So I won't mention it.

AVN in WA: Sanitation causes autism?

2011-10-30T22:32:00.001+08:00

Meryl Dorey, from the Australian Vaccination Network is in WA holding "seminars" where she will no doubt warn parents of the "dangers" and "myths" of vaccination.

Anti-vaccinationists love correlations where they take to sets of data, which may or may not be directly related, and draw conclusions from the coincidences of those data sets.

One of their favourites is that autism (and, well, any number of diseases and syndromes) has supposedly increased since vaccination began.

Another is that vaccination wasn't responsible for the reduction in many childhood diseases. Instead, they claim it was sanitation and clean water alone that led to improvements in health.

So basically we have vaccination and sanitation sitting side-by-side. One supposedly causing autism and the other delivering better health.

How is it, therefore, that they don't claim a direct link between sanitation and autism. Surely if autism has increased in the way they suggest, then its timeline must fit neatly with that of the roll-out of sanitation and clean water.

If you attend one of the AVN "seminars", you might like to ask Meryl Dorey why this correlation is ignored.

AVN in WA: Credible research?

2011-10-29T20:58:00.011+08:00

In a comment today on the AVN's Facebook page, the mysteriously out-of-place admin "SB" made the point that when looking at published research data, we shouldn't dismiss or accept results based simply on whether we like or dislike the industry in question.

Meryl Dorey, apparently missing the point of SB's comment entirely, replied [my bolding]...

I agree 100% SB - and when studies are tainted by industry funding, it is very hard to take the results they come up with as gospel truth.

I really don't think that's what SB was saying at all given that earlier, in the very same thread, she'd written "If we don't trust anything that comes out of universities or research institutes, then what is the point of it all? How can you "do your own research" if everything is considered tainted?"

Anyway, Meryl continued...

I spend much of my day reading studies that are relied upon by governments and health departments to decide not just vaccination policy, but health policy in general. Many of those which have been funded by drug companies are designed in such a way as to achieve the required result.

She goes on the cast doubt on a study of vaccinated versus unvaccinated kids, listing three principal reasons for her doubts. I'll leave her concerns alone for several reasons

I haven't read the study myself and am not qualified to do so to any useful degree (neither is Meryl).
Meryl has previously demonstrated an apparent inability to deal with very simple high-school-level statistics so I wouldn't trust her review of scientific data anyway.
It's irrelevant to the point I intend to make...

Having listed what she labels "errors" she continues [my bolding]...

So we need to take all information into account and critique the studies based on what we know of the researchers, any conflicts and any obvious errors that we see. But since most research will come from pharmaceutical companies or be funded by them, we have no option but to look at that information. It doesn't mean we have to believe it, but knowing where to find it and how to access it is very helpful.

And finishes her reply with [my bolding]...

If we dismiss information simply because we don't agree with it, we will not be basing our decisions on fact. It can be very easy to see what is valid and what is not and we can learn as much from tearing apart the obviously tainted and incorrect studies as we can from reading those studies that are valid and independent.

So Meryl claims to cast a critical eye over the things she reads, "tearing them apart" in order to decide what is valid and what is tainted and emphasises that it's very easy to spot them either way.

Keeping that in mind...

In 2009, Meryl posted on her blog part of an article in which the author, David Icke, claimed that vaccination was part of an Illuminati plot to implant mind control chips in the population with a view, ultimately, to depopulating America through genocide. Meryl posted the excerpt and the link without any further comment except "Here is a link to read more".

Given today's assurance from Meryl that she carefully considers the things she reads, I now must assume she had torn apart the detail of that article looking for flaws and, finding none, decided it was credible enough to recommend to her readers.

Here's an excerpt from the part of the Icke article that was posted on Meryl's blog [my bolding]...

"The word ‘evil’ is much overused and I don’t say it lightly; but we are dealing with evil in the sense that the word is the reverse of ‘live’. Those behind the conspiracy to cull the human population and turn the rest into little more than computer terminals are anti-life. They have no respect for it and no empathy with those who suffer the consequences of their actions, no matter how appalling."

Note that she posted the excerpt and link without one word of criticism which is what leads me to assume that she found it credible since she doesn't usually, in my experience, post links to things she disagrees with, without noting her disagreement.

The link on Meryl's blog post no longer works. The Pakistan Daily copy of the article has since moved to here. The original David Icke article, complete with the obligatory scary pictures, can be found on his website here.

Here's some more excerpts from the remainder of the Icke article that Meryl asked her readers to "read more" of...

The swine flu virus was created in a laboratory to generate mass panic with the specific intention of forcing everyone to have the vaccine. Problem-Reaction-Solution. This ‘natural’ swine flu virus apparently contains genes from humans, birds and pigs from several continents.

Only those at the core of the conspiracy, and those who bother to research it, know what the game is. ‘There is evidence that an international corporate criminal syndicate, which has annexed high government office at Federal and State level, is intent on carrying out a mass genocide against the people of the United States by using an artificial (genetic) flu pandemic virus and forced vaccine program to cause mass death and injury and depopulate America in order to transfer control of the United States to the United Nations and affiliated security forces (UN troops from countries such as China, Canada, the UK and Mexico).

Their vehicle is a secret society network structured like a transnational corporation. The operational headquarters is in Europe, in places like Rome, London, Paris, Brussels and Berlin. I refer to this as ‘the Spider’ and it dictates to the global web.

There are subsidiary networks of secret societies in every country that answer to the ‘Spider’. Their job is to control their country’s politics, banking, business, military, media, medicine, and so on, and introduce in their sphere of influence the global agenda dictated by the ‘Spider’. Those on the inner levels of this structure are collectively known as the ‘Illuminati’.

What we do know is that we are seeing a long-prepared plan for mass vaccination by people who could not care less about the health of the population. That says everything about the real motivation, but only those in the shadows know what the effect is designed to be.

While Meryl is concerned that research data may be "tainted" if the research is funded by industry, and is happy to outline her criticisms of vaccine research in blog posts and lengthy (and numerous) Facebook commentaries, she seems entirely unconcerned that David Icke might not be an entirely reliable source of medical advice.

So, one more reason why I don't much care what Meryl thinks of any given piece of research - 4: she apparently thinks David Icke, a man who believes the world is run by shape-shifting reptilian overlords, is credible. And remember, she thinks it's "very easy" to spot valid and invalid research.

If you've attended or are thinking of attending the AVN "seminars" in WA, ask yourself if you find any of the above conspiracy theory to be credible. If you share a belief that the world is run by lizard people, if you think vaccination is part of a global plot to turn us all into robots and kill us on demand, then by all means hand over your hard earned cash to Meryl. If not, buy your child something nice instead and get your medical information from responsible people who are qualified to give advice and who, usually, offer it for free.

AVN in WA: Pro-vax-safety, pro-doctor?

2011-10-28T22:13:00.003+08:00

In an article in the Northern Star, Digby Hidreth writes...

"Ms Dorey stressed that the AVN was not an anti-vaccine organisation, but one that was "pro vaccine safety".

But in January this year, after a judge ordered that a child be immunised, in keeping with her father's wishes (but against the mother's), Meryl Dorey wrote on her Facebook page [my bolding]...

"Court orders rape of a child. Think this is an exaggeration? Think again. This is assault without consent and with full penetration too."

Given that Meryl Dorey apparently thinks that immunisation and rape are not merely analogous but actually one and the same thing, one wonders why she wouldn't be anti-vaccine? Is she not anti-rape? Is she simply an advocate for "pro rape safety"?

And then...

This week, in Cathy O'Leary's article in the West Australian, Meryl Dorey is quoted as saying

"I always say to people to go to their doctor and get information but get the other side as well so they can make a real decision about whether to vaccinate,..."

And yet, when we go to the AVN Facebook page we find this...

"Zoe" commented: "Hi, are you able to direct me to some information on the tetanus vac? we have not vaccinated our 15 month old at all to date but we are starting to think about this vaccination as our son becomes more and more active. Thanks for your help."

Meryl replied: Hi Zoe - take a look at the AVN shop - there is an article there by Dr Kris Gaublomme on the tetanus vaccine that I think you will find helpful - it is available as a download.

And that reply, which has been summed up by others as "buy my stuff" is not unusual (the tetanus information, available freely elsewhere on the internet, had a price attached on the AVN website). THis is just on eexample from this month but I can't recall ever seeing a public recommendation from Ms Dorey that people should seek advice from actual doctors.

In fact, I think you'd be hard pressed to find that recommendation from any admin or AVN supporter on any AVN-controlled site (except for the mysterious "SB" who has herself been the subject of vilification on the AVN Facebook site as a result of her usually-rational comments) .

If Ms Dorey "always" says to go to your doctor, there seems to be very little evidence of this on the internet.

Meryl Dorey doesn't simply lack any qualifications in the area of vaccination, or medicine in general for that matter, but seems unsure of what her own message to parents is. After all, would she seriously support the choice of any parent who actually chose to have their child raped? I'd hope not.

AVN in WA: Simple facts in the media

2011-10-27T11:12:00.005+08:00

Cathy O'Leary has written a simple and factual article in The West Australian about the Australian Vaccination Network's (AVN) return to WA.

"An anti-vaccination group that sparked a political row in Perth last year is back in WA charging parents $15 for its public forums.

The Australian Vaccination Network held meetings in Busselton and Perth this week and will hold others in Jurien Bay and Geraldton next week. Last year, the Uniting Church in Perth refused to let the NSW group use one of its halls and the State Library came under fire when it let the group use one of its buildings instead.

The NSW Office of Liquor, Gaming and Racing also stripped the group, based at Bangalow near Byron Bay, of its charity status after health authorities found its information was biased and said its website should state that its claims were not medical advice."

There's nothing demonstrably wrong in these opening paragraphs except, perhaps, that the OLGR's decision to strip the AVN of its charity status was as much about actual breaches of charity regulations as it was about the AVN's refusal to abide by an HCCC ruling.

The AVN's last visit was controversial. The church did refuse to let the group use its facilities. There were ructions about the State Library's decision to host the anti-vaccination "seminars". Health authorities did request that the AVN be up front about its anti-vaccination position and its lack of medical expertise. The AVN did ignore this advice. The OLGR did strip the AVN of its charity status and part of their decision was, apparently, based on the AVN's refusal to follow the HCCC's advice.

So, Cathy O'Leary has told it as it is. Naturally this has upset the AVN's Meryl Dorey who wrote on her Facebook page...

"More rabid anti-vaccine safety press from Cathy O'Leary of the West Australian. I would think that the hundreds of families whose children have been hospitalised because of a dangerous flu vaccine might have something to say about this?"

Perhaps Ms Dorey thinks Ms O'Leary should have just made up some different facts that paint the anti-vaccine group in a better light?

The article even included a comment from Ms Dorey who said "I always say to people to go to their doctor and get information but get the other side as well so they can make a real decision about whether to vaccinate,"... whatever that means.

When I need my car repaired, I go to a mechanic. If I'm told my brakes need replacing, I either get the job done or, if I'm unwilling to trust the advice, I might seek further advice - from a different mechanic. If a long line of mechanics keep telling me my brakes need replacing should I assume a conspiracy because no one's giving me "the other side"?

Should I, perhaps, seek the advice of a farmer's wife who might charge me $15 to tell me all mechanics are out to make a profit and that they only promote the views of "big auto" and that I'd be better off not replacing my worn-out brakes because worn brakes are a natural part of the driving process and that people have died after having their brakes replaced?

I'm having a great deal of difficulty seeing how this would be a rational path to take with my car and yet some parents happily do it with their children's health. I don't get it.

Seriously, the AVN promote some pretty loopy ideas, from bizarrely unscientific advice about toxicology to lizard-people conspiracies. Far from being "rabid", I think Cathy O'Leary was all-too-generous to the AVN.

Five reasons not to vaccinate

AVN in WA: Cognitive Dissonance

2011-10-26T00:14:00.008+08:00

In honour of Meryl Dorey's return to WA, I'm just going to repeat some things I've written before. I present them here in list form...

I often find myself bemused by the cognitive dissonance on regular display over at the AVN...

They support people who deny germ theory but link to stories about doctors apparently spreading pertussis to patients.
Also, despite an apparent disbelief that germs cause disease, they insist that sanitation and clean water is the real reason vaccine-preventable diseases were reduced.
They claim modern medicine is good for emergency trauma cases whilst also claiming it is run by corrupt pharmaceutical companies who will happily maim and kill us all if there's a dollar to be made.
They complain that health authorities are useless when it comes to controlling vaccine manufacturers like CSL, but happily "flip the bird" at health authorities when told to post warning notifices on their own website.
They think the small amount of anecdotal evidence against vaccines outweighs the vast amounts of anecdotal evidence that vaccines are basically safe and work as advertised.
They believe childhood diseases are a natural right of passage and that vaccines screw up the natural processes of immunity - but recommend homeoprophylaxis to supposedly help your children avoid catching these diseases.
They don't believe in vaccine efficacy at all yet link to any stories which show a drop in vaccine efficacy - and they seem to think this supports their case.
They advise parents to "do your research" yet dismiss the evidence of people for whom research is their life.
They note any historical correlation between any ailment and the development and roll-out of vaccines whilst ignoring other development timelines, such as electricity and electronics, motor transport and industrialisation in general, with similar correlation.
They decry science as being imperfect ("science doesn't know everything" or "science isn't the only way of knowing") but readily point to any study that suggests even the tiniest weakness in vaccine use.
They believe we're all pawns in some massive global conspiracy run by "the Illuminati" or some such, but openly discuss their views on the world-wide web using computers built by major corporations with software written by other major multi-billion dollar corporations.
They believe that even the tiniest, trace amounts of known toxins are always toxic and never worth the "risk", but will happily recommend the consumption of hydrogen cyanide (apricot kernels) to "treat" cancer or "Traditional" Chinese "Medicines" that can contain toxic levels of heavy metals.
They argue that vaccines have no impact on disease organisms whilst also arguing that vaccinations are causing those same organisms to mutate into resistant forms.
They complain that doctors can't be trusted because they profit from vaccination - yet seem unconcerned that their much-beloved homeopaths, naturopaths, chiropractors and other alternative practitioners do not ply their trades for free. (Even the AVN charge for "information" that is quite often freely available elsewhere.)
They argue that we are being damaged by modern medicine and that "traditional" remedies are superior without realising that countries where science-based medicine is the norm enjoy much better life expectancy.

How can anyone trust any sort of "information" a group like this might spread? I can't.

If you have any more examples of the ongoing dissonance at the AVN, drop a comment.

Are anti-vaccinationists stupid?

2011-10-22T00:03:00.001+08:00

I've re-opened the blog for a short time in honour of Meryl Dorey's return visit to Western Australia.

Let's begin.

On her anti-vaccination Facebook page, Mery Dorey writes...

"Study after study show that the parents who refuse vaccines or vaccinate selectively are older, more highly educated and of a higher socio-economic status. Yet we are continually told we are stupid for making a choice that our own research says is right for our families!"

I sympathise with a parents who decide against vaccination as a result of reading mis-information on the internet. I don't think they're stupid, as such, just ill-informed. And there's a big difference.

For example, one could just as easily suggest that the people who invested in things like Firepower Fuel Pills were actually very educated, it's just unfortunate that the information they received was wrong. Firepower roped in a number of major sporting clubs and the Australian Government, including our defence forces. Clearly these were not uneducated slum-dwellers. Presumably there was some decent level of education and success - but they were still duped because they simply didn't understand the real science behind the claims being made for the product.

Similarly, people who have lost their life savings as a result of bad financial advice are not and were not stupid, they just suffered as a result of following bad advice.

So no, Meryl, the average parent who swallows your nonsense isn't stupid or uneducated, they are just placing their trust in the wrong sources. They become "stupid" for want of a better word, when they begin to evangelise their anti-vax faith and start claiming their knowledge of immunisation to be greater than that of the world's immunologists and doctors. That's pretty dumb.

“Court orders rape of a child. Think this is an exaggeration? Think again. This is assault without consent and with full penetration too.” [Meryl Dorey, January 2011, in response to a court order for a child to be vaccinated, in keeping with her father's wishes]

Meryl Dorey, AVN & Healthy People

2011-03-19T19:52:00.000+08:00

Time and time again we hear the claim from anti-vaccinationists that their unvaccinated children are healthier than any of the vaccinated kids they know.

Since they never get around to defining "healthy", it's always been difficult to know exactly what criteria they use to make their comparisons. Until now...

This week on the AVN Facebook page, Meryl Dorey made the following comment...

I've highlighted the interesting bit for you.

Her cousin was diagnosed with lung cancer then went to hospital for treatment. Despite her lung cancer, she amazingly went into hospital "healthy".

On what planet are people with lung cancer considered healthy? Or should I say, "in what circles?"

My concern for unvaccinated children has just risen one-hundred-fold. If having lung cancer doesn't qualify as unhealthy, what the hell does?

Once again I find myself questioning the AVN's usefulness on any issue related to health.

Originally noticed at scepticbros

Meryl Dorey, AVN & Chemotherapy FAIL

2011-03-02T22:42:00.006+08:00

So, Meryl Dorey of the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN), had this to say on her Facebook page...

Since the 5 year survival rate for chemo is only 2.5%, perhaps it is a good idea for people who do get diagnosed with cancer to look into what alternatives are available. I can't imagine any therapy having such a huge failure rate and yet still being supported - people just don't know. MD

To put it mildly, this is pure, unadulterated bullshit. I dealt with it in 2009 when someone used the figure to defend the "treatment" of Tamar Stitt with mud wraps to cure her cancer but I'll go over it again here.

Remember, I'm just a guy with a blog. Some of my interpretations might be wrong.

When I first read about the study that Meryl suggests "people just don't know" about, even I, a layman with no medical or scientific training, was able to understand how it might be flawed and how the conclusions drawn from it by medicine deniers were almost certainly wrong.

The first issue was that the study was performed by radiation therapists. These might be considered as competitors in the "cancer cure" market place - though I doubt Meryl would consider radiation therapy as one of the alternatives sufferers should seek out or that radiation therapists would seek her endorsement.

The second issue was that the study was only related to adult malignancies, but you don't see that mentioned in Meryl's overly simplistic comment.

Another issue was that cancers for which chemo is known to have an incredible success rate were NOT included in the study.

Oh, and cancers for which chemotherapy is not usually considered as a treatment WERE included in the study. Yes, the study included people who weren't even being treated with chemo.

Forgive me for thinking this approach might be flawed. It's a bit like trying to find out if aeroplanes are a viable mode of travel, then performing some of the tests underwater, few of the tests in mid air - with second-rate aircraft - and using push bikes and inflatable dinghies for the remainder of the tests.

So, why is it important to note that some of the patients weren't treated with chemo? Well, the title of the study is "The contribution of cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adult malignancies"

Take special note of that title, especially "The contribution of..." part. This is not, as I understand it, assessing the efficacy of chemotherapy but just the part it plays in all cancer treatments. Using this study to assess the usefulness of chemotherapy is akin to assessing all forms of illness and their various treatments then concluding that heart surgery isn't much use because it doesn't fix broken limbs or lung disease or cancer or a bad case of the flu. Or, if I may, a bit like noting that since vitamin C doesn't cure snake bite, it has no use for anything.

Clearly the study DOES NOT show that "the 5 year survival rate for chemo is only 2.5%". Meryl either misunderstood the study or is ignorant of or chose to ignore discussions explaining what it really showed and why, even then, it was largely flawed and virtually useless as an indicator of the efficacy of chemotherapy.

To me, it seems like a pointless thing to assess but, as always, I'm willing to be educated by people who know more about medicine and science than I do.

On that note, here's part of what oncologist "Orac" had to say about this same study...

Indeed, if I were more cynical, I'd say that it appears almost intentionally designed to have left out the very types of cancers for which chemotherapy provides the most benefit. Also, it uses 5 year survival exclusively, completely neglecting that chemotherapy can prevent late relapses. Adding to the impression that the study was custom-designed to minimize the apparent benefit of chemotherapy found, there were also a lot of inconsistencies and omissions in that leukemias were not included, while leukemia is one type of cancer against which chemotherapy is highly efficacious; indeed, leukemia is treated with and, when it is cured, cured by chemotherapy. The very technique of lumping all newly diagnosed adult cancers together is guaranteed to obscure benefits of chemotherapy among subgroups because it lumps in patients for whom chemotherapy is not even indicated!

But here's another thing, I know quite a few people now who have had chemotherapy and survived past five years. According to the theory that says anecdotal evidence trumps science, a theory promoted as superior by the anti-vax/alt-pharma crowd, I have absolute proof that chemo works 100% of the time. I wonder if there's some secret world movement trying to suppress the truth about this amazing cancer cure?

Now, what any of this has to do with vaccination I really don't know but it does add to my overall distrust of the AVN as a source of useful health information. They just don't seem to be able to get even the easy stuff right. "People just don't know"

NOTE: I'm not a doctor and neither is Meryl Dorey, so you shouldn't trust me, or her, when it comes to medical advice. If you want that, go and see a doctor... a real doctor who knows about that sort of thing.

Meryl Dorey, AVN & Vaccine Efficacy

2011-02-21T21:04:00.001+08:00

A news report suggests that, for a variety of likely reasons, the polio vaccine appears to have lost efficacy in Pakistan...

Officials at the National Polio Control Programme said the number of polio cases had increased during the last three years after going down for the previous seven years.

They suspected that the vaccine might have lost its efficacy after not having been stored at the required temperature, especially in far-flung areas where electricity supply is disrupted for long periods.

Athar Niaz Rana, head of allergy and immunology department at the Shifa International Hospital here, said: 'Vaccine failure and failure to vaccinate are two important factors which have affected the national polio campaign.'

He insisted that the 'security situation in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province is also one of the factors which has led to the failure of vaccine in that region'.

So, polio cases had been decreasing for several years but have recently shown an increase. Interestingly, Meryl Dorey (presumably) of the AVN has linked to this article from her Facebook page with the short and simple comment...

'Polio vaccines may have lost efficacy in Pakistan' 78% of cases occurring in the vaccinated.

Hmmm, so no mention whatsoever of the mitigating circumstances but there's something even weirder about this comment - Meryl doesn't believe vaccines are effective in the first place so how can she accept any possibility that they can lose efficacy? Something can't lose the efficacy it never had.

Indeed, the situation in Pakistan should surely demonstrate to any reasonable reader that properly prepared, stored and administered vaccines are effective.

That story dates back to December last year but here's a more recent one, from today in fact, which you are unlikely to see the AVN link to...

15 Nigerian children paralysed by polio in 1yr - Report

A total of 15 children in six northern states in Nigeria and Abuja were paralysed by polio in the last one year (February 8, 2010 to February 8, 2011) according to the latest edition of an online newsletter, Countdown to Polio Eradication in Nigeria, which monitored the progress made by Nigeria in polio eradication.

[...]

“To completely eradicate polio in Nigeria, every child under five in every city, village and settlement must receive oral polio vaccine multiple times,” Pate advised

The full story tells how Nigeria has enjoyed an annual 98% reduction in polio cases and was close to eradicating the disease. Tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists living in relative safety, for now, in developed countries will likely dismiss this reduction by suggesting doctors simply stop reporting the disease as polio. I've dealt with this "Polio is the same as Accute Flaccid Paralysis" nonsense before.

Meanwhile, vaccine efforts in Pakistan are further hampered by conspiracy theories spread by the country's religious right who claim that vaccinations have been designed by western organizations to reduce Muslim populations.

Poliomyelitis mainly affects children under the age of five, but adults carry and spread the virus. Prevention can be ensured by a few drop of an oral vaccine. There are only four countries left in the world who are still dealing with polio: India, Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan. And only Pakistan is seeing a rise in infection rates.

In related news, Rotary have committed to eradicating polio within a few years...

The incidence of polio infection has plunged from about 350,000 cases in 1988 to 968 cases in 2010. Four new cases were reported in the past week bringing to 9 the number of new cases in 2011. More than two billion children have been immunized in 122 countries, preventing five million cases of paralysis and 250,000 pediatric deaths.

Once again I find myself bemused by the cognitive dissonance on regular display over at the AVN. They support people who deny germ theory but link to stories about doctors apparently spreading pertussis to patients. They claim modern medicine is good for emergency trauma cases whilst also claiming it is run by corrupt pharmaceutical companies who will happily maim and kill us all if there's a dollar to be made. They think the small amount of anecdotal evidence against vaccines outweighs the vast amounts of anecdotal evidence that vaccines are basically safe. They believe childhood diseases are a natural right of passage and that vaccines screw up the natural processes of immunity but recommend homeoprophylaxis to help your children avoid catching these diseases. They don't believe in vaccine efficacy at all but now they link to stories which show a drop in vaccine efficacy - and they seem to think this supports their case.

How can anyone trust any sort of "information" a group like this might spread? I can't.

If you have any more examples of the ongoing dissonance at the AVN, drop a comment.

Vic govt supports quackery?

2011-02-18T00:31:00.001+08:00

Graeme Hannigan from the Victorian Skeptics left a comment on my article about the Coroner's findings into the "death by homeopathy" of Penelope Dingle.

I'm reproducing the comment in full here...

In view of the Coroners Recommendation no.! the Victorian State Governments Department of Health provides an internet based information service, called the ‘Better Health Channel’.
http://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/

The ‘Better Health Channel’ provides downloadable PDF ‘Fact Sheets’ not only relating to medical treatments but also pertaining to the following complementary and alternative health practices;

Acupuncture, Alexander Technique, Aromatherapy, Ayurveda, Bowen Therapy, Herbal Medicine, Homeopathy, Kinesiology, Massage, Meditation, Myotherapy, Naturopathy, Osteopathy, Reiki, Tai Chi and Yoga.

The Better Heath Channel makes no clear distinction between evidence based medicine and sham medicine. In the list of Tests and Treatments, Aromatherapy appears between Appendicectomy and Arthroscopy.

The wording of the disclaimers is identical and directives to ‘Please seek advice from a qualified health care professional’ could be interpreted equally as referring to an aroma therapist or a medical doctor.

To elevate sham medicine to the same level as evidence based medicine is a complete failure of consumer protection. The Victorian Government, by speculating on unproven medical practices is negligent in its obligations to the health consumer, encouraging of a credulous public attitude leaving health consumers open to abuse by the many charlatans who are only too willing to commit health fraud by offering false hope to the desperately sick and vulnerable.

The Better Health Channel carries the endorsements ‘approved by independent health and medical experts’ and ‘quality assured by Victorian Government Department of Health’.

These endorsements could lead the uninformed reader to reasonably draw the conclusion that these unproven medical practices actually work.

As a further example of the presentation of ambiguous and misleading information, I draw your attention to the Homeopathy ‘Fact Sheet’ provided by the Australian Homœopathic Association;

http://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/bhcv2/bhcarticles.nsf/pages/Homeopathy?open

The ‘Fact Sheet’ makes at least twelve claims of homeopathy that have no scientific basis nor have these claimed properties been substantiated to modern scientific standards. The ‘Fact Sheet’ correctly states five times that homeopathy is based on belief, not science.

The ‘Law of Similars’ the cornerstone of homeopathic is not a demonstrable law of nature like gravity nor is it a law as enacted by legislation. It is more accurately described as the ‘Lore of Similars’ as in folk-lore.

Homeopathy lacks scientific grounding and repeated clinical studies, as confirmed by the Cochrane Collaboration Review, show that it lacks evidence of efficacy beyond that of a placebo.

The Victorian Government, by speculating on unproven medical practices, is culpably negligent in its obligations to the health consumer, is encouraging of a credulous public attitude, leaving consumers open to abuse by the many charlatans who are only too willing to commit health fraud by offering false hope to the desperately sick and vulnerable.

I invite you to join me by signing the petition calling on the Dept. of Health to review the Better Health Channel to ensure that the information provided is genuinely ‘Quality Assured’ by confining itself to science based medicine, supported by credible evidence of efficacy.

If the Dept of Health insists on including references to questionable health treatments it should clearly identify them separately from medicine.

It should also clearly indicate those unproven treatments, which are not grounded in science and that have no evidence of efficacy beyond that of a placebo.

Please feel free to sign my online petition at:
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/42922.html

Support your local chaplain

2011-02-16T21:51:00.003+08:00

Kylie at Podblack has asked us to fill in the National School Chaplaincy Program Consultation Questionnaire.

I thought about it, wasn't going to do it, then thought "if I don't, I can't complain when the Christain lobby gets its way." So I filled it in.

I have to note that I find the questionnaire too leading to be properly answered since several questions take chaplaincy as a final outcome for granted, for example...

Question 1
Do you support the introduction of minimum qualifications for school chaplains?

Question 4
What elements are most important for minimum qualifications for schools chaplains?

Question 5
Are there any other comments you would like to make about the qualifications of chaplains?

The only way I found to respond to these, and other questions, was to dismiss the questions as flawed since they assume some level of support for chaplaincy. Since question one allowed no space for comment, I couldn't answer it at all since any answer assumes a priori acceptance of chaplains.

thefreedictionary.com gives the following definitions for chaplaincy [my bolding]...

1. A member of the clergy attached to a chapel.

a. A member of the clergy who conducts religious services for an institution, such as a prison or hospital.
b. A member of the clergy who is connected with a royal court or an aristocratic household.

3. A member of the clergy attached to a branch of the armed forces.

While it doesn't specifically mention school chaplains, it's pretty clear that the foundation of chaplaincy is religion. It is ridiculous, in this day and age and in a secular country, to be asking how religious counselling services should best be provided in our publicly funded schools. And that is what these questions are essentially asking.

Some people will argue that school chaplains are not employed to promote their faith but simply to provide caring, compassion and guidance to children who might need it. On the other hand, Chaplaincy Australia describes itself thusly [my bolding]...

Chaplaincy Australia is a National Department of the Australian Christian Churches (ACC) who is committed to communicating the Christian faith in a hands-on, compassionate and meaningful way.

I could point at the Catholic Church and scoff at the idea of members of the clergy being "hands on" with children, but this is too important to be distracted.

How is a religiously-based counselling service of any use to children whose parents may not wish them to be lied to about some supreme being watching their every move? How does it even meet the needs of children whose parents may wish them to believe in a different supreme being to the one being sold by Chaplaincy Australia, for example? The very idea is fundamentally flawed.

Religious counselling has no place in public schools in the 21st century. If parents want their kids religiously schooled, they can send them to private school or, better still, church.

Medical answer of the week #1

2011-02-08T23:17:00.001+08:00

Okay, time for a new segment...

MEDICAL ANSWER OF THE WEEK!

And this week's award goes to SAVN regular Maureen Chuck. Faced with a question on the VINE Facebook page which began...

"What is an alternatitve [sic] to Tetanus shot, dog bit me yesterday thru long pants..."

Maureen responded somewhat sensibly...

"Tetanus"

It doesn't get any better than this, does it? You just don't see that sort of intelligent humour (okay, it's possibly more truth than humour but it's still hilarious) on the anti-vax forums.

I'd like to think this will be a weekly award but chances are I'll never do it again. I'm like that.

Tracey Spicer on Vaccination Rape

2011-02-07T20:49:00.008+08:00

Talk-back radio host Tracey Spicer has recently taken an interest in the Australian Vaccination Network and the so-called "vaccination debate". Last month, she hung up on Meryl Dorey during an interview about fraud claims levelled against Andrew Wakefield.

I was just perusing Stop the AVN's Facebook page when I saw this...

This follows a statement Dorey made on the AVN's Facebook page where she wrote...

Court orders child rape. Think this is an exaggeration? Think again. This is assault without consent and with full penetration too...

The ridiculously vile statement shocked even supporters of the page and was soon followed by something labelled by her detractors as a "notpology" since it was just an attempt at an excuse, dressed up as an apology.

I look forward to hearing what Spicer has to say about it. If you're not in Sydney, keep an ear on the 2UE webpage.

Update: Audio of the Tracey Spicer interview

COPYRIGHT:

On a separate issue, there's been a bit of a kerfuffle going on at SAVN this week as Meryl Dorey has apparently been reporting a variety of screenshots used on their page for infringing copyright.

I'm a little concerned about some of the defences I've read from SAVN supporters who imply that since Facebook posts are public, they can be copied. I think that's as wrong as suggesting that if someone posts a recipe on a website, it becomes public domain. It doesn't. It's no more public domain when published on the web than if it were published in print and made available through your local public library.

The same applies to"Tweets" posted on Twitter. While it may seem counterintuitive, because the fundamental point of Twitter is to have other people "Retweet" your comments, it appears that Twitter itself frowns upon using screenshots or other people's Tweets without their permission.

Don't
* Use screenshots of other people’s profiles or Tweets without their permission.

No, I did not seek Tracey Spicer's permission for the screen-shot used above (which I actually copied from a copy on the SAVN Facebook pages) and yes, I have possibly breached copyright by posting it. But copyright law has fair use exemptions including use for purpose of critique and parody.

While I'd agree that the SAVN's use of screen-shots probably is (or ought to be) covered by fair use exemptions, and that is by far the main defence being used by SAVN contributors, I think it's important to understand that, exemptions aside, material can still be subject to copyright even if it is posted on a public forum, unless specifically exempted by the author.

BUT then there's the complex issue of originality! Have fun with that!

NOTE: I am not a lawyer but I don't expect Tracey Spicer to "ping" me for helping to advertise her radio show and I doubt the SAVN have breached anyone's copyright.

Meryl Dorey, AVN & Causal Links

2011-02-06T22:57:00.007+08:00

One of the most frustrating habits of the anti-vaccine lobby (and the conspiracy-theorist-mindset in general) is their habit of taking two pieces of data and drawing a causal-link conclusion from them.

The most obvious example of this is the idea that since autism is diagnosed in children at around the same time as they receive the bulk of their vaccinations, vaccines must cause autism.

It's understandable that lay people would make a link like this in their own minds and I'm sure we are all guilty of it at times with various things, like it raining when we wash the car. Humans notice patterns like this and we have a habit of drawing conclusions from them.

It's even more understandable that lay people can be convinced by others who insistently claim such links and who seemingly back it up with supportive data. But this is where things get frustrating.

This week, anti-vaccinationists appear to turned their attention to a graph which allegedly shows that vaccination has had no effect on polio and that the disease was simply renamed.

Since the graph carries a copyright notice and since the AVN seem to have a bee in their bonnet this week about supposed copyright infringement on Facebook, despite the fact their own FB page is littered with screen-shots from all over the internet, I'm not going to show you the original. But here's a very rough copy based on the same data, so you can get the idea...

The graph was posted on the AVN Facebook page by Meryl Dorey and described as "proof" that polio had been redefined, not wiped out.

Ignoring the fact that no one with any passing familiarity with vaccination considers polio to have been eradicated, I could waste some time and energy pointing out that if the graph were really demonstrative of a redefinition, then AFP diagnosis* should have increased as polio diagnosis fell, overlapping in the middle of the range around 1985. This graph appears to show polio as almost eradicated before AFP begins to rise at all. What happened between 1990 and 1995? Were all sufferers abducted by aliens before they could be diagnosed?

But I won't waste energy on any of that because the correlation from the graph isn't compelling anyway.

There is simply not enough information in this image to draw a conclusion that polio was simply redefined as AFP. There are just two sets of data travelling in opposite directions. Without further information, we can only guess if there's any relationship.

For example, anti-vaccinationists argue that because measles mortality fell around the time of improving public sanitation and before the introduction of the vaccine, then sanitation must be responsible for the improved outlook for measles suffers.

Now, mortality actually tells us nothing about infection rates** but since the conspiracy theorists like to use it, here's a graph showing the production of the petrol-powered motor car charted against measles mortality...

(Source for measles data, whale.to)

The graph is as good as I could do with the data and software at my disposal, an excuse I've seen used by at least one author of another questionable graph often cited by anti-vaccinationists. But, with a much better data fit than the AFP graph, this one makes a pretty convincing argument that the thing that actually reduced measles deaths was neither vaccination nor public sanitation but the proliferation of motorised vehicles.

If one statement has become a meme in the world of sceptical activists and those promoting science-based medicine, it's "correlation does not equal causation". This simply means that just because two things seem to coincide, they are not necessarily related.

If you buy a yellow Toyota you might suddenly notice how popular yellow Toyotas are, but that doesn't mean you started a trend. it just means you noticed something you weren't previously aware of.

Some things really are just coincidences and sometimes we notice them - but try telling that to a conspiracy theorist on a mission and see how far you get.

Once again I find myself doubting the AVN as a source of quality information on vaccination.

*Although Meryl Dorey describes AFP as a disease that is clinically indistinguishable from polio, it is in fact a set of symptoms and is caused by a number of diseases, including polio.

Since polio causes AFP, it should be pretty clear to most people why the symptoms are the same. But it is syllogistically silly to say that because the symptoms of AFP and polio are identical, they must be the same thing.

All labradors bark but all things that bark are not labradors.

All polio cases present as AFP but all AFP cases are not polio.

**Mortality is a poor way to demonstrate the effectiveness or otherwise of vaccines. A far better comparison is incidence - but charting incidence against vaccination rates doesn't work for people who are trying to demonise vaccines because such comparison tends to make the vaccine look effective.

NOTE: I am not a doctor or scientist. I'm just some guy with a blog so don't take my word for anything. I'm no more qualified to offer vaccination advice than Meryl Dorey. If you want advice on vaccination, ask a doctor - a real doctor who went to medical school and learnt useful stuff about biology and such - not one who thinks crystals allow you to communicate directly with angels or that God works his wizardry through your spinal column.

Why choose homeopathy?

2011-02-05T09:44:00.001+08:00

This is just beautiful...

The trustingly dulcet tones of Kylie Sturgess, who should definitely have a gig on mainstream radio or television, explain the true power of homeopathy and why just taking an overdose won't be enough to topple widespread belief in it.

Sceptics risk it all for science...

2011-02-05T00:04:00.003+08:00

This weekend (probably today when you read this), people around the world will once again attempt the impossible - to overdose on homeopathic products.

The 10:23 Challenge is a follow-up to the 'overdose' protest staged by the 10:23 Campaign in 2010. International protesters from more than 10 countries, and more than 23 cities will gather for over the weekend of February 5-6 2011, to make the simple statement: Homeopathy - There's Nothing In It.

The challenge will culminate on February 6th at the QED conference in Manchester, where 300 protesters will participate the largest ever single demonstration against homeopathy.

Aussie thrill seekers, or those who are just a bit thirsty, can find some info on Podblack's blog.

The Perth meeting will be in Forrest Place/Murray St Mall from noon, Saturday Feb 6 (oops, 5) and will include an information campaign. A repeat performance is planned at the Fremantle Markets, 10am on Sunday.

Vaccine War: SBS

2011-02-01T19:39:00.003+08:00

So The Vaccine War has just aired on SBS in eastern parts of Australia and is about to start in WA. I went to check out the program's discussion forum but it looks like the whole SBS site is down.

Early Facebook reports suggest the anti-vaccine lobby are not too impressed with the documentary which, by all accounts, was properly balanced in favour of the evidence so I'm going to assume they are bombarding SBS with conspiracy-filled vitriol.

I'll know more soon when I get to watch it myself but I'm guessing they didn't support the notions that your local GP hates children or that vaccines contain microchips designed by lizard people to kill us at the flick of a remote switch.

UPDATE:

Discussion forum is back up for now.
The full episode is apparently online here.

Vaccination advice t-shirt

2011-01-31T23:09:00.001+08:00

I felt the old "Love them, Protect them, Never inject them" t-shirt sold by the AVN as part of their dissemination of balanced vaccine information (not advice, despite how it might read) was getting a bit tired so I've designed a new one for them...

Some important selling points for the avid pro-info supporter:

Comic Sans main font
Scary red letters
Spelling and grammar errors
Random capitalisation and odd formatting

The perfect gift for your best ~~anti-vax~~ ~~pro-choice~~ pro-info friend.

UPDATE:

As always happens with such things, I've just had a better idea. Hint, it might involve a lizard. Oh well, maybe tomorrow.

Cancer cure, fear, germ theory & AVN

2011-01-31T22:44:00.004+08:00

Cure cancer with diet and exercise?

A Queensland man who claims he can cure cancer with diet and exercise is facing court action questioning the credibility of his treatment regime.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) alleges Darryl Peter Jones' medical treatment claims are misleading or deceptive under the Trade Practices Act.

Before it was shut down, the Darryl Jones Health Resolution Centre's website, advertised a cancer treatment program involving an exercise regime, the consumption of vitamin B17 and restriction of glucose in the diet.

The Federal Court in Brisbane heard on Monday that Mr Jones sold an e-book on his website entitled "The Truth about Overcoming Cancer".

"Vitamin B17, otherwise known as Laetrile or Apricot Kernels is neither a vitamin nor a cure for cancer...

Since the early 1950s, a modified form of amygdalin has been promoted under the names laetrile and "Vitamin B17" as a cancer cure, but studies have found it to be ineffective and potentially toxic. It is also not a vitamin, and can cause cyanide poisoning.

I know, it's difficult to imagine that any natural substance could possibly be toxic, but there you go. Not so surprisingly, the people who bang on and on about the minute amount of so-called "toxins" in vaccines and real medicines will often have no hesitation whatsoever in promoting these "cyanide pills" as a cure for cancer.

Laetrile is just one of possibly hundreds of "natural miracle cancer cures" that are all based on entirely different theories of what cancer is or what causes it. All are usually supported by people who despise science-based medicine.

(UPDATE: He's been banned from making cancer cure claims)

On that matter, SMH also has the rather depressing story of a woman who died due to a fear of doctors. It's sad that such fear exists and sadder still that people who should know better spend their lives propagating such fear and putting other people's lives at risk.

Interestingly, I found both these stories after following an unrelated link posted by Meryl Dorey on the AVN Facebook page. That link was to part of a story about pertussis being spread by hospital staff - the rest of the story is behind a wall.

Now, this is hard to get my head around because this story (the bit we can see) lends strong support to the germ theory - the idea that disease is spread by pathogens - yet Meryl often supports people like Punter on her AVN blog. Punter is a germ-theory denialist who apparently believes, if I understand correctly, that bacteria are part of some sort of clean-up crew and that rather than cause disease, they respond to it.

I guess that should Meryl ever be pressed about germ theory denialism, she'll deny supporting it just as she denies ever promoting Illuminati mind-control conspiracies. It appears to me that any theory which amounts to a denigration of vaccination is good enough for the AVN and its diverse supporters to spread as "information" to worried parents.

Big Alt-Pharma

2011-01-30T17:14:00.000+08:00

While the anti-vaccination lobby love to accuse the medical industry of being in the pocket of "Big Pharma", I've lost count of the number of times Meryl Dorey has advised people on her Facebook page that they can get information by buying something from the AVN.

Though I'm sure it's not about the money.

Alternative Mechanical

2011-01-30T14:51:00.000+08:00

Thanks Meryl

2011-01-30T13:23:00.002+08:00

Meryl Dorey from the Australian Vaccination Network apparently felt people should be made aware of the Dr Amy, the Skeptical Obstetrician so posted a link to Dr Amy's site on the AVN Facebook page. I can't thank Meryl enough for bringing this blog to my attention. One more voice of reason out there in the world. It gives me hope.

Of course, Meryl doesn't exactly share my view of Dr Amy but that's good. When we do share views I'll have to make an appointment at the local shrink to see if I'm losing my faculties.

The SkepticalOB is commenting on the implication that Gardasil, a vaccine given to young adult girls, must be bad because it causes more miscarriages than all the vaccines that are given to little kids. This reminds me of my oft-repeated contention that driving a car causes rapid growth of facial hair in males. Think about it - how many guys do you know who have substantial facial hair before they get their driver's licence? Now maybe that's something Meryl should investigate because it's clear to me that the issuing of driver's licences is a plot sponsored by Gillette.

Bil Gates: Vaccination Saves Lives

2011-01-30T13:09:00.000+08:00

Loretta Marron

2011-01-25T21:34:00.007+08:00

I must confess, Loretta Marron is not a name I recognised when I saw it mentioned in a blog comment yesterday.

I probably should recognise her name as she was Australian Skeptic of the Year 2007 and 2008 and might well be described as a health crusader.

When I read her name, mentioned in this complaining comment written by a naturopath at the Sceptics' Book of Pooh-Pooh...

Skepticism occurs when only the logic brain is functioning. Half a brain = halfwit. There are many people like Loretta Marron the 2007 Skeptic of the Year who is so proud of the stress she creates by being the anonymous complainant to the TGA and CRP that she requests that her name is not given out to the people she makes complaints about...

...I had to Google it. Who was this woman who the naturopath asserted used only half her brain and who, he went on to imply, wasted oxygen? What had this apparently shy and anonymous person done to earn the wrath of one of the "love and light" brigade?

Well, among other things, she did this...

"Natural therapist" Jill Newlands looks quite the cancer expert as she checks the label on the bottle before recalling it's "...chloride, ...chloride" while the other bottle apparently contains something called "this one". This follows her advice that she wouldn't consider chemotherapy - in a hospital!! It would be funny if the whole situation wasn't so potentially tragic, as Peneolpe Dingle discovered when she decided to forgo real cancer treatment and follow the advice of a Perth homeopath instead.

I think I like Loretta Marron and you can read a lot more about her at Podblack's blog, but I really must give thanks to Trevor Savage, ND who brought her to my attention. Keep spreading the word Trevor, people need to be made more aware of this sort of thing. Thanks.

Meryl Dorey, AVN & Seeing the Light!

2011-01-22T23:46:00.006+08:00

I rarely visit the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) Facebook page. I avoid it partly because it's so tightly moderated that there's often little worth reading since anyone who doesn't toe the anti-vaccination-cult line will usually find their comments deleted and themselves banned - and partly because what's left is often depressing.

But today was one of those times when I did drop by and today my jaw dropped. Someone posting as "Australian Vaccination Network" was promoting a product that contains aluminium and arsenic! There are a few admins over there and sometimes they sign with initials like SB or MD and sometimes codes like B52 and sometimes they use their names - like Meryl Dorey and sometimes, as in this case, nothing. I have no idea why they do this and it does not help to ease my general distrust of the AVN as a useful source of information.

For the sake of this post, I'm going to assume that it was Meryl Dorey making this product recommendation as one respondent to the comment thanked Meryl for the information and no one's corrected her.

The interesting bit is "If you are concerned about the mercury issue and want to save energy, LED lightbulbs are a fantastic option..."

This advice followed concerns expressed about the mercury content of compact fluorescent globes that are replacing the old incandescent types around the world. But here's the thing... LED (Light Emitting Diode) semiconductors contain things like...

Aluminium gallium arsenide (AlGaAs)
Gallium arsenide phosphide (GaAsP)
Aluminium gallium indium phosphide (AlGaInP)
Gallium(III) phosphide (GaP)

Wow! Aluminium AND arsenic - together! Surely no self-respecting anti-vaccinationist could ever support the sale of these things? Surely it's a plot by Big Illumina (as in "Illuminati") to trick us into buying something they tell us is for our own good but which will actually poison us EVERY time we flick a switch!

I didn't want to assume too much here so I did some selective research and found the following information...

The toxicology of AlGaAs [Aluminium gallium arsenide] has not been fully investigated. The dust is an irritant to skin, eyes and lungs.

I think we can conclude from this that anything that contains arsenide is going to be dangerous to our health! And Aluminium phosphide is used as a fungicide and is a probable carcinogen! Imagine that hanging over your dinner table. Aluminium gallium indium phosphide would be exactly the same thing because it's got two of the same things in it.

No one seems to know if Gallium is toxic or not - they just put it in stuff and wait to see how many people die. It's the new Vioxx.

Okay, of course I don't believe there's a conspiracy to poison us with minute amounts of substances which might be considered toxic in certain circumstances. But then, I don't go on about infinitesimally small amounts of so-called "TOXINS!!!" in vaccines either - and I genuinely don't understand how anyone who supports the AVN can promote products that contain compounds of aluminium or arsenic - unless they haven't done the research.

I was also going to write about Meryl Dorey's comment on an article published at CNN but it's just more of the same old "if vaccines work, why are you worried?" nonsense coupled with a notion that better-educated people are never wrong - which is why all educated people are Catholic... and Buddhist and Hindu and Muslim and Protestant... yes, they're all right because they're educated and educated people are never wrong.

But Dorey has got me thinking... if seat belts work, why can't we drink and drive and speed? I guess seat belts don't really work and it's all just a big con to impose authoritarian control and deliver profits to multinational vehicle manufacturers. It's government-ordered stabbing of drivers, with full penetration.*

*I'm using "stabbing" in an historic way, the way litterate people use it, not in the way people use it today.

Psychic Detectives in Oz

2011-01-14T10:45:00.001+08:00

This story appeared a couple of weeks ago in the Sydney Morning Herald...

Supernatural sleuths and the search for truth

The Australian Institute of Criminology advises the families of missing people to avoid psychics, saying: ''Desperation can force people to consider options they would never entertain in more stable times.''

It's something Don Spiers knows all too well. Since his daughter, Sarah, disappeared in 1996 - a suspected victim of Perth's Claremont serial killer - he has been ''hounded'' by up to 400 psychics and clairvoyants offering cryptic clues to her whereabouts.

''They had my emotions on a roller-coaster,'' Spiers told The West Australian in 2008. ''You'd be full of hope … and there'd be nothing. Why would they want to make it worse for me?'

The article offers a detailed analysis of when and why the police might sometimes use self-professed "psychics" to assist with investigations and why families of missing people or murder victims should probably avoid seeking or accepting "assistance" from such people.

Critics ask why she [Debbie Malone] cannot immediately zero in on crucial information, such as the location of a body or the address of a killer.

Malone says it's an unrealistic expectation and if it was that easy, ''every psychic in Australia would be solving the case''.

Whereas, in reality, none ever do. Not one.

So how to explain the discovery of Kristi McDougall's body by Cheryl Carroll-Lagerwey, who dreamed she would find Kiesha Abrahams at the spot?

A Queensland research psychologist, Kathryn Gow, has analysed psychic readings for 20 years and is convinced a small number of psychics have a genuine ability. She suggests that as an Aboriginal elder, Carroll-Lagerwey was ''in contact with the basic elements of life and therefore can probably sense what has happened in an environment''.

The president of the Australian Psychics Association, Simon Turnbull, thinks it likely that ''at that particular event, where a body was waiting to be found, there was an obvious case of confusion to do with the psychic identifying the body''.

Mendham says it may be ''a strange coincidence''.

''Unfortunately bodies do get found in the bush,'' he says. ''She found a body - that's all we know for sure.''

Exactly. People claiming no psychic powers whatsoever have been known to find bodies whilst the vast, vast, vast majority of people claiming such powers never do. Picking one hit out of millions of misses and claiming significance is just silly. It's like those times when you have a song in your head and then it comes on the radio, it happens and we notice it when it does and it seems surprising or amazing. But we usually fail to notice the millions of times when we have songs in our head that don't come on the radio soon after.

If I spend half an hour looking for my car keys in places where I "feel" I've left them, is the moment that I do find them of paranormal significance? I suspect it's more than counteracted by all the previous "moments" in which I didn't find them. Self-professed psychics and their believers never seem to notice all the misses.

Meryl Dorey, AVN & Research

2011-01-09T12:24:00.008+08:00

After PZ Myers posted about it on his Pharyngula blog, there's little doubt that the majority of the sceptical blogosphere will very soon be aware of a radio interview between host Tracey Spicer and Australian anti-vaccinationist, Meryl Dorey.

Spicer gave no ground and refused to allow Dorey to tout the AVN website.

Dorey has of course responded to the interview with a post on the AVN blog. I'm going to ignore most of it because it's just a rehash of the same old "if vaccination worked, vaccinated people wouldn't get sick" nonsense. I am intrigued, however, by Dorey's apparent inability to transcribe Spicer's very clear commentary. For example, when Spicer says...

T: It absolutely is news Meryl. It is discrediting...
M: (No it hasn't)
T: ...and disputing the entire research upon...

Dorey transcribes it as...

T: The fact is Meryl, it has been discredited.

M: No, it hasn’t.

T: And it’s confusing (?) the entire research upon

It's not even difficult to hear (except for Dorey's "no it hasn't"). Later in the transcript Dorey writes that she couldn't make out every word of Spicer's comments but those comments are incredibly clear on the online audio. Perhaps Dorey recorded the interview herself rather than relying on the official audio from the radio station? I don't know but it does suggest that the remainder of the transcription might not be a reliable review of the interview. (Update: I see someone else has noticed the discrepancies - a lot of them)

After the interview was terminated, Spicer mentioned some of what's on the AVN website:

Under the heading measles, mumps, rubella, she states that these are all non-threatening illnesses in early childhood.

Meryl responds in her blog:

note from Meryl – I’m not sure what she is referring to...

It took me five minutes on Google to find one page on the AVN/Living Wisdom website that meets the criteria here.

Unlike vaccination (which offers only temporary immunity), the natural occurrence of each of these diseases (all non-threatening illnesses in early childhood) generally results in lifelong immunity.

She has even highlighted that paragraph in purple, suggesting that she thinks it's an important point.

The webpage is titled "Australian Vaccination Network - General Vaccines & Information - MMR" while the story carries the general heading "MMR" then in large, bold, purple text "Measles, Mumps, Rubella". It looks vaguely like the sort of thing Spicer was referring to. So, as we've come to expect, Spicer was right and Dorey was, apparently, incapable.

I have to wonder about Dorey's research abilities when she can't even find information she presumably posted on her own website.

Given her repeated apparent inability to get even the easy stuff right, I find it difficult to see how Dorey or the AVN can be considered a reliable source of information on something as important as your child's life.

MORE:

Brian Deer's BMJ article about Andrew Wakefield

How does homeopathy work?

2011-01-05T23:07:00.002+08:00

Many people have asked this question and the answer is, to say the least, complex. The following video clip explains the basis of homeopathy in a clear and concise fashion and includes comments from Zofia Dymitr, chair of the Society of Homeopaths.

I just saw the clip at Podblack's blog and had to post it here too. It deserves all the publicity it can get.

While Dymitr looks a little shell shocked, Simon Singh shows no signs of bruising from last year's dust up with the British Chiropractic Association.

If nothing else, Dymitr's commentary provides an excellent lesson in obfuscation, obtuseness, circumlocution, passing the buck , discombobulation and weasel wordery.

In summary... how does homeopathy work?

MORE:

Comment from the Quackometer

Alternative Cancer Cure - a miracle?

2010-12-08T18:25:00.012+08:00

From a website called Cancer Angel...

Kim Tinkham was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer in February 2007, just two days before her fiftieth birthday. Rather than go the conventional route of mastectomy followed by chemo and/or radiation she chose to seek out an alternative way to heal her body. Her choice to search for an alternative coupled with a late night email landed her as a guest on the Oprah Winfrey show in March of 2007, where she stood her ground for her right to choose and shared with the audience that ‘you cannot make a decision based on fear’.

With hundreds of emails from people around the world who watched the show segment applauding her decision and spurring her on she spent the next four months seeking out answers from doctors and practitioners around the world. With her self imposed deadline of October fast approaching and no answer to the question “what causes cancer?” she finally found the research of Dr. Robert O. Young, a microbiologist in California. After communicating with Dr. Young via phone and email she made the decision to follow his protocol and three months later was pronounced cancer free.

Kim Tinkham died yesterday - from cancer. It's a sad but unfortunately predictable end for a woman who was persuaded to forgo real medical treatment in favour of pseudoscience.

The survival chances from stage III breast cancer treated with chemotherapy is reportedly a dismal 50%. When you effectively do nothing to treat cancer, the chances of survival drop closer to 0% (with the possible exception of a spontaneous remission).

There are calls to bombard Oprah with messages denouncing her promotion of The Secret and other nonsense that might have had some influence on the decisions made by Ms Tinkham.

I'm not sure such actions will serve any purpose. In 2009, after Newsweek condemned the quackery that makes regular appearances on Winfrey's show, she responded...

"I trust the viewers, and I know that they are smart and discerning enough to seek out medical opinions to determine what may be best for them."

Oprah is currently on a promotional tour in Australia. I understand ~~she~~ her crew will be in the southwest of WA tomorrow. Maybe ~~she'll~~ they'll visit a biodynamic winery - I hear they're becoming popular these days.

UPDATE: Kim Tinkham on Oprah. Oprah says she's happy the message of The Secret is reaching people but also, to be fair, she says Tinkham is irresponsible for ignoring medical science. Tinkham responds that she's following Winfrey's advice to make her own choices. From here it degrades into a battle of woos which Tinkham "won".

Note that Tinkham's claim that her miracle cure guru was a "real doctor" was wrong.

The video link was posted on Dr Robert Young's blog as part of his promotion of an alkaline diet miracle treatment for cancer. You'll find a testimonial from Tinkham there too, complete with an email address where you can "contact her".

The blog is replete with photos of a happy Kim Tinkham advising others to wish their cancer away like she did.

MORE:

Digital Journal summary of Kim Tinkham's cancer journey
Dr David Gorski expresses a view

Rhinos are endangered

2010-11-12T10:41:00.003+08:00

I just saw this video promoted on Channel 7's Morning Show and thought it was worth sharing.

The rap song, produced by students at Belair Schools (South Australia) and Zoos SA as part of the Monarto Zoo Planet Keeper programme, begins with a simple fact...

"Rhinos are endangered, the result of superstition..."

Interestingly, this story appeared on The Morning Show immediately following a segment in which "celebrity psychic" Mitchell Coombs told three women nothing of value about their own lives (although, he did say one of the women would meet, or might already know, a male whose name begins with M and I do feel he might have been spot on with that information).

Superstition is killing rhinos. Stop it.

WA Coroner & quack cancer cures

2010-10-20T16:31:00.001+08:00

Spotted at Stop the AVN, reported in The Age.

THE West Australian Coroners Court will hold a major inquest next month into a series of deaths in mid-2005 when five people, including a 53-year-old Victorian woman, received dubious treatments for cancer allegedly at the direction of the notorious quack Hellfried Sartori.

It's difficult to understand the point of such an investigation since it seems, to date, that the government has done nothing about the inquest into the death of Penelope Dingle who tried to cure her cancer with homeopathy (sugar and/or water).

At the conclusion of the inquest, the coroner recommended federal and state health authorities review their legislation regarding complementary and alternative treatments. I'm not aware that anything at all has changed since.

All the inquests in the world won't stop people profiting from selling nonsense while it remains legal to do so.

In more-positive news, EoR points to the story of a young boy who survived cancer.

Sunrise on Vaccination

2010-10-20T16:03:00.005+08:00

Whooping cough and vaccination were discussed on Channel 7's Sunsrise program this morning. I missed the main segment but caught a couple of email comments and David Koch's reply.

The second email that I heard read out was from a typical conspiracy theorist, anti vaccinationist, taking Koch to task for apparently being brainwashed by big pharmaceutical companies. Koch responded quite forcefully that we need 96% vaccination coverage to provide herd immunity (I now know this figure was provided by Dr Ginni Mansberg earlier). He went on to effectively ridicule what he called "airy-fairy parents" who don't want needles stuck in their kids.

Now, this is great - Channel 7 - Sunrise - were promoting science and medicine. But I'm confused. In the past (and no doubt very soon, again, in the future) I'm damned sure Koch has sat there while such things as "kitchen remedies" have been promoted. In fact, everything from psychics to reiki to acupuncture and naturopathy turn up regularly on the show and the promotional information, all too often supplied by practitioners, is lapped up by the Sunrise hosts.

Earlier this year they featured Deepak Chopra, who was billed as "the world leader in mind-body healing".

It seems to me Sunrise has to bear some of the responsibility for people believing there are genuine alternatives to real medicine and for those who extrapolate from this that there are also non-medical alternatives to vaccination.

There is now a video of this morning's segment online, featuring Sunrise doctor Ginni Mansberg. This is where Koch first raises the problem of those "airy-fairy parents" putting the rest of us at risk.

David, those "airy-fairy parents" are clearly such an important part of the Channel 7 viewer demographic that your bosses persistently feel the need to cater to them by supporting and promoting nonsense to the detriment of the rest of us. Even in this segment we see two examples of "let's not go there", once from Mansberg and once from Mel, when the issue of vaccination objectors is raised.

Why not go there? Why do the Sunrise team fear the truth?

UPDATE:

Dr Ginni responds to the "nutters" - she will "go there" after all...

Meryl Dorey, AVN & Big Pharma Fail!

2010-10-18T22:55:00.004+08:00

Today, Meryl Dorey put out the following call on the Australian Vaccination network (AVN) blog...

Scarlet Fever was a dreaded killer of children (and adults) in the 1800s and the early part of the 1900s. In fact, it regularly killed more people than that disease we have all been taught to believe is such an indiscriminate killer of young and old – measles.

But Scarlet Fever has virtually disappeared. We don’t have scare campaigns telling us that we have to keep our children away from crowds because there is an epidemic of Scarlet Fever. We don’t have stories coming out in the media pointing the finger of blame at those who haven’t been vaccinated against Scarlet Fever and blaming them for the deaths of vaccinated children.

Perhaps that’s because we have never had a vaccine for Scarlet Fever. Never.

So, our learned adversaries who believe – against all of the available evidence, that vaccines have saved the world – how do you explain this decline in the mortality from Scarlet Fever without a Scarlet Fever vaccine? I’m waiting. Let’s hear it. C’mon – don’t be shy…

[article link]

I'm at a loss as to her point here. We are usually being asked, by the AVN, to believe that all vaccines are dangerous and ineffective and that the only reason we still have them is to make big pharmaceutical companies rich (or because our reptilian overlords want to gain total control of the population through lethal microchipping).

Ignoring the fact that a vaccine for Scarlet Fever was developed in 1924 then superseded by penicillin, what does not having a Scarlet Fever vaccine today actually prove? It seems to me that it demonstrates the strong possibility that the pharmaceutical industry might not actually be making dangerous and ineffective vaccines for problems that don't require them purely in the interests of maximising profits - otherwise we'd still be lining up for scary Scarlet Fever shots.

But maybe that's just me.

MORE:

Dorey also provides readers with a graph indicating that measles and scarlet fever both showed a dramatic drop in mortality in the late 1880s. I assume we are to conclude from this tight correlation that because one disease doesn't need a vaccine, neither does the other. It's an interesting correlation to be sure.

Ignoring the fact that Dorey has been told repeatedly that mortality is not best indicator of vaccine efficacy because diseases can also have disastrous, long-term, non-lethal effects (so incidence is a better measure) it's interesting to note that the 4-stroke internal combustion engine was being put into full production around the time these diseases showed their dramatic fall in mortality.

I can only conclude from this that cars are the reason why less people die from these diseases today.

God did it!

2010-10-15T21:40:00.001+08:00

How strange is it that a god who can 'poof' an entire universe into existence, who can part seas, flood the globe and generally wreak havoc at the blink of his spiritual eye, has to resort to using mere mortals to dig a bunch of men out of a collapsed mine?

"There are actually 34 of us," 19-year-old Jimmy Sanchez wrote, "because God has never left us down here."

Amen, a watching world would agree.

But now the question has become, exactly whose God was down there with Jimmy Sanchez and the others?

Different churches are laying claim to inspiring divine intervention in the remarkable rescue, giving short shrift to the impressive technological achievement of the Chilean engineers (and a giant U.S.-made drill) in their efforts to get a leg up on the competition for souls in South America's newly diverse religious marketplace.

So sad that the fervently religious can have such little regard for their fellow humans.

Meryl Dorey, AVN & "what's that gurgling sound?"

2010-10-14T18:01:00.005+08:00

That gurgling sound is the sound of the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN)* slowly going down the toilet!

I just spotted the news at Young Australian Skeptics and have followed up some news resources - the AVN is to lose its status as a charity. Anyone vaguely familiar with the anti-vaccine scare-mongering that forms the group's raison d'être would wonder how they were ever able to claim charity status in the first place.

From the Government Gazette announcement...

I, the Hon. KEVIN GREENE, M.P., the responsible Minister for the purposes of the Charitable Fundraising Act 1991, do hereby revoke the authority to fundraise issued to Australian Vaccination Network Inc on the following grounds as set out in section 31 (1) of that Act:

(a) fundraising appeals have not been conducted in good faith for charitable purposes.

(c) fundraising appeals have been improperly administered.

(f) it is in the public interest.

That cheering sound you hear is from thousands of sceptics across Australia who have worked tirelssly to bring the AVN's antics into public scrutiny.

The story is already getting wide publicity...

From Pro Bono News:

The NSW Office of Liquor Gaming and Racing (OLGR) has rescinded the charitable status of the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) after a two month investigation.

But the national, volunteer-run lobby and support group says the move is a political decision because its message of an individually informed health choice conflicts with the government's policy of pro-mass vaccination.

From The Herald Sun:

A CONTROVERSIAL NSW-based anti-vaccination group has been stripped of its charitable status after the state government found its appeals had not been conducted in good faith.

The Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) was ordered in July to publish a disclaimer on its website stating the group was anti-vaccination and its material shouldn't be read as medical advice.

From The Northern Star

AUSTRALIAN Vaccination Network media spokeswoman Meryl Dorey today said the Office of Liquor Gaming and Racing (OLGR) announced it would revoke the lobby group's authority to fundraise.

The press release from the Bangalow-based network said the OLGR, the body that oversees charities, had openely stated there was no evidence of fraud or ciminality in an audit of the group earlier this year.

The AVN have published more details in a media release that paints the decision as "political". Here's some of what the OLGR had to say...

The Organisation has failed to publish a disclaimer on its website as recommended by the Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC). This has resulted in an unacceptable risk of potential donors to the Organisation being misled when making a decision whether or not to make a donation, which has led to appeals not being conducted in good faith.

The Organisation's website is misleading in that it may lead people making donations to believe that they are donating to a cause which promotes vaccination whereas the Organisation adopts an anti-vaccination position. When requested by the HCCC to publish a disclaimer on its website the Organisation failed to do so.

The failure of the Organisation to comply with the HCCC recommendation resulted in the Commission publishing a Public Warning on 26 July 2010 advising that this failure "poses a risk to public health and safety". In this circumstance it is in the public interest to not permit the Organisation to conduct fund raising appeals under the Act.

It's pretty damned clear that the AVN have been their own worst enemy by refusing to comply with a request from the Health Complaints Commission earlier this year. It can't be easy to still pretend to be charitable while you're flashing a government health body the brown eye.

Meryl Dorey concludes her opening statement with a request for potential donors to hurry up and donate before the revocation takes effect (why these things aren't instant is beyond a simpleton like me). But she's been desperately pleading for funds for months, supposedly to fight a legal campaign against the HCCC decision and it seems to have mostly fallen on deaf ears. I imagine anyone who gives a toss has already donated - to an organisation that has now had its charity status revoked.

I wonder if there are legal avenues for donors to recoup their money on the basis they were misled as to the group's true nature?

This is going to spread through the blogosphere faster than I could hope to keep up with (I almost used an infection metaphor there but this is serious folks - children have died) so use Google blog search to follow along.

MORE:

Peter Bowditch reported the AVN to the OLGR in May last year.

*For newcomers, the AVN is an anti-vaccination lobby group that uses scare tactics to convince people, especially new parents, that vaccination is a lethal tool of evil governments and pharmaceutical companies. They use every means at their disposal to get this "message" across but among their favourites are spreading fear about supposed toxins and the gross misuse and outright abuse of statistics, some of which have to be mangled beyond recognition in order to even appear to support the anti-vaccination agenda. Logical fallacies that are not welcome in most sensible conversations or debates find a welcoming home at any AVN-run website.

NOTE: I'm not a doctor or scientist. You really don't need to be to see through the nonsense that passes as information from groups like the AVN.

Meryl Dorey, AVN & Science

2010-10-07T20:58:00.010+08:00

*UPDATE* I recommend that readers take a look at the comments following this article for important clarifications

Someone on the Australian Vaccination Network's (AVN) Facebook page posted a link to an Adelaide Now story about a hospital doctor contracting whooping cough.

In short, a doctor at a Women's and Children's hospital tested positive for whooping cough and the hospital has taken action to identify anyone who was potentially infected by him. The story does not mention any confirmed infections among the 59 people identified as having had contact during the infectious period, but says 25 were given precautionary antibiotics. The article finishes with a call for children to be fully vaccinated.

The doctor's vaccination status was not mentioned but is the cause of some speculation at AVN Central. An AVN administrator, posting only as Australian Vaccination Network, wrote:

What was the doctor's vaccination status? How long since his last shot and if it was fairly recent, what does this say about the effectiveness of vaccination? While the unvaccinated are being blamed for the outbreak that's been going on in Oz for the last few years (despite our record-high levels of vaccination), cases like this where a health professional has contracted and possibly passed on pertussis are far from rare.

Given that we don't know the doctor's vaccination history, the comment seems somewhat pointless. This doctor might be one of those who the AVN regularly tell us about - doctors opposed to vaccination. Even if we assume the doctor was vaccinated, anyone who knows anything about vaccination knows that it isn't claimed to be 100% effective. So the doctor could be fully up to date with his or her vaccinations, and still become infected. That, in itself, isn't even news.

The next response on the Facebook thread was from Meryl Dorey, also posting as Australian Vaccination Network but at least including an unfortunate MD at the end of her comment (she isn't a doctor - of any kind. She's not even a scientist. For the record, neither am I). Here's a screenshot of her comment...

Her opening remark was what caught my attention...

The other question is - was this mutation something natural or did the vaccination actually CAUSE it?

Now, I'm no biologist - I didn't even do biology in high school (I did chemistry and physics instead) but I really don't think she has even a layperson's concept of what mutation is.

As always, I'm open to corrections but, for what it's worth, here's my layman's summary of mutation.

Organisms are never quite identical. Minor differences in DNA occur across a species. Sometimes these changes are bad for the organism and those individuals die or fail to reproduce. Sometimes the changes seem to do nothing, bad or good, for the organism but if the organism survives and reproduces, those changes can be passed on. Few changes would be likely to automatically deliver an immediate, significant benefit to an individual or species.

However, some of those seemingly insignificant changes might become beneficial for the organism if its circumstances change. In a season where grass is in short supply, those animals in a group that have longer necks might benefit by reaching leaves in trees. Shorter individuals might die that season and the "longer-neck mutation" is now part of the species. It has mutated but it didn't intentionally grow a longer neck to survive, the mutation wasn't "caused", as such. It survived because some individuals were different enough to exploit a differing situation that others couldn't. It's evolution in a nutshell.

With bacteria, like that which causes whooping cough, all that needs to happen is for the organism to change just enough to not be recognised by an immune system that has already been exposed to the original organism.

But mutation is a numbers game. It's occurring all the time in all organisms but remember, not all mutations are beneficial. Some of the mutations might make the "new" bacteria different to the old bacteria but it might also be less virulent - more easily defeated. Such mutations pose little threat to us.

Think of beneficial mutation a little like choosing winning Lotto numbers. To really improve your chances of winning Lotto, you need to try a hell of a lot of number combinations - and you still might not win.

Beneficial mutation is best served by the ability to constantly reproduce as each new generation can have different "combinations". Then we need enough individuals to carry just the right combination - and that requires still more opportunities to reproduce. Since infected people will usually either beat the infection (possibly with long-term side effects), receive antibiotics or die, the organism needs to keep finding new hosts in order to keep playing the "mutation lottery"

A large population of unvaccinated (or never-infected) people offers the best opportunity for the bacterium to evolve a mutant combination that allows it to by-pass a pertussis-ready immune system.

I am at an absolute loss to even contemplate how a vaccine for whooping cough could actually CAUSE such a mutation. It's not like the bacteria are weighing up the situation and choosing which parts of their DNA need to be changed in order to survive - they are just lucky enough to sometimes develop a difference that makes them look different to a pre-primed immune system. Such mutations would occur even if vaccination had never been invented.

Further down the AVN Facebook page is a question about whether live virus vaccinations are contagious.

I was just wondering - Which vaccines are live culture? When a child is being vaccinated, does the doctor tell them to stay away from other people especially babies & children for a few days, because of the risk of that child spreading the live culture that they were just vaccinated against.

The obvious short answer to this, to a layman like me, would be "no" since vaccination would be completely pointless if it posed exactly the same threat as the natural disease it is designed to contain. But this is an AVN page so you can bet that isn't the answer that's given.

The first reply is just bizarre so I'm just going to leave it well alone.

The second reply comes from Meryl Dorey, self-described leading expert on vaccination.

Hi Fiona - Live virus vaccines include the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella), Chicken Pox (Varicella) if we license the Shingles vaccine in Australia, that will also be a live virus, some of our licensed flu vaccines are live though they are... not used often here, the oral polio vaccine which is also not used often in Australia is live, rabies is live which is only used for bat handlers here in Oz and I think I'm forgetting one but it's too early in the morning...does anyone out there know if I have?

I haven't checked all the facts of Dorey's reply but I do note a significant omission which could have put the questioner's mind at ease. The live viruses used in vaccines like MMR are "attenuated". From wikipedia (my bolding)...

An attenuated vaccine is a vaccine created by reducing the virulence of a pathogen, but still keeping it viable (or "live").[1] Attenuation takes a living agent and alters it so that it becomes harmless or less virulent. These vaccines contrast to those produced by "killing" the virus (inactivated vaccine).

It seems to me, and I remind you I'm neither a doctor nor a scientist, that even if the vaccinated child were contagious, then any subsequent infection would be mild. Again, I'm ready to stand corrected if I'm wrong (*UPDATE* I recommend that readers take a look at the comments following this article for important clarifications). Even so, Dorey's answer seems sadly lacking in important details that one might expect to find from a group that claims to offer parents information that will help them make vaccination decisions.

But why are AVN members concerned by infections - either from doctors or vaccinated kids? After all, Meryl Dorey is on record as saying whooping cough isn't lethal and that it's little more than a bad cough that is easily treated with sugar and/or water (okay, she called it "homeopathy" but that sounds far too "sciencey" for something which actually is just sugar or water). Anti-vaxxers often argue that our immune systems are strengthened by contracting infections, so surely they should welcome infectious doctors, vaccinated-pox parties and biological mutation.

Fun with the Cuttlefish

2010-10-06T19:42:00.000+08:00

If you love poetry (or verse), atheism and scepticism then you no doubt already follow the Digital Cuttlefish (DC). If not, you definitely should.

In a recent post, DC has invited entries to a growing piece of verse about what the Devil would do.

DC opened with...

If I were the devil, the first thing I’d do
(I’d be subtle, and not too apparent)
Is create holy writings that all disagree
And announce that each one is inerrant.

...and there are follow-up verses from DC and other contributors.

I've added...

If I were the devil, the next thing I'd do
(along with the things I have stated)
is to make lots of people and tell them "be good",
then condemn them for flaws I'd created.

We'll see if it makes the grade.

University of Southern Queensland supports Creationism?

2010-09-21T23:57:00.002+08:00

On Sunday, Jayson D. Cooke announced on the Young Australian Skeptics' website that the University of Southern Queensland was to host a seminar by scientists from Creation Ministries International (CMI). As Jayson pointed out, neither of the two scientists involved appears to hold any professional qualification related to the seminar subject - evolution - which lead some people to wonder why the university would sponsor them to speak on the subject.

Here's a Google cache of CMI's web page dated 17 September, 2010.

The page advertises a "university-organised seminar" and says "This is the first time in CMI’s history that a secular university has shown this sort of open-minded commitment to presentation of the ‘other side’ of this issue."

Here's a screen-shot from the same web page tonight...

This one says "Stop press! The arrangements for the seminar in Hervey Bay have changed. Several community organisations have expressed a wish to take a leading role in hosting the event and USQ Fraser Coast is working with these organisations to manage a smooth transition. Details of the venue will be available soon."

It seems USQ have reconsidered their support for a blatantly non-science event being touted as "the other side" of the truly scientific theory of evolution.

A win for science, reason and scepticism. Let's keep religion in churches, where it belongs.

via Young Australian Skeptics

UPDATE:

Read more at Wombat Wal's blog

Homeopathy for Whooping Cough?

2010-09-18T19:58:00.003+08:00

No!

Another Australian baby died from Whooping Cough (pertussis) this week. Some people are recommending that pertussis can be treated homeopathically - ie, with magic liquid or magic pills that contain nothing but water or sugar respectively.

Needless to say, neither water nor sugar are likely to be effective cures or preventatives for any disease, let alone a serious, life-threatening one. Indeed, extensive testing shows that homeopathy doesn't work.

And don't be misled by this article which describes homeopathy as "herbal remedies". To be herbal, the end product would need to contain some herbs. Homeopathic remedies, generally speaking, are highly unlikely to contain even a molecule of anything vaguely herbal, let alone a quantity large enough to induce any medicinal response. It's about time journalists understood this, it's hardly news any more.

Speaking of lagging behind - from the same article we get this plea...

A four-week-old baby died in NSW last year. Dana McCaffery's parents have since become vocal advocates of vaccination.

Yesterday, Toni McCaffery posted her condolences to the SA baby's parents on a Facebook page and repeated her plea for the Federal Government to raise awareness and offer free vaccination to everyone.

'I am in tears . . . please Mrs Roxon act on your promise," she wrote. "We have been pleading all year for the government to act and not wait for another death. To the family, we are so, so sorry."

What about it Mrs Roxon? How many dead babies does it take for someone to act - not only on vaccination education but against those who scare monger about vaccination or who seek to profit by selling snake oil to worried parents?

Why do bloggers have to do your damned job for you Mrs Roxon?

UPDATE:

I should add that I do like one comment from the news article...

Australian Medical Association immunity spokesman Dr Rod Pearce said anyone recommending homeopathic "vaccinations" or treatments was illegitimate.

I assume he means they're all bastards?

COSMOS on vaccination

2010-09-16T21:52:00.003+08:00

Three vaccination articles on COSMOS online...

Vaccination: Jumping at shadows
A vaccination story.

Vaccination: A Numbers Game
Explains the history and benefits of vaccination.

Vaccination: Danger Zones
Maps areas of high and low vaccination across Australia.

Found via SAVN

Meryl Dorey, AVN: Neonatal sepsis & madness

2010-09-12T23:25:00.010+08:00

*Note: I feel I should clarify that the word "madness" in the title refers to a comment made by Meryl Dorey.

Meryl Dorey, from the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) has posted two lengthy articles telling the tale of a woman who delivered her own baby at home but had to go to hospital the next day with related complications. Since this is the AVN, you can guess that, once the medical profession becomes involved, the story turns dark and we soon find ourselves on a journey of unimaginable bureaucracy, lies, heavy-handedness, unnecessary tests and pharmaceutical madness.

I have no reason to doubt the basic details of the article [update: That article has now been password protected for some reason but a copy is available here] but we must keep in mind that this is a second-hand account of a story initially told by someone who had found herself in exceptionally difficult and seemingly disturbing circumstances - so some of the details may be a little murky, though I don't doubt the woman's anguish even if the story is only partly correct. My main interest, however, is with Dorey's approach to medical facts, statistics and assumptions.

For the sake of brevity I'm not going to re-paste much of the article here. In short, the woman gave birth at home and the next day, after she and her baby had been taken to hospital, her baby had a fever and was subjected to tests and procedures, including a lumbar puncture, against the mother's will. Reading it, I was disturbed that doctors would be sticking a needle into a newborn's spine if the only concern was a raised temperature. Surely there must be something she's not telling us? Remember, I'm not a doctor - (neither is Meryl Dorey).

The doctors' refusal to submit to the mother's wishes forms the basis of Dorey's retelling of her story. Dorey is miffed, to say the least, that trained doctors would take action against the wishes of someone "using their brain" (yes, she still considers that a scientific qualification).

In the comments section, "Tom" points out that it appears the doctors acted in accordance with standard practice based on a risk of sepsis (I assume from his comments that Tom is a doctor or healthcare worker of some kind). Dorey responds (my bolding)...

Thank you for replying Tom. I have to say, I am appalled! The risk of a lumbar puncture has GOT to be greater then the risk that a fever – with no other symptoms – could be sepsis. This is madness, plain and simple...

As an aside, it's worth noting that despite writing almost 3400 words in the article, most of them condemning the medical profession and various government departments, Dorey never mentions sepsis once. The first mention of it on the page was in Tom's first comment where he succinctly explains, in a 27-word sentence, why it is medically negligent for a doctor not to act quickly. I'll leave that with you.

Now, back to Dorey's comment. Whilst she lists some possible complications of lumbar puncture in the article, most of which are "rare", "very rare", "extremely rare", or otherwise inconsequential, Dorey doesn't supply any data on the relative risks of either lumbar puncture or sepsis misdiagnosis. So, is it madness? Is it plain, or simple? I didn't know so I had a look around and it appears Tom is right and Dorey is, not surprisingly perhaps, wrong. First to Wikipedia...

The problem for doctors, as Tom mentioned in his comment, is that neonatal sepsis can present with nothing more than a fever...

It is difficult to clinically exclude sepsis in newborns less than 90 days old that have fever (defined as a temperature > 38°C (100.4°F).

These doctors were dealing with a baby just 24 hours old and suffering high temperature and who was delivered at home in unknown conditions by a mother who'd suffered heavy blood loss after failing to deliver the placenta. One imagines these doctors had some reasons to be concerned but, ignoring all the other factors, were they right to act so quickly, against the mother's wishes, when the baby only had a fever?

Dorey says "when doctors become the only ones whose opinion matters ... we have turned a corner into anarchy ("dictionary for Ms Dorey please!").

But why would doctors make a snap decision? Here's a few stats on the mortality rate of neonatal sepsis (my bolding).

A prospective study was carried out to determine the predictors of outcome in neonates with sepsis admitted to neonatal care unit at Basrah Maternity and Children Hospital over six months (from the first of November 2004 till the end of April 2005). One-hundred twenty neonates were studied, sepsis was confirmed by clinical and laboratory measures. Seventy four (61.7%) neonates were males and 46 (38.3%) were females. Thirty three (27.5%) were preterm and 87 (72.5%) were full term. Sixty seven (55.8%) neonates were still alive during period of hospitalization and discharged home, while fifty three (44.2%) neonates died. Early onset sepsis was detected in 35(29.2%) neonates while late onset sepsis was detected in 85(70.8%) neonates, however, the mortality rate was higher in early onset sepsis (62.9%) compared to late onset sepsis (36.5%).

So, almost 63% of neonates with early onset sepsis died. Almost two out of three of them died!

Now recall that neonatal sepsis can present with nothing more than a fever. Note too that, in his comment, Tom makes the point that an infected baby probably won't survive 24 hours without treatment. The WHO says that "The chances of survival are slim for newborns with a serious infection, whether hospitalized or in the community."

Did the doctors take the right action? Again, a bit of Googling says they followed protocol. From MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia (my bolding)...

Babies in the hospital and those younger than 4 weeks old are started on antibiotics before lab results are back. (Lab results may take 24-72 hours.) This practice has saved many lives.

So far, Tom appears to be on the money. The doctors acted correctly in the best interests of the baby, albeit against the wishes of the mother. But what about the lumbar puncture that had me concerned? From MedlinePlus again...

A lumbar puncture (spinal tap) will be done to examine the cerebrospinal fluid for bacteria.

Bingo! That's why I don't offer medical advice and why my "feeling icky" about a procedure does not make that procedure invalid or unwarranted. Meryl Dorey's personal opinions and doubts carry similar weight where real medicine is concerned. Argument from incredulity is a logical fallacy.

So, facts we have at our disposal after 15-30 minutes of looking for information...

a newborn presented with a high temperature
high temperature can indicate sepsis
early onset sepsis can be fatal in 63% of cases
doctors acted quickly to deal with possible sepsis
they took blood samples and performed lumbar puncture
they administered antibiotics as per accepted protocol

There are other aspects to the story which would require independent verification to even begin to hold an opinion on. I have no intention of commenting on them but the medical decisions of the doctors look to be correct to a layman like me.

I'll leave you with some choice comments from Meryl in her comments section...

I would have thought that here in Australia, we were past this sort of mediaeval treatment of women and babies.

Hmmm, because antibiotics and evidence-based protocols are mediaeval? I wonder what she thinks of homeopathy?!?!

Until it is known that there is a bacterial infection present, the indiscriminate use of such invasive procedures should have been left up to the mother. If there had been any ramifications afterwards, it was the mother who would face them and she was willing to take that chance.

She was willing to take the chance that her baby might not have had sepsis - with a 63% mortality rate? Did she even know the risks? If I'm "willing to take the chance" that my nappy-wearing baby will bounce safely if I drop it on its backside, should I be allowed to take that chance? (I saw something along these lines in a video in high school, some 30 years ago, so I do have evidence)

The right to risk letting your child die when evidence suggests a possibly-life-saving alternative is a whole different discussion to whether these doctors acted correctly. We've seen this issue raised before with homeopathically-inclined parents who let their own baby die of eczema rather than use evidence-based medical help and others who preferred their cancer-stricken child be wrapped in mud rather than try chemotherapy. From America we've seen similar stories of parents who prayed while their child died from a treatable disease and others who ran from authorities wanting to save their child's life with chemotherapy.

I wonder if Dorey thinks there is anything the government should prevent parents from doing, regardless of the risks to their children's lives? Is every parent always right, as long as they claim to use their brain? For the record, I think Dorey, with her constant conspiratorial battle against rules, regulations and reality, is the one advocating anarchy.

Now, we have a baby who may have ongoing gut and immune system issues because of this and who could possibly have been made a paraplegic or killed because of the lumbar puncture that the mother did not want.

The risk of ignoring possible sepsis was high - one quarter of the world's 4 million neonatal deaths are from sepsis. There was no time to "wait and see" since deaths often occur before the lab results are in. The risks of the complications Dorey prefers to highlight were, as usual, minimal.

This isn't Lotto but if it was, Dorey's preferred strategy seems to have been selected to minimise the chances of winning.

Once again we have a case of Dorey effectively arguing that "seat belts are bad because some people die whilst wearing them" yet refusing to acknowledge the life-saving statistics that counter such an argument. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to trust anything on the AVN websites. I wouldn't be making medical decisions based on Meryl Dorey's "feelings".

NOTE: Like Dorey, I'm neither a doctor nor a scientist.

New blog to watch

2010-09-11T22:53:00.000+08:00

There's a new sceptical blog on the Aussie radar and it might be worth keeping an eye on. It's run by two brothers living on opposite sides of Oz and is intriguingly entitled "SkepticBros". Hmmm, I wonder if there's some hidden meaning in there?

AVN: Kill a tiger, put lead in your pencil

2010-09-05T01:24:00.005+08:00

Meryl Dorey of the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) regularly complains that sceptics call the AVN anti-science conspiracy theorists. But why do people apply this label to them?

Here's a hint from their Facebook page. Take special note of the responses in the blue-grey section. The opening comment is from Meryl Dorey herself. I suspect the second AVN comment is also hers, though unsigned....

I'll ignore the implicit racism in "Noelene's" response, illustrated by her apparent surprise that a Chinese and Indian doctor are each guided by evidence and are both gobsmacked that someone might prefer ancient spells, rituals and a bit of rhino horn over something that has a modicum of evidence behind it.

Yes, even some Chinese and Indian people can think like intelligent, educated people. I know, I know, wonders never cease! Couldn't they at least chant a little about qi or something - like real doctors do?

It gets difficult to ignore the racism, though, when the admin (Dorey?) joins in and takes a swipe at the nations of both China and India because they are beginning to let go of long-outdated, pre-scientific approaches to health care. She complains that they are turning their backs on things like Ayurveda because they've been told "Western medicine" (with a capital "w") is "scientific" (in quotes).

Now, here's the odd thing... One of the biggest complaints from the anti-vaccination crowd is that vaccines and pharmaceutical medicines are loaded with toxins. Yet, here they are promoting a non-evidence-based system of "health care" that is known to often include toxic heavy metals.

And these aren't trace amounts of so-called toxins, like the formaldehyde found in some vaccines, these are toxic levels of heavy metals. Could this be why "eastern" doctors are turning their backs on it? Maybe they care about the health of their patients?

Traditional Chinese Medicine has similar problems. A search for TCM lead poisoning turns up plenty of results. I'd like to think Chinese doctors are starting to see that evidence-based medicine might just be better than a dose of mercury poisoning or the bile from a tortured bear.

And then we get to that old chestnut which can be summed up as - "we are so unhealthy these days because of western medicine and the crap we eat"...

High levels of cancer, heart disease, chronic illness - in those 'scientific' societies. And as these countries adopt our diet and our medical system, they see a similar increase as well.

While I suspect there are a few more differences between western and eastern nations than just diet and health systems, I decided to find out if we really are less healthy than other countries.

I checked the World Life Expectancy Map and sure enough, both China and India could do with some of our "problems". While Australians, with all our evil medicines and vaccines and a bunch of animals who seem to want to kill us, can expect, on average, to live to over 81 years old, the Chinese drop off the perch around 73 years of age and Indians don't make it past 66! Even Americans, with all those super-sized hamburgers and "fries", make it to 78!

Why do the AVN promote toxic remedies and the rapid extinction of animal species that are being killed just so their parts can be sold in expensive mystical remedies that don't work?

I really don't think I can take health advice from a group that appears to think that humans have more use for a tiger's penis than a tiger does.

Homeopathy and Eastern Medicine

2010-09-03T20:26:00.003+08:00

Supporters of so-called "alternative medicine" often dismiss modern medicine as "western", implying that supporters of it are not open to viewpoints on health from other cultures. Sceptics and promoters of evidence-based medicine are often implored to embrace "eastern wisdom".

I'd like to set things straight right now and state that I fully support the health message coming out of Japan in recent weeks, as reported in The Washington Times...

TOKYO (Agence France-Presse) | The physician to Japanese Emperor Akihito and top scientists have slammed homeopathy as an "absurd" medicine, urging health workers to stay clear of the alternative treatment as it grows in popularity.

"I cannot help but feel strong bewilderment" over the recent rise in homeopathy's use as a treatment in Japan, said Ichiro Kanazawa, who chairs the prestigious Science Council of Japan.

"The reason is that it ignores science," Dr. Kanazawa, who is also the medical supervisor for Japan's Imperial Household Agency, said in a statement.

The controversy has been fueled by reports that a 2-month-old girl died last year of a cerebral hemorrhage in Japan after she was given a homeopathic remedy instead of the normal treatment of vitamin K.

Once again we see how a "treatment" with "no side effects" can still have devastating results if it means people don't get the treatment they actually need to survive.

Like homeopathy, sitting in a cardboard box has no side effects - but it isn't going to cure cancer either, or correct a vitamin K deficiency. Promoting something as better just because it has no side effects is completely silly if the product or procedure is also demonstrated to have no beneficial effects.

After carefully harvesting several dozen fields to gather together truckloads of straw to build their man with, Japan's homeopathy association said...

"The stance of judging that it has no effect because it cannot be explained by conventional theories is unscientific, and we are taken aback," the association said in an e-mail message to Agence France-Presse.

I know what they mean. It's unscientific to say that my idea of sitting in a cardboard box can't cure cancer just because you can't explain why it does. Science also can't explain why I can fly unassisted or how I am able to be in six places at one time or how I can write this blog with no access to any electronic devices.

Of course, homeopathy isn't really dismissed just because it's completely implausible. It's dismissed because, like my cardboard box remedy, it fails any half-decent test of its efficacy. Science has no need for an explanation of how homeopathy works when science knows it doesn't work.

First seen at The Second Sight where you'll also find some interesting discussion on Meryl Dorey and statistics

MORE:

Homeopathy scientifically disproven
Homeopathy in Japan
Perth homeopaths

AVN: Engaged in plagiarism?

2010-09-01T00:19:00.003+08:00

Today's Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) has withdrawn "information packs" from its website after allegations that the packs included copyrighted material (my bolding)...

The packs, which were selling for up to $128, included home-made books filled with articles photocopied from journals around the world, information on drugs taken from MIMS, the medical guide used by doctors and nurses, and copies of brochures inserted in medication boxes by pharmaceutical companies.

It appears this has gone well beyond a bit of grumbling from people looking for any way to inflict pain on the anti-vaccination group...

Mary-Anne Toy, from The Age newspaper, said she did not recall giving the network permission to sell her work and would seek payment. Leigh Dayton, a science reporter at The Australian newspaper, was also unaware her story was being sold.

Meanwhile, Meryl Dorey has put her hand(s) out once again and asked AVN supporters to dig deep, really deep, and throw (more) money at the ailing organisation...

Yesterday she asked her supporters for $150,000 to fight the HCCC claiming it ''stepped outside of its jurisdiction to persecute a non-profit organisation''.

I live in a smallish town and I had a chat with the ladies from the local pottery group the other day. They say they have some sympathy for the AVN.

Tuesday's biscuit monitor, Mildred Hadleigh, told me that the ladies are sick and tired of impromptu visits from ASIO and the Federal Police and complained of unwarranted intrusions into the group's affairs. "It's a damned nuisance", she said, "You're just about to take a sip of tea and a helicopter buzzes you from out of nowhere. We only charge $1 for tea and a Tim Tam so it's not like we're high rollers or anything. This persecution of honest potters has to stop."

Actually, I think Mildred's a little batty and prone to fantasy - but she makes a nice cup of tea and often forgets I've already had one, or two, Tim Tams as she repeatedly insists I have "just one". When she notices the packet is empty, she tells me about how she knows it's the Australian Navy who keep taking them. Who am I to tell her different?

MORE:

Comment from Vaccination Awareness & Information Service

CREDIT:

I've been a little remiss in noting that, although I am not an SAVN contributor, the StopAVN Facebook page has been a springboard for some of my recent articles, including this one.

Meryl Dorey, AVN & Damned Statistics Pt II

2010-08-30T00:36:00.006+08:00

This is a follow-up to my previous article discussing Meryl Dorey's apparent failure to grasp simple statistical concepts and the misinformation that results from that failure.

In a recent comment posted on the Australian Vaccination Network blog, Meryl Dorey linked to a news article about Whooping Cough vaccination rates in California. Dorey noted that she'd also posted a comment on the news website and she included the following statistics...

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.

Dorey goes on to argue that the numbers of willingly unvaccinated children is so low as to be trivial compared to the numbers for whom vaccination is ineffective. But was she using statistics correctly this time?

As I've mentioned before, I'm so scientist or statistician so I welcome corrections in either calculations, data or approach. What I provide here is a layman's summary.

My first instinct was that Dorey had made a glaring error by conflating two entirely different data sets - unvaccinated children vs entire population - at the very least because she'd failed to supply data about the known vaccination status of those who aren't "children".

With her 0.03% statistic, she'd effectively said that those 10,000 kids were the only unvaccinated people in the entire state of California.

You cannot simply take one figure showing childhood vaccination numbers and then draw a whole-of-population statistic from it. It would be like saying - if there are two black rabbits at the zoo and there are 10,000 animals in total at that zoo, then only .02% of the zoo's animals are black. But the first statistic tells us nothing about what other animals might also be black. What about the panthers and monkeys and seals and yaks? And how many rabbits are there altogether? What percentage of the rabbits are black? That's something we might like to know but we can't calculate it without more information.

For her "10,000 children" figure to be of any use, we need to know how many "children" (of similar demographic) there are in California, not how many people. Using "under fives" as my starting point, since we're talking vaccination, I found a few websites that suggest the number of "children" in California is around 3 million. That's much less than the 36 million that Dorey used. So immediately we can see that her calculation was out by around a factor of 10 (ten).

At this point I still hadn't read the article Dorey had linked to, I was just running numbers based on what she'd written in her comment. When I did read the news item, the statistical murder scene looked much worse.

From the article (my bolding)...

Our media partner, the Watchdog Institute, crunched the numbers for kindergartners entering California schools in 2009. The number entering kindergarten with so-called “personal belief exemptions” against vaccines hit 10,280 last year.

I'll forgive Dorey the rounding-down since the additional 280 kids wouldn't make any real difference to the calculation she was doing. But what is really important is what data set was really being measured in the article - and that was "the number [of children] entering kindergarten... in 2009".

Kids entering kindie in one specific year is a much smaller number than all kids under five. With this new information, it was clear that even my calculation was going to be far too generous in favour of unvaccinated kids. At a wild guess, I'd have to assume that around one fifth of kids aged five and under would be entering kindergarten in any given year (and that's assuming all kids of eligible age go to kindie in California).

So from our figure of 3 million kids under five, we should only be expecting around 600,000 of them to be old enough for kindergarten. With just a tiny bit of effort, and correct reading of the text in question, I've slimmed Dorey's population figure by a factor of 35,400,000 people. That's over 35 million people that should not have been included in her "calculation".

With our new information we find that those 10,000 unvaccinated kids represent around 1.5% of kids of kindergarten age in California. That's 50 (fifty) times higher than the rate Dorey "calculated". We could probably extrapolate this to suggest around 1.5% of all kids under five are likely to be unvaccinated.

So, is that as bad as it gets? Of course not.

Firstly, the news article also noted that the "exemption" rate was as high as 50% of kindie kids in one school and 45% and 39% in two others. If your kids were in those classes then whole-of-population vaccination rates are meaningless - your kids are at serious risk. But I'll ignore that for now, just as Dorey did.

Just before I hit POST, I thought I'd take a look to see if kindergarten is compulsory in California. Since I've mentioned it, you can probably guess the answer - no it isn't compulsory.

Given that, we can make a (fairly safe) assumption that a percentage of those kids who don't attend are also unvaccinated. That means the real number of unvaccinated kindie-aged kids in California is likely to be much higher than the 10,280 mentioned in the news item.

Considering that up-to-date immunisation records are required for entry to California kindergartens, I think we can safely assume many parents of unvaccinated kids just wouldn't bother with it.

If we also consider that a good percentage of those parents who seek a "conscientious objection" to vaccination seem also to believe in conspiracy theories in which the world's governments are hell-bent on making our children sick for the sake of pharmaceutical profits, you might wonder if they'd risk sending their kids to kindie when it's not compulsory. I suspect that 1.5% figure for unvaccinated kids probably pales in comparison to the reality.

This got me looking still further and with one search I find that the California vaccination rate in children is probably closer, on average, to 76%. That would mean 24% of Californian kids are not vaccinated for one reason or another - that's 800 times greater than Dorey's suggested figure. Some of those kids will have legitimate medical reasons, some others will have parents who think health is delivered by magic and taken away by lizard people with microchips.

Once again, I'm not a statistician. It's also late. If I've made an alarming error, please point it out so I can fix it asap.

UPDATE:

It appears the actual numbers for kindie attendance in California are closer to 430,000. That increases my 1.5% figure to 2.3% (76 times Dorey's figure) and that still doesn't tell us anything about the rate of "personal belief exemption" outside of kindergarten. No matter how you look at it, Meryl Dorey's 0.03% figure was beyond incorrect. For someone who does claim to be able to crunch the numbers to the extent that she can supposedly re-interpret scientific papers and draw conclusions different to those drawn by the experts who wrote them, it is unforgivable that she puts such nonsense out in public then claims to be offering parents information they can use to make a decision on vaccinating their kids. Such "information" is dangerously misleading.

Meryl Dorey, AVN: Letter to editor

2010-08-29T18:49:00.003+08:00

The Southern Highland News has published a letter from Meryl Dorey in which she claims the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) is being attacked unfairly. She featured the letter on her blog about two weeks ago where she said she'd sent it to newspapers and magazines across Australia.

Today she has called upon her blog followers to go to the news website and post a supporting comment. A quick look suggests that they've got a job ahead of them if they hope to counter the rational comments already published in opposition to the anti-vaccination message spread by Dorey and the AVN. If you are a supporter of vaccination and are concerned by the misinformation spread by the AVN, then you might like to add your own comment at the SH News site too. Comments are still open at time of writing this.

In the letter, you'll note that Dorey has again denied supporting conspiracies such as reptilian aliens and mind control-chips and blames health crusader Ken McLeod for spreading what she calls "ridiculous lies". I have dealt with these claims before and explained why it is fair to draw a conclusion that the AVN might support reptilian-overlord and mind-control-chip conspiracy theories in relation to vaccination.

Dorey also writes that "136 of 139 pharmaceutical and vaccine manufacturing facilities in Australia have failed their TGA audits" and claims that this fact merited no mention in the press. In fact, The Australian covered the article over a month ago, well before Dorey sent off her letters. Here's part of what The Australian wrote...

The federal government's Therapeutic Goods Administration yesterday revealed that only three of the 139 labs it audited last financial year were problem-free.

"Deficiencies were identified in 136 of the 139 sites manufacturing medicines, requiring corrective action by the manufacturer," a TGA spokeswoman told The Australian. "All identified deficiencies are corrected following audit, with some requiring follow-up audits to verify and confirm that implementation has been effective."

So, far from "failing" audits, some deficiencies were found and all deficiencies were corrected. Since details of the deficiencies haven't been released, we could either assume that these companies had engaged in evil cover-ups of major failings in their production and testing systems, or that they used the wrong colour biro in making certain notes. We just don't know - but you can probably assume what conclusions the AVN would draw.

Maybe the micro-chips were sourced from a third-party Korean manufacturer instead of from an Illuminati-preferred supplier. Yes, that was probably it.

Another story published at Pharmacy News tries to paper over the controversy by claiming the issues are more likely to be administrative (where can you buy purple biros at short notice anyway?) but I think we can be sure, based solely on its name, that Pharmacy News would be run by the Illuminati. They are presumably part of the conspiracy.

Seriously, the micro-chip idea holds more sway since the TGA, a government body and therefore controlled by Big Pharma, wouldn't be interested in ensuring pharma companies comply safety regulations. According to groups like the AVN, vaccines are intended perpetuate illness - so why would a company producing crappy product be castigated for it? That wouldn't make sense, neither would penalties for sloppy book keeping. But ordering the wrong micro chips - THAT would be potentially disastrous when the day arrived for our Lizard overlords to finally take control of the world.

That must be it. I can't see how it could be anything else.

MORE:

See the vaccination poll here. Dorey has asked her followers to tilt it so it's only fair vaccine supporters counter any effect they might have. Currently the poll is 71% in favour of vaccination. If anyone has a direct line to PZ Myers, it might be worth letting him know too.

ABC: Meryl Dorey was wrong. The proof is in!

2010-08-21T17:07:00.006+08:00

I haven't promoted The Skeptic Zone podcast for quite while but the time has come to send you there again.

Although I rarely get to listen to it due to my download limits, it's obvious the Aussie team have been hard at work and have attracted some big names in science and sceptical circles. Recent podcasts have featured the likes of Banachek, Captain Disillusion and Dr Phil Plait. It is definitely a world-class, quality product.

This week's episode, #96, is an absolute cracker. It is a must-listen for anyone who's been following the antics of the Australian Vaccination Network's Meryl Dorey.

I recently discussed Ms Dorey's refusal to accept that she'd fed inaccurate and misleading information to ABC Radio host, Katya Quigley. In that article I showed that, even without access to a recording of the segement, it was clear from the data on the AVN's blog that she was wrong. The host had used data supplied by Ms Dorey and the ABC complaints department had ultimately ruled that the data was both inaccurate and misleading.

But Meryl Dorey is still refusing to accept that the error was hers. In a comment on her blog just two days ago, Ms Dorey questioned why the McCaffery's, who lost their baby girl to pertussis, continue to say the AVN supplied the ABC with misleading data (my bolding)...

I do feel that the McCafferys have fallen prey to some pretty vicious types who show their kind, caring and completely false faces to this family looking for answer as to why their beautiful baby died whilst showing their true, vicious side to the rest of the world. The McCafferys are either so filled with grief they are not able to see this or they simply choose not to for their own reasons – I’m not sure? It does make me wonder however when they continue to say things that are patently untrue such as stating that I tried to obtain Dana’s medical records (as you so rightly put it – that was not what I did nor would I have been able to had I wanted to) and that the ABC found that I had provided misleading information when again, they know that this is untrue.

The simple fact is that the McCaffery's are right and Dorey is wrong. If there was ever any doubt then The Skeptic Zone episode #96 should clear it up once and for all. Dr Rachie has a recording of the segment in question.

On her own blog, Meryl Dorey has stated that she supplied Katya Quigley with figures for 1991 but claims that Ms Quigley must have said they were for 2001 and that the ABC ruled against Ms Quigley for getting it wrong.

I dealt with this in my article, without benefit of the audio from the segment, but Dr Rachie puts it well and truly to rest in this podcast.

Contrary to what Meryl Dorey says, Katya Quigley did not claim she had pertussis figures from 2001. She said she had figures from 1991 and that they were supplied by the AVN.

However, the fact is that the specific figure in question, 71.6%, was from 2001, not 1991. Dorey got it wrong and ultimately, intentionally or by mistake, mislead Katya Quigley with it. Unequivocal proof is now in.

Listen to the segment. Dr Rachie clearly and succinctly deals with a bunch of other fundamental questions surrounding the AVN's deceptive use of statistics.

Meryl Dorey owes the McCafferys yet another apology. It would be great if she could supply one with some amount of sincerity and no "but" attached to it.

MORE:

I will echo the message to Meryl Dorey from the Vaccination Awareness and Information Service: "Please, leave the McCaffery family alone"

Meryl Dorey, AVN & Damned Statistics

2010-08-19T16:13:00.012+08:00

Before I get on to the statistical part of this discussion, let me share this with you.

In a comment today on her blog, Meryl Dorey (aka shotinfo) wrote the following...

Logic is what is important here and what we are trying to bring to this issue. A logical approach to looking at whether or not vaccination is in the public interest or in the interest on the individual.

Those who approach this in an accusatory, over-emotinal way, leave logic far behind.

Yesterday, a link was posted on the Australian Vaccination Network's Facebook page to a video by a Dr Rebecca Carley (a sort-of female David Icke - without the lizard people). The video is entitled "Vaccines - The True Weapons of Mass Destruction Part 1 of 15 ".

~~(I'm glad I took the screenshot because it seems to have disappeared from the AVN Facebook page now)~~

I'd never heard of Dr Carley so naturally I did some searching. I discovered that she's had her medical licence revoked due to mental impairment and gained a reputation for urinating and defecating on herself in front of some police officers - but if that doesn't concern you, then here's her home page (where you'll of course find the cause of - and cure for - all diseases.)

I didn't even bother to watch the Youtube clip Dorey linked to but seriously, if you're wondering if Dr Carley is someone you want to trust, just click the link above and take a look at her website. You don't even need to read it. Just look at it. When you've recovered, come back and we can talk statistics, AVN-style.

Are you back? By linking to her video, the AVN appears to suggest Rebecca Carley is a credible source of information on vaccination - someone parents should listen to if they want "balance". What do you think? Impressed?

How long do you think it will be before Dorey starts denying the AVN ever supported Carley's rambling conspiracy theories - just as she denies ever supporting David Icke's Illuminati theories?

STATISTICS:

Statistics and probabilities are often confusing. Most people just don't get them. I'm no superstar at them either but I am able, occasionally, to spot fundamental flaws in someone's statistical interpretations or applications.

Enter Meryl Dorey.

I mentioned some time ago about an online comment in which Dorey had used syllogistic "reasoning" to completely misinterpret a fairly simple statistic. Here it is again in a nutshell (my emphasis)...

ann wrote:

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 replied:

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.

(NOTE: see 88% update at end of article*)

Of course Ann never said that 88% of vaccinated people got mumps. Meryl made that up, either deliberately or due to an inability to understand simple statistics. It's difficult to see how it could be a mistake because if 88% of vaccinated people really were getting mumps then I think we'd notice. Surely Dorey can see that the vast majority of people she meets every day aren't suffering with mumps?

That was back in March but Dorey is still at it with her oft-repeated assertion that if something isn't 100% reliable then it simply doesn't work (my bolding)...

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, eh? According to the latest information on this outbreak, there is NO difference in the number of cases between areas with high or low vaccination rates and once again, most of those getting whooping cough are fully vaccinated. The vaccine isn’t working – why is that so hard for ‘scientists’ to understand?

Let's mess with some hypothetical numbers to see if she's right...

Let's assume a population of 100,000 kids.
Let's assume 95% of them are vaccinated.
Let's assume 2000 of the total population of kids are infected with pertussis.
Now, let's assume 80% of those who get infected are vaccinated.

So, 1600 vaccinated kids were infected with pertussis. 400 unvaccinated kids also caught it. Four times as many infected kids were vaccinated.

Using Dorey's simplistic approach we can just say that the majority of sufferers were vaccinated and, therefore, vaccines don't work. But is that the full story?

Those 1600 kids who were infected came from the 95,000 vaccinated kids. So only 1.68% of vaccinated kids were infected.

The other 400 infected kids came from the 5000 unvaccinated kids. So 8% of the unvaccinated population became infected.

Now we have a much clearer picture of whether the vaccine had any impact. While less than 2% of vaccinated kids became infected, almost five times that percentage of unvaccinated kids were infected.

To put it another way, over 98% of the vaccinated kids were not infected. Not bad considering no one claims vaccination to be 100% effective.

To make it clearer still...

one in 60 vaccinated kids was infected
one in 12 unvaccinated kids was infected

In other words, based on this example, an unvaccinated kid is five times more likely to catch the (potentially fatal) infection.

Note that this is a simplistic analysis of a hypothetical situation but illustrates the problem with Dorey's continued insistence that most infected kids are vaccinated. Using her silly approach to statistics we could just as easily say that the majority of kids who did NOT get infected were vaccinated. I don't think you'll see Dorey make that point, however.

Without specific data showing that vaccinated kids are actually proportionally more susceptible to infection than unvaccinated kids, it's safe to assume that the reason more vaccinated kids are infected is because there are many, many, many times more kids in that group. For that same reason, more vaccinated kids will have red hair, more will die before age 35, more will go to prison, more of them will buy Toyotas and Holdens and Hondas and BMWs. And more vaccinated kids will grow up with an exceptionally poor grasp of statistics. None of this, however, will happen BECAUSE they were vaccinated but because there are vastly more of them in the first place.

Dorey further insists that, because some vaccinated kids do not gain immunity, vaccines don't work. This is just plain idiotic. It's difficult to even see it as a simple error in logic. It's patently silly.

Some people die wearing seat belts. Some even die because they were wearing a seat belt! Some people survive traffic accidents without wearing seat belts. Does this mean seat belts don't work and are instead "weapons of mass destruction" made only for profit? I wonder if Dorey lets her kids wear seat belts?

Some people die wearing parachutes. Some people survive plane crashes without wearing a parachute. Does this mean parachutes simply don't work?

Air bags? Safety helmets? The same arguments apply. All these things are made by companies for profit. All are sold on the basis that they will save lives. All fail in some circumstances and some have been implicated as the cause of death in extraordinary cases. None of them has a 100% success rating - nothing does - but, statistically, logically, they work.

Meryl Dorey's approach to statistics is not logical.

*88% UPDATE

I'm not a reader of scientific data but I think the 88% figure was misinterpreted in the first place, by Ann. Here's the CDC report. What it actually says is... "Among the patients for whom vaccination status was reported, 88% had received at least 1 dose of mumps-containing vaccine, and 75% had received 2 doses". The attached table shows that only 64% of the sufferers were known to be vaccinated and 14% of those were not fully vaccinated. This makes my hypothetical scenario somewhat generously in favour of the unvaccinated.

MORE:

You can read more about Dr Rebecca Carley at the Millenium Project.

More in this AVN series:
Meryl Dorey, AVN & Lizard People
Meryl Dorey, AVN & ABC Radio
Meryl Dorey, AVN & Pertussis Test