Home > Comments and Articles > Australian Vaccination Network
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| For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolators, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie. Revelation 22:15 |
Speaking of whoremongers, murderers and liars ... (14/1/2001)
I once naively thought that there could not be more than one person prepared to say that people who murder children were innocent because the signs of violence were really just the results of vaccination. Now I have found a discussion on an anti-vaccination mailing list about finding or inventing appropriate slogans and sound bites to use when campaigning on behalf of murderers. A suggestion made by Meryl Dorey, President of the Australian Vaccination Network, was "Shaken Maybe Syndrome". Here's my suggestion for an extension of this campaign. Not all child abuse is violence, many children are abused sexually. With the experience they have, the anti-vaccinators could easily fabricate a connection between vaccines and genital damage and start defending child rapists as well as murderers. Think of the publicity! Think of how you could use this to frighten parents. Think of the expert witness fees.
Sicko, and proud of it ... (10/6/2001)
Earlier this year I commented about a man who had murdered a ten-week-old boy by beating the child to death. This would have been horrifying enough, but what took it almost into the realm of fantasy was that some anti-vaccination liars want to get the murderer out of prison and are using him in their campaign to spread their mental disease. You can read about this outrage here. I cynically suggested that someone would call him a "hero", and it turns out that a bunch of chiropractors have done just that. Someone has passed on to me some comments from the Australian Vaccination Network's mailing list. As they mention me, I have no qualms about reproducing them here.
| From: "Paris Moon" Date: Tue Apr 17, 2001 4:58pm Subject: Ratbags strikes again Just came across this on their site: Child murderer update http://www.ratbags.com/rsoles/index.html Who is the sicko that runs that site? Christine and the reply from the list moderator: You don't want to know. When we passed the letter around to write the prison to protest the limit on mail they could receive, he is a spy on some list and he wrote the prison and told them to blame it on Alan trying to get him in trouble. He is a sicko |
I did not write to the prison a tell them "to blame it on Alan" at all, and the person writing this knows that very well because she received a copy of my email. Lying must be a habit. So there you have it. A man who bashes a baby to death is a hero, and someone who comments on it is a "sicko".
More anti-vaccination madness (11/8/2001)
The Australian branch of the anti-vaccination movement is campaigning to force doctors to report anything that might have been caused by vaccination no matter how long ago. That is, if something happens and the person it happens to has been vaccinated at some time in the past, they want it mandatory that it be recorded as a possible vaccine adverse effect. The idea is to produce enormous numbers of these spurious adverse effects so that they can show how dangerous vaccination is. One of the things on the list is "death", so presumably they want all of the 130,000 deaths that occur in Australia each year to be recorded as vaccine-related if the deceased person had ever had a shot at any time in their life.
They want pictures ... (18/8/2001)
The President of the Australian Vaccination Network posted a request to some newsgroups asking people to send her pictures. Here is my first contribution, and I am sure it will make her nostalgic for the old times and the diseases that she would like to see brought back for our children.
They want pictures ... (25/8/2001)
The President of the Australian Vaccination Network posted a request to some newsgroups asking people to send her pictures. I intend to send her one each week, and this is my second contribution.
They want pictures ... (29/9/2001)
During September, four more pictures were added to the collection that I am supplying to the President of the Australian Vaccination Network, following her request on some newsgroups for pictures to remind her of the old times and the diseases that she would like to see our children experience. You can click on each picture to see a larger view, or click here to see the full collection.
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They want pictures ... (27/10/2001)
During October, four more pictures were added to the collection that I am supplying to the President of the Australian Vaccination Network, following her request on some newsgroups for pictures to remind her of how things will be when she and her friends get their way. You can click on each picture to see a larger view, or click here to see the full collection.
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Strange email indeed (24/11/2001)
I received an email this week from a web designer telling me that one of his clients had a new address and new web site so that I could change my links to it. The email started out "Dear Webmaster" and finished by saying "I hope that your web site is doing well. Best Regards". As it was the Australian Vaccination Network, I am pleased that they wish my site well. The interesting thing is that while the original domain link to www.avn.org.au still works, this email told me to change the link to point to www.vaccinations-immunizations.org. I wondered for a while why an Australian organisation with its own domain name would choose to adopt an international name, complete with US spelling. The only thing I can think of is that Barbara Loe Fisher at the National Vaccine Information Center has been distracted by personal problems during the year (her husband died) and the AVN are globalising to exploit her tragedy and steal market share from the NVIC. I also noted that the AVN site describes the AVN as "a non-profit, registered charity", but the relevant government department that deals with charities says "1.6 Is there a registration scheme for charities? No. However, there is a registration scheme for persons or organisations that wish to conduct fundraising appeals for charitable purposes". So they are lying about being a "registered charity" because there is no such thing, but this is no surprise as lying is what they do for a living. Perhaps someone from the AVN could enlighten me as to what "charitable purposes" they support. Paying the expert witness fees for Scheibner, Kalokerinos etc when they appear for the defence of child murderers doesn't count.
They want pictures ... (24/11/2001)
During November, three more pictures were added to the collection that I am supplying to the President of the Australian Vaccination Network, following her request on some newsgroups for pictures to remind her of the benefits of avoiding immunisation. You can click on each picture to see a larger view, or click here to see the full collection.
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They want pictures ... (31/12/2001)
During December, seven more pictures were added to the collection that I am supplying to the President of the Australian Vaccination Network, following her request on some newsgroups for pictures for pictures to remind her of how good it would be for children in a world without vaccines. You can click on each picture to see a larger view, or click here to see the full collection.
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Some award winners are not grateful ... (12/1/2002)
I notified the Australian Vaccination Network about the honour they had received by winning the prestigious Anus Maximus Award for 2001 but they did not acknowledge my message or display the award logo on their site. I don't know whether they were just being very modest or whether they were ashamed that their nonsense had been given some recognition. Actually, I think it must be modesty because, as I have pointed out before, I doubt that they are capable of shame. If I ran an organisation devoted to harming children, I wouldn't want any publicity either.
An open letter (23/3/2002)
The following message was posted to the AVN mailing list at Yahoo! Groups (Ms Dorey is the President of the Australian Vaccination Network):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AVN/message/16223
From: <meryl@a...>
Date: Fri Mar 22, 2002 9:32 am
Subject: Re - posting on this list
Hi all,
Just to remind everyone, this list is a venue where everyone is entitled to state their own opinions and the research they have uncovered. The only thing that will not be tolerated here is abusive behaviour. We need this to be a place where everyone feels safe to express their opinions - even if we don't agree with those opinions. Respect is the key. I will not vaccinate my children any further - others will vaccinate fully or selectively. I respect their decision as long as it is an informed choice, and I hope that they will respect mine.
So please let's not start a flame war here. We all love children and want a healthy world. The only difference of opinion we have is how to achieve that goal. So please be nice to each other.
Take care,
Meryl
When someone alerted me to Ms Dorey's offer of peaceful coexistence, I wrote to her:
Dear Ms Dorey,
In a message dated 23 March, 2002, to the AVN mailing list at Yahoo! with the subject "Re - posting on this list", you said: "Just to remind everyone, this list is a venue where everyone is entitled to state their own opinions and the research they have uncovered. The only thing that will not be tolerated here is abusive behaviour. We need this to be a place where everyone feels safe to express their opinions - even if we don't agree with those opinions. Respect is the key".
The fact that I am banned from the AVN list suggests that the words quoted above are empty rhetoric or maybe just blatant hypocrisy. It is easy for you to reverse this impression by removing the ban and resubscribing me to the list (email address peter@ratbags.com, individual emails, plain text). To maintain the ban in light of what you said above can only lead to the reasonable implication that the matters discussed on the list are either shameful or cannot withstand scrutiny by someone who is not a true believer.
I look forward to rejoining your list shortly.
Thank you.
Her reply was much as I had expected, despite the sentiments expressed in her original message:
Dear Mr. Bowditch,
When you were subscribed to the AVN Discussion list, you breached our code of behaviour by being extremely abusive and disrespectful. I see no reason to re-subscribe you since you have shown no signs of ever changing that behaviour which caused you to be banned in the first place. I must therefore inform you that at this point in time and for the foreseeable future, you will not be subscribed to the AVN Discussion list.
Kind regards,
Meryl Dorey
During the time I was subscribed to the list I posted no messages of any kind to it, so it would have been impossible for me to have been "extremely abusive and disrespectful". Other list members, however, had no problem with abusing me and, as in the case of Ms Dorey herself for example, accusing me of financial corruption. Still, why should I expect anything else but hypocrisy from people who claim to like children but would rather see a million children dead or crippled than one child with a needle in his arm?
Predictable hypocrisy (30/3/2002)
Last week I wrote to Meryl Dorey, the President of the Australian Vaccination Network, and asked for the ban on my membership of her organisation's mailing list to be lifted. I did this because Ms Dorey had made yet another announcement of the tolerance of dissent that was supposedly a policy of the list. She refused my request and stated that I had been banned from the list because while I had been a member I had "breached our code of behaviour by being extremely abusive and disrespectful". As I have never posted anything to that list in my life, I fail to see how I could have been either. Other members of the list, however, including Ms Dorey, had no problem abusing me and suggesting that I might be some form of criminal. I have now restored all the messages about me sent to the AVN list to the anti-vaccination mailbox page. If people don't like seeing what they say about me reproduced here, they should keep quiet.
Anti-vax update (27/4/2002)
I haven't mentioned the anti-vaccination liars for a couple of weeks, so I thought I would comment on some advice that I saw someone given during the week. The person had complained on the Australian Vaccination Network's mailing list that her sister had a son (4) who was autistic and another son (2) who was not and the mother of these boys was planning to continue vaccinating them. Shock! Horror! What to do? Instructions were given for the following actions.
A preview of Hell (26/10/2002)
On 
the page here devoted to the anti-vaccination liars, I say that "a special place should be reserved in Hell for people who want to kill or maim children by preventing them from receiving vaccinations". On Thursday, 24 October, I attended a seminar organised by the Australian Vaccination Network, and I came away thinking that not only has that special place been reserved for them, but that they have already moved in. I will be writing a full report with comments in a few weeks once I have seen the video of the night (someone else ordered it for me - I couldn't see my credit card being acceptable), but I will give a short summary here.
The night started by ridiculing the medical experts who had been invited to speak in favour of vaccination but didn't turn up. I am not sure when they would have been able to say anything, as there were only two-and-a-half hours available for the entire program and there were six anti-vaccination speakers already scheduled, plus housekeeping, introductions and a question session. Professor John Dwyer from the University of New South Wales wrote a declining letter which suggested that vaccination might just have been the most significant advance ever in medical science. This got a good laugh when it was read out.
The content of the speeches was much as I had expected, particularly as I knew the speakers. The first speaker's current obsession is meningococcal disease, and she gave us the usual claptrap about how it is not a problem (only six deaths so far this year in this state) and how the vaccine that the government is going to use has not been tested. The second speaker was a medical doctor who believes that doctors kill people and that children should be allowed to eat dirt. He also provided a fraudulent interpretation of some Australian disease statistics. The third speaker was also a medical doctor, although she runs a woo-woo clinic rather than a conventional general practice like the previous speaker. She told us all about leaky guts and autism. The fourth speaker was yet another medical doctor - the infamous Archie Kalokerinos. Dr Kalokerinos told us that massive doses of vitamin C would cure just about every ailment, and that vaccination was a deliberate process of genocide carried out under the auspices of the World Health Organization and the Save the Children Fund. He went on to say that these two groups "put Hitler and Stalin in the shade" when it came to deliberate and intentional mass killings. It is extremely disturbing to see how apparently calm and normal a man as insane as Kalokerinos can appear to be.
According to a report of the seminar put out the next day by the Australian Vaccination Network, I and a group of friends got up from our front-row seats and left at this point. Facts being what they are, the truth is that I was in about the twelfth row (next to a lady in a face mask who was warning everyone about the dangers of chemtrails), and the one person who came with me asked one of the questions in the Q&A at the end of the night. I don't know who the people were who left after Dr Kalokerinos finished his rant, but perhaps they were offended by his belittling of the Holocaust or maybe they just had sensitive gag reflexes and wanted to get out before vomiting.
The next speaker announced the alarming news that the makers of the vaccine to be used in the government's meningococcal vaccination campaign had been given special permission to omit some things from the bottle labels. The manufacturer of this 
particular vaccine was not the same as the one that was selling untested vaccines, as reported by the first speaker. (A third company has applied to be able to supply some of the vaccine doses needed in 2003. I would assume that an appropriate complaint will be fabricated as soon as approval is announced.) The speaker also warned us of the dangers of mercury in vaccines which no longer have mercury in them. Still, what are facts when there are vaccines to be stopped? This speaker also displayed a comic strip by murderer Alan Yurko, which tested even my gag reflex. The final speaker was a herbalist and naturopath who told us about witchcraft and voodoo potions. A question session followed.
I fully expected to be accosted by a three-headed dog when we tried to leave at the end of the night, but Cerberus was nowhere in sight. We sought relief and sanctuary in the nearby Illawarra Catholic Club, where we were able to get a couple of nerve-calming beers. My companion tried to play a slot machine but it kept giving him his coins back. I don't know whether this was because the place has rules against taking gambling money from atheists, but I suspect that the ultimate boss of the place had decided that we had suffered enough for one night and wanted to spare us from placing losing wagers.
Some people were not happy (2/11/2002)
I ran a story last week headed "A preview of Hell" about attending an anti-vaccination seminar. As well as publishing the story above on this site, I also posted it to several Internet forums where the anti-vaccinators hang out. Not surprisingly there was no discussion of any substantive issues, but two things seemed to create a lot of concern. One was my mention at the end of having a drink in the Catholic Club and the other was my comment about someone announcing where I was sitting when I was actually somewhere else. The club comments ranged from someone who wondered why an atheist would talk about Hell, to someone who thought that the $5 we spent on two beers would have been better spent saving some children somewhere, to someone who tried to turn the issue into a discussion of paedophile priests (the Catholic Club is a sort of mini-casino and probably has little to do with the theological or administration aspects of the church).
The seating position comment produced an interesting result. I was initially attacked for being egotistical and expecting everyone to know who I was. I replied that my comment was really about the bizarre leap of non-logic that took two isolated facts - I was known to have been in the room (I had signed a list that had been passed around) and someone left early - and from them derived the conclusion that I was the person who had left. Someone then told me that she had recognised me on the night (she had been seated right behind me) and had told the person who made the "he left early" statement about me. This was supposed to make things better, but what it told me was that the person who announced the next day that I had been sitting in the front row had known at the time that this was not me. Telling people that it was me was not a case of very poor inference creation but a deliberately untrue statement. It is what the rest us call "lying". Why was I not surprised?
They just can't help themselves, can they? (21/12/2002)
The Australian Vaccination Network won the Anus Maximus Award in the 2001 Millenium Awards, thus rendering them ineligible for the award this year despite their site containing some wonderfully egregious lying about the Health Claims and Consumer Protection Advisory Committee. To give you some indication of what it takes to win such an award, consider this from a message posted by the president of AVN to the AVN's mailing list on 5 December, 2002:
I just wanted to let you know that in Australia, the package inserts are almost always removed before the bottles of vaccines are sent to the doctors. Vaccines that are part of the Australian Schedule are generally ordered from the state health dept. Someone there must have the job of removing them before the docs get to see them. I know this because we regularly get calls here at the AVN from doctors asking us questions about vaccine ingredients and I've asked them about the package inserts and they say they never get them with the vaccine bottles!
I have in front of me the package inserts for the DTPa, HepB and Hib vaccinations which the World's Finest Grandson will receive shortly. To get these secret documents, I asked his doctor. When I told the doctor that I had heard that the inserts were removed before the vaccines were sent to doctors, he looked at me as if I had gone mad and told me that the inserts were always there.
Speaking of mailing lists ... (4/10/2003)
People have been posting the names of doctors to the Australian Vaccination Network's mailing list. These are doctors who will discard the ethics and principles of their profession and the morals of civilised behaviour in order to issue vaccine exemption certificates to anyone who walks in off the street. In other words, these doctors are prepared to participate in fraud. The moderator of the list has asked people not to name names, because it might get these amoral physicians into trouble. It might even do that, as it should.
Keep it up, liars (11/10/2003)
An Australian airline issued a warning to passengers who flew on a certain flight that they might have been exposed to measles. Here is a response from the president of the Australian Vaccination Network. And these people keep asking why I call them liars.
I can't help it - please read the following and then, replace the words hang nail" every time you read the word - "measles" they are both about as dangerous as each other to children though hang nails can be a bit more painful! Incredible fear mongering!
Liver Transplant (1/1/2004)
One of the true miracles of modern life is transplant surgery. Could there be a more thrilling example of medicine than the ability to transfer parts from one person to another so that someone can live? One hindrance to the wider use of transplants is the shortage of donors. In most cases, the donor has to die on a 
hospital operating table if the organs are to have any use. It doesn't matter how many living wills you make or how many donor cards you carry or how good your intentions, if you die at home or even in the ambulance it is unlikely that anything except maybe your corneas will be transplantable. There are limited opportunities for living donors because there are organs that we just can't live without (which is why transplants are needed), and this really only applies to kidneys, skin and blood. It is early days yet, but work is progressing on performing liver transplants from living donors, as the liver will regrow if it is not too badly damaged.
There was a case recently in Canada where a woman named Edith Petes provided a portion of her liver for a workmate, Zahir Ismail. Zahir was 51 years old and his liver had been destroyed by Hepatitis C. Nobody knows for sure, but it appears that he may have contracted hepatitis from a vaccination he received as a child in Kenya. He left Kenya when he was a teenager and settled in Canada in 1984 to study for his PhD. Unfortunately, the transplant was not successful and he died eight days after the operation from complications arising from the surgery. His wife Alison and the donor Edith were equally devastated at his death, and they share a bond which cannot even be imagined by the rest of us.
Zahir Ismail was 51 years old and received the suspect injection in the early 1950s in Kenya, which could hardly have been described as being in the forefront of world-standard medical care at the time. And how did Meryl Dorey, President of the Australian Vaccination Network, report this story of courage, medical wonder and ultimate tragedy? She released the story under the heading "Another victim of unsafe vaccines". I had to buy a new keyboard because I couldn't get the vomit out of the old one.
More anti-Muslim nonsense (26/6/2004)
In
support of their perverted agenda against the rights of children to live safe and healthy lives, anti-vaccination liars in Britain have been spreading the story that MMR vaccines contain pork. The exact subject heading on a message sent to the AVN's anti-vaccination liar mailing list was "Muslim Babies -- MMR Jabs have traces of Pork".
As it is usually prudent to expect that anything said by these despicable child haters is a lie, it is worth looking at reality. It seems that gelatine is used in the manufacture of the vaccines, and gelatine can be extracted from pigs. Of course, it can be extracted from any animal which has collagen in it, which is pretty much any animal at all. All gelatines are made up of the same 20 amino acids, but the proportions and arrangement can vary from one animal to another. The gelatine is not used whole, but is broken down into peptides (which are molecules consisting of two or more amino acid molecules joined together). Presumably the pig gelatine is used because it is the best way to get the desired mix of peptides. Once the peptides have been created, it is beyond absurd to suggest that they still bear any relationship to pork. In fact, it makes as much sense as suggesting that breathing downwind from a pig is against Muslim law because there might be molecules of carbon dioxide which had been exhaled by the pig in the air.
We consider it ridiculous when religious fanatics like Jehovah's Witnesses refuse to allow their children to have blood transfusions, but how much worse is it when the more idiotic parts of a religion are exploited by people outside the faith who see this as a way to achieve their insane objectives.
Forty years on, the fear persists (23/10/2004)
Australian 
papers have been full of a story that millions of doses of polio vaccine contaminated with simian virus 40 were administered to Australian children between 1956 and 1962. Two batches were released before the problem was discovered and another two were released when it was known that they could contain SV40 from the monkey kidneys that were used to culture the virus. While this seems reprehensible with forty years of hindsight, medical science then wasn't what it is now and someone had to decide whether the risk from SV40 exceeded the risk of polio, and as there had been no adverse reports from the earlier contaminated batches it was decided to continue vaccinating rather than to delay the program. People now who have never seen polio think that the decision would have been very easy and cannot understand why the vaccines were released. In every one of my infant and primary school years I shared classes with kids with callipers on their legs. When I had my appendix out one of the other occupants of the children's ward at Hornsby Hospital was an 11-year-old girl who was going to spend the rest of her life in an iron lung. This was a very scary and very visible disease.
The newspaper and television news stories were beat-ups, and were based on a book by two journalists and the research of the one scientist who seems to "know" the truth. There is some slight evidence of a coincidence of SV40 and certain types of tumours, but if what the scaremongers are saying is true there would be hundreds of millions of people aged between 50 and 60 who are suffering from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. There aren't.
None of this stops the anti-vaccination liars from leaping on the bandwagon, of course, and the story was all over the liars' mailing lists, both in Australia and elsewhere. To give you an idea of how every piece of bad news is an opportunity for these people, consider the following passage from a media release put out by the Australian Vaccination Network:
Today's revelation that the Australian government knowingly distributed contaminated vaccine to Australian children and adults in the 1960s pales into insignificance when we consider that the vaccines which are still being used by millions in Australia and overseas have never been cleared of this contamination.
"Is there infectious virus? The short answer is, yes," stated Dr. Michele Carbone, a researcher associated with Loyola University at the Vaccine Cell Substrate Conference in July 2004.
Since 1963, we have been assured that polio vaccines have not contained this deadly contaminant. This is now known not to be the case. Not only that, but regulators and those who have been charged with making sure our vaccines are as pure as they can be have had knowledge of this risk for decades and did nothing about it.
The risk of polio infection in Australia is non-existent since all cases which have not been imported for the last 30 years are directly associated with the polio vaccine. The risk of cancer from the vaccine however is a clear and present danger. We must get rid of these toxic doses which are contaminated with at least 60 known simian or monkey viruses.
The AVN want to know what else we have not been told about vaccines?
The prize for the best scare story of the week, however, goes to the woman who told a friend of mine that the pink colouring of the Sabin oral polio vaccine was haemoglobin from the monkey kidneys. Sometimes the lies are so bizarre that the only possible conclusion is that they are generated by minds working in a different universe.
The tsunami which devastated countries around the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004, caused severe headaches for anti-vaccination liars. While most wanted to donate something (although one leading liar suggested that the tsunami was just Mother Nature reacting to a new vaccine which could save 500,000 child deaths a year) there was the problem of finding a charity or relief organisation which would not waste the money on vaccines. After UNICEF and the Red Cross were eliminated, a suggestion was made to donate to A Touch of Love, a charity which distributes naturopathic "medicines" and nutrition advice, but never vaccines, in Third World countries. I wrote to the President of the Australian Vaccination Network, who had once described measles as "benign" and less harmful than a hangnail:
To: meryl@avn.org.au
Subject: Touch of Love
Date: Sat, 01 Jan 2005 12:52:24 +1100
Dear Ms Dorey,
I have a question about the Touch of Love charity. Have the people who work for the charity in developing countries been vaccinated against any of the local diseases? For example, if they were working in a country with endemic yellow fever they would have required a valid vaccination certificate to enter the country (and to return to Australia). I know that it is possible to obtain fakes of such certificates in Australia, so have the aid workers in A Touch of Love availed themselves of this opportunity or were they forced to undergo the actual jabs themselves?
Have a Happy New Year. The 750,000 children who died of "benign" measles during 2004 won't have that opportunity.
Sad news (19/3/2005)
On Sunday, March 13, the president of the Australian Vaccination Network, Australia's leading anti-vaccination liar outfit, announced that the organisation would be going out of business within a week if money could not be found to pay some debts. I might have had a certain amount (a tiny amount) of sympathy if the announcement had not contained the sentence: "No doubt, the Australian Sceptics (sic) will be declaring a national week of celebration at the death of the 'Anti-Vaccine Liars'". Indeed we will, but it is early days yet and the corpse is still twitching. We can't use lack of brain activity as a sign of final demise because this crowd have been brain-dead for years, so we are containing our celebrations to a quite acceptable Seaview Brut until we see the dirt going into the hole and onto the coffin. Then we break out the Moët.
AS committee members Peter, John, Richard and Ian
do some celebrating at Sydney's Skeptics in the Pub
You may wonder why I headed this item "Sad news" when all about should be rejoicing and declaring days of festivities. Unfortunately, it now seems that enough people have kicked the can to pay off the debts and the AVN will stagger on for a while yet. Many of the donations were given as pledges, so the real test will come when the pledgers are asked to produce actual cash. I won't take the champagne out of the refrigerator and put it back in the cellar just yet, and I will keep the flute glasses handy. You never know when good news might arrive.
Defamation? (26/3/2005)
There have been suggestions that something said in last week's update may have been defamatory of the Australian Vaccination Network. When the President of the AVN recently described me as "total slime", it reminded me that at a seminar conducted by the AVN in October 2002 six speakers took the stage to tell the audience that:
A woman with an autistic son (4) and another son (2) who was not autistic once asked the AVN for advice. She was told about the following services offered by the AVN to anyone who needs them:
It would be difficult to defame an organisation which does such a good job of defaming itself.
Vaccines and foetuses (23/7/2005)
One of the lies told by anti-vaccination liars is that the ingredients used in vaccines include parts of aborted foetuses. One of the materials used in the manufacture of rubella vaccines is a cell line derived from a legal abortion carried out in 1962. This is a tissue culture, very many generations removed from its source, and could only be considered aborted foetal tissue in the minds of people with, well, no minds at all. It is used to grow the organisms used to create the vaccine and is as much an ingredient of the vaccine as the acid used to prepare the sheet steel before pressing into body panels is a part of a car. None of these facts are of interest to anti-vaccination liars, of course, as their objective is to find anything which can possibly be used to frighten parents out of vaccinating their children.
In 2003 the anti-vaccination liars joined forces with the anti-abortionists to request a ruling from the Catholic Church about this use of the products of abortion, with the obvious expectation that they would receive an immediate knee-jerk condemnation of the practice and would therefore be able to threaten vaccinating parents with an eternity in Hell. What really happened was that the Church spent a long time considering the matter and talking to scientists and people who might know what they are talking about. The Pontifical Academy for Life has just released its findings. No, the Church does not like the use of anything to do with abortions and recommends that alternatives be sought, but that doesn't mean that Catholics can't vaccinate their children. This is how the ruling finished:
To summarise the summary, it says that while the Church does not like it, in the absence of any alternative it is permissible for Catholics to continue to vaccinate their children because of the overarching responsibility for the welfare of children. That is what the words "morally justified as an extrema ratio due to the necessity to provide for the good of one's children and of the people who come in contact with the children" mean. And are the anti-vaccination liars lying about this? Of course they are. That is what they do. The Australian Vaccination Network issued a media release with the deceptive title 'Vatican says, "Parents must oppose vaccines from human foetal remains"'. Other liar sites have similarly misrepresented the Church's ruling.
Yet another person wrote to me during the week trying to claim that the anti-vaccination liars are not opposed to vaccinations. That person was mistaken. There is nothing that is too evil for these people to do in the pursuit of their deranged objective of placing every child in the world at risk of death or serious injury. It is almost incomprehensible to sane people that anyone could hate children so much.
Let's misinform some parents (19/8/2006)
The Australian Vaccination Network held a public seminar on August 15, the purpose of which was to provide some information to parents so that they could make informed choices about vaccinating their children. 
I was a bit too busy to go (my sock drawer needed reorganising). (I might not have been welcome anyway. When they held one of these liefests once before someone volunteered to stand at the door and identify me if I tried to get in.) There were three speakers advertised, and it is worth looking at what they were going to talk about to see what sort of information was going to be imparted to the eager parents. (You can see an advertisement for the liefest here.)
The first speaker was Meryl Dorey, President of AVN. Ms Dorey achieved a certain fame a few years ago by telling everyone who would listen that I and my group of friends had left an AVN seminar early, despite knowing full well at the time that she wrote the words that the person who left early was not me and I only had a single companion at the event. Here is what she was going to be talking about this time.
You will notice that she was going to mention the "up to 50 vaccines" that children receive by school age. It's just as well she said "up to", otherwise some people might think that she was being a little deceptive. The table below lists all vaccinations given in the current Australian schedule for all children up to school age. You might like to count them, and you will see that the total number is 10 vaccines given in 26 doses. If you take out the three shots which are only recommended for "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in high risk areas" you get back to 8 vaccines and 23 shots (Hepatitis B is given at either 6 or 12 months, but not both). If you generously allow that some shots vaccinate against more than one disease, the total is 35 vaccinations. Not 50. Not even near 50. By the way, I notice that AVN has changed the name of its magazine from Informed Choice to Informed Voice. This is consistent with AVN's agenda to ensure that no parent makes an informed choice about vaccination. It's best not to even mention the phrase.
The next speaker describes himself as an "Anthroposophical Medical Doctor". The only mention of him that I can find is on the web site of a New Zealand purveyor of magic homeopathic nostrums. (I actually found him in Google's cache, because the page has been removed from the site.). I'm not sure what an "Anthroposophical Medical Doctor" is, but according to Wikipedia "One of the most prominent and well-researched anthroposophical treatments is a range of mistletoe extracts used to treat patients with cancer". If this is anything like a true statement then the term "Anthroposophical Medical Doctor" is synonymous with "quack". I am sure that he would have much good advice for parents, especially if he is going to tell them not to "fear childhood illness" and therefore not bother to protect their children against such illnesses. I suppose that in the day or two between being exposed to meningococcal disease and dying from it children can be given lots of love and care, and the same treatment might even be useful for a child with measles or diphtheria. What's there to fear about a little blindness or suffocating?
The third speaker presents a conundrum, as he is a homeopath espousing something called "homeoprophylaxis".
The problem with this is that the principles of homeopathy quite distinctly reject any idea of homeopathy being used to protect anybody from anything. A system of medicine which states that the only things which can be treated are symptoms and that each person is so individual that there can be no standard medication cannot accommodate prophylaxis. Samuel Hahnemann was quite clear on this, and he should know because he invented homeopathy. You might think that Dr Golden had moved on from Hahnemann's teachings and was promoting the new, more scientific homeopathy. Well, you might think that until you found out that Dr Golden was the founder of the Australasian College of Hahnemannian Homoeopathy. Perhaps he thought that the people attending this seminar wouldn't know that, or, if they did, would not detect (or would not care about) the almost incredible irony of him standing up on a stage and preaching something completely contrary to Hahnemann's philosophy.
But we are talking about an anti-vaccination seminar, so why should consistency, common sense or facts be of concern to the promoters and the speakers?
Lie with a question. Answer with a lie. (4/11/2006)
Last August I mentioned that the Australian Vaccination Network had conducted a lie-to-the-parents a seminar and I graciously allowed that a suggestion that children receive "up to 50 vaccines by school age" was not strictly lying as the real number, 10, does literally fall into the category of "up to 50". Of course it also would be literally true for claims of "up to 1000", "up to a million" and "up to a googolplex", but perhaps even the AVN places limits on its own mendacity.
I have just received a media release from the AVN announcing another of these liefests, and this one is addressing four questions. Two of these questions illustrate the deceptive disingenuousness typical of organisations like AVN, where the wording of the question is all that is necessary to start the fear running in the listener and the answer is really just icing on the cake. I do notice, however, that the "up to" has disappeared from in front of the "50". I have sent the following message to the President of the AVN, and I eagerly await a reply.
Dear Ms Dorey,
I have been sent a copy of the media release about your seminar at Byron Bay on November 15. I notice that you will be addressing two questions which could reasonably be assumed to have very short answers, so I am intrigued about how you plan to expand the answers.
Overvaccination - Are 50 vaccines by school age too many?
The obvious answer to this is "Probably, yes". It is however a very strange question. The list below shows all the vaccines currently recommended for children up to school age. (I have omitted the Pneumococcal polysaccharide (23vPPV) and Hepatitis A which are only recommended for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in high risk areas.) The numbers in brackets are the doses of each vaccine in the schedule.
As this list shows, there are eight vaccines addressing twelve diseases, given in a schedule of 24 doses. None of these numbers is 50. I am at a loss to understand why the number 50 is mentioned in your question unless the question is purely rhetorical and simply intended to create a climate of fear and doubt in the minds of parents who are concerned about their children's health and welfare. It might be much wiser in the future to stick to the wording used in previous seminar promotions as it can be argued that saying "up to 50" when the number is really 8 is not strictly dishonest. Of course, it still depends on your definition of "dishonest", and your definition might differ from mine.
Cervical cancer vaccines - are our babies at risk of this sexually transmitted disease?
The only sensible answer to this question is "No", so I wonder why you are asking the question at all. There is no suggestion that the HPV vaccine should be given to "babies", but even if there were it is obvious that prevention of disease should be started as early as possible. Cervical cancer is a major killer of women around the world and I am sure that you would agree that any action which can reduce this toll should be supported. I believe that I have heard you say that you are not opposed to vaccination per se but just want it to be safe, so I assume that you are not opposed to the HPV vaccine on safety grounds as there has not been any opportunity to gather after-market reaction statistics.
Again, I wonder why you are asking this question. I hope that the intention is not to cast doubt on a vaccine by using some weird appeal to morals, as has been done with the Hepatitis B vaccine, as if offering protection against disease somehow encourages undesirable behaviour. Surely, if parents are worried about their adolescent children engaging in sexual activity the correct approach is consultation, discussion and education about morality and appropriate behaviour while simultaneously ensuring that the children have protection against any serious consequences (even up to a death sentence) should they have an occasional lapse of judgment or grace.
I would be happy to discuss this on the AVN mailing list should you ever permit me to subscribe, but without access to that forum I have little choice but to conduct the conversation in public on my web site.
Numerology (6/1/2007)
In November last year I wrote to the President of the Australian Vaccination Network with my own question about a question she was proposing as a seminar topic. Her topic question was "Overvaccination - Are 50 vaccines by school age too many?", and I wondered where she got the number 50 from. Over the Christmas break I have been practising my skills in certain arcane arts, and I have discovered the answer to my question through numerology. Here is the derivation of the number 50 when used to count vaccines given before a child reaches school age.
| Number of occasions on which vaccines are administered: | 7 |
| Number of injections in the complete schedule: | 23 |
| Number of unique vaccines: | 8 |
| Number of diseases vaccinated against: | 12 |
| Total: | 50 |
Let's keep those cross-infection rates up (31/3/2007)
In an excellent example of how bureaucrats can do something good occasionally, my local health authorities have issued a policy which states that anyone working in the health industry (except those very few people who have no contact with patients, blood or clinical staff) must have current vaccinations against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, hepatitis B, measles, mumps, rubella, varicella and influenza, and must also be able to demonstrate that they have been screened for tuberculosis. (You can see more about the policy here.) As you can imagine, this has the anti-vaccination liars screaming blue murder, and they are moving the lying and hysteria into top gear. They have been trying (unsuccessfully) to get the nurses' union to treat this as some form of worker oppression and have even tried lying to the federal Minister for Health (who is a committed Catholic) about vaccines which "include tissue from aborted homan (sic) foetuses". (You can see what the Vatican had to say about this lie here.)
One tactic tried by the Australian Vaccination Network was an attempt to place the following advertisement in publications put out by the Australian Medical Association. Acting ethically, the AMA refused to run the advertisement, which has caused the AVN to start screeching about censorship and conspiracy and freedom of speech.
The Australian Vaccination Network has its own magazine rather hypocritically named Informed Voice, and I have decided to test their dedication to freedom of speech. In my capacity as Vice President of Australian Skeptics I have sent the following letter to the advertising sales person at Informed Voice. I may be misjudging them, but I do not expect a prompt reply. Or even any reply at all.
To: sales@informedvoice.com.au
Subject: Advertising
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 22:17:19 +1000
At Australian Skeptics we are looking at ways of promoting our views to a wider audience and reaching people who would not normally read our publications. As part of the process we are considering advertising in magazines and publications with diverse readerships. Someone suggested that a suitable place for us to run advertisements would be Informed Voice.
Unfortunately it seems that we have missed the deadline for booking for the next issue, so we would be looking at the Spring edition coming out in August. On the plus side, the proposed editorial content of that edition would make it highly suitable and relevant for us to run a full-page advertisement telling people of our work against cancer quackery and the useless, untested and unproven "treatments" offered to desperate people (and even treatments like laetrile which have been tested and found not to work).
As several members of the committee have not seen the magazine and might be resistant to advertising in it sight unseen, could you please forward copies of two recent editions to me at PO Box 1166, Parramatta NSW 2124.
Thank you.
Anti-vaxxers at it again (14/7/2007)
The Life Matters program on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's national network ran a series of three programs about vaccination this week. The program talked to some parents about vaccination and had two experts. One was Professor Robert Booy from Westmead Hospital, who could be expected to know something about vaccination, and the other was Meryl Dorey from the Australian Vaccination Network, who could be expected to know nothing about vaccination except that it is an evil practice. The three sets of parents were all from the NewAge, mungbean-munching district of New South Wales (the region with the lowest vaccination rates in the state, which suggests that they were recruited through AVN which is also headquartered in the area) and therefore could hardly be seen as representative of families who live in cities and other populated parts of the state. I posted the following comment to the Life Matters guest book:
It is rather ironic that a program named "Life Matters" should be providing a platform for anyone who is opposed to vaccination, which is probably one of the greatest life-savers ever to come out of medicine. In fact, it is bizarre that there is even any debate about vaccination today. It is hard to imagine how life could matter to anyone who would deny children the opportunity of a life free of the diseases which have killed and maimed (and still kill and maim) millions.
I realise that the anti-vaccination campaigners will deny that they are opposed to vaccination per se and will just say that they want vaccines to be proved safe. When they say this they are lying, because they will not admit to the possibility of a safe vaccine. Just ask them. Ask for an example of a safe vaccine, or what it would take to convince them that any vaccine is worth the "risk".
A thousand children die each day from measles, but one of your guests has described the disease as "benign". Perhaps she should be asked how many dead children it would take to make her think that a disease is serious.
Well, Ms Dorey actually repeated her disgusting an ill-informed comment that measles is benign. She later posted a gloat about the program to the AVN mailing list, and predictably had this to say:
Peter Bowditch (self-proclaimed ratbag) from the Australian so-called skeptics was the first person to put up a post on this subject.
Equally predictably she had to attempt to belittle me. I am a self-proclaimed nothing - anybody reading the front page of the RatbagsDotCom site can see what the word means, and the use of the expression "so-called" just indicates nothing except the inability to make a point. The legal name of the organisation is Australian Skeptics Inc (and I am not "from" there). Possibly even more predictably, she claimed something which is not only false but easily demonstrated to be false. My message was posted at 11:41am, which would seem to be some time later than 10:55am when the first message (supporting vaccination) was posted. Still, there is a war against vaccination to be fought and someone once said that truth is the first casualty of war.
You can download or listen to the programs from the Life Matters web site. Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Speaking of lies ... (27/10/2007)
I September I reproduced a rant from an anti-vaccination liar of breathtaking idiocy, and I said that it "requires no other comment". I have had a couple of emails asking for comments, on the quite reasonable basis that what is plain to me might not be so clear to people who have not been observing the fanatics for as long as I have. I have also been asked for a generalised rebuttal of the major lies told by the opponents of vaccination. I have chosen a list of ten lies on the Australian Vaccination Network's web site as the basis for a series of articles I will be writing over the next few weeks. It will be a series because some of the lies and their justifications need research and comprehensive answers. Here are the lies from the AVN site:
The first article will appear here shortly, but in the meantime I have republished an article by Dr Stephen Basser which appeared in the magazine of Australian Skeptics, the Skeptic, in 1997. Sadly, not much has changed over the decade since then. You can read it here.
A nice little earner (23/2/2008)
The 
web site for the Australian Vaccination Network invites other web site owners to participate in an affiliate scheme where they can be paid a commission for selling AVN memberships, magazine subscriptions and other goodies. I thought about applying, because I can always use some additional cash, but something stopped me filling in the form. A conscience, I believe it is called. (I know that the Google advertisements 
on this site sometimes promote things that I don't like but I have little control over what Google decides to show here.) The book cover at right is for yet another fraud that claims to have the cause and cure for all forms of cancer. The fact that AVN is selling rubbish like this gives the lie to the claim that they aren't opposed to medicine and just want the tiny bit of it associated with vaccination to be safer. As one of their claims is that vaccines cause cancer it would be a very short book if it told what they claim to be the truth: "Cancer: The Cause is vaccination and the Cure is not vaccinating". I expect that there is more in the book than this but I am not about to waste any of my money on finding out. If AVN would like to send me a free review copy I would be grateful as I could put it through my office shredder and recycle it into the cat's litter tray (which would probably encourage the cat to spend more time outdoors).
In March last year I mentioned that the poor dears at AVN were all in a fluster about a government policy that health workers should show a commitment to health by having all their vaccinations up to date. They had tried to get the Australian Medical Association to run an anti-vaccination advertisement in its magazine and were offended at a refusal. (I am still waiting for an answer to my enquiry about advertising in the AVN's rag.) The campaign has warmed up and you can now get postcards to spread around the message of the dreadful attack on personal freedom arising from employers insisting on responsible behaviour from employees. I would be a lot more convinced of the intentions behind the campaign if the AVN was distributing the postcards for free but unfortunately you have to pay for the privilege of spreading AVN's lies. Again, I am prepared to accept a couple of free packets of the postcards if AVN want to send me some for evaluation. I have a table with a short leg and they might be useful as shims. Face down, of course, so I wouldn't have to see the lies.
A child died. Hooray! (14/3/2009)
I was banned from the Australian Vaccination Network's Internet mailing list many years ago. Since then I have found various ways of finding out what goes on there. It is a regular occurrence for people to be banned for expressing contrary opinions (known in the outside world as "talking sense"), but usually they get to post at least one message before dismissal; I didn't get to post at all before the powerful magic of my name became too much to bear. (The magic worked even better on another list - the owner of the largest anti-vaccination liar list closed it completely because she believed, on no evidence, that I might be a member.)
When the news broke that a child had died of whooping cough, the first in my state since 2000 and the first in Australia since 2004, I thought that It might be time to check the list traffic to see how the denizens were reacting. I found what I expected to find - trivialisation of the death and exploitation of it to attack vaccines. I thought it was time for some more Kind and Gentle activity, so I sent the following email to AVN President Meryl Dorey and someone known only as Sue who had recently rejoiced in a news story about a death from measles:
Congratulations. You must be very pleased that your work is achieving the expected results.
The reaction was predictable. Sue posted my email to the list with a paranoid comment about how spies must have given me her email address. Someone commented that it was sneaky of me not to post my email to the list that I am banned from posting to, and someone else ad hominemed me by ridiculing Australian Skeptics. None of these people bothered to contact me directly, but instead chose to talk about me (without referring to me by name - there's that powerful juju again) in a forum in which I am prohibited from participating. Of course, none of them showed any pity for the dead child or tried to explain why the death had anything to do with the dangers of vaccines.
The media doesn't care. Boo hoo! (14/3/2009)
Coincidentally with the whooping cough death mentioned above, a couple of local papers ran extensive opinion pieces about the venality and stupidity of anti-vaccination liars.
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This attention to common sense did not please the local anti-vaccination campaigners. Causing them particular offence was that Meryl Dorey from AVN had been cut off in a radio interview and that she had only had a few words printed in the press after an extensive interview. I didn't hear the radio interview but I have no reason to believe that she was cut off for any reason other than the usual - she had gone off-topic or had started repeating herself. (I've been on both ends of talkback radio and I've been both cutter and cuttee.) Or perhaps the interviewer thought that the radio station didn't need to promote an anti-vaccination agenda any longer. In the press story, the words that were printed did not include any truth so perhaps this was another case where the journalist felt that enough had been said.
I've been interviewed many times and always expect to be edited. Someone once said that the only way to be quoted in full was to ask in advance how many of your words would be printed or how many seconds of audio or video would be broadcast and then only speak that number of words or for that period of time. This is rarely practical. The best one I had was a half-hour interview for about two minutes of screen time. That wasn't the problem, because I expected it. The problem was that the producer then wanted me to demonstrate some cancer "curing" devices so I had to go back to the studio the next day. The producer then decided he needed one of those faintly ridiculous "walk to camera" scenes so I had to return a third time.
Oh, and did I mention that someone who suggested on the AVN mailing list that the radio truncation might be because the interviewer didn't like lies was banned from the list ten minutes later?
Unhappy anti-vaccinators. Boo, hoo. (2/5/2009)
The crisis is gradually easing and the migraines are less frequent, but I can't do too much this weekend. On Saturday I'm off to participate in a television program about vaccination. This is a follow-up to a program shown last weekend which encouraged parents to vaccinate their children. That program was prompted by the death of a baby a few weeks back from whooping cough, and there was the obligatory input from an anti-vaccination campaigner who managed to illustrate her idiocy by saying that whooping cough didn't kill (remember, this was a story about a dead baby) and that it could be treated with homeopathy and herbs. The Australian Vaccination Network's Internet mailing list (from which I am banned) went into melt-down mode about the terrible treatment that their representative got on the program and initiated a letter-writing campaign in protest. The station's reaction was to hold the forum that I will be attending as part of a select audience. As members of the AVN have in the past expressed distaste at the thought of being in the same room as me it should be an interesting afternoon in the studio. By the way, when the baby's death was reported in the press in March, the reaction on the AVN's mailing list was to dismiss the report as just being propaganda to promote mandatory vaccination. This triggered a Kind and Gentle email from me to the writers.
Here is the segment of the Sunday Night show which caused all the fuss.
Anti-vaccination liars still unhappy. How tragic. (9/5/2009)
The second television show that I mentioned last week went ahead. I was in the audience when it was recorded but I didn't get to say anything. The anti-vaccinators on the Australian Vaccination Network's mailing list (from which I am banned) were even less happy after the second show went to air than they were after the first, because they expected the host to be sympathetic to their complaints after the first episode. Apparently it was disgusting to ask someone what her medical qualifications were (none) and a major revelation when a real doctor admitted that vaccines were not 100% safe and effective (a fact known to and recognised by all sentient beings). The anti-vaccination doctor appearing on the panel objected to being introduced as such and then went on to say how opposed to vaccines she is.
Reports of the program from people who watched it on television almost universally misspelled the host's name, and in a wonderful example of the careless attitude to facts endemic in the anti-vaccination movement, one of the people there read out details of a court case in which someone had received compensation for damage caused by a badly manufactured batch. She misquoted the names of the parties and this was obvious to anybody who knew anything, because the "guilty" vaccine manufacturer she named was a charitable trust which conducts neither research nor manufacture. Her comment didn't make it to air, and in the official AVN report of this biased editing the company was given a different name, also wrong. Strangely, when I went looking for facts I only found the case reported on two of the most rabid anti-vaccination liar web sites in the world, and in both case the source was a 2001 newspaper report of a 1992 court case. The case was described as "recent".
Here is the television show. It is highly encouraging that the mainstream media have finally stopped treating these people as if they have some expertise, or even opinions that are worth listening to. When there is an epidemic of whooping cough and children are dying it is past the time to be polite to people whose activities can only increase the infection and death rates.
Who's a clever boy then? (23/5/2009)
Meryl Dorey is the President of the Australian Vaccination Network, an organisation dedicated to the welfare of quacks and the malfare of children. What happens if you type the search string "meryl dorey" into Google? (Insert sound of self-satisfied chuckle here.)
Should I be worried though? When I was sued by a company that had been found by a court to be operating illegally, one of the complaints they had was that my criticism of their illegal activities was placed higher in Google than their company web site.
Speaking of the AVN ... (23/5/2009)
The Australian Vaccination Network used to have a Facebook page. Now they don't. How sad is that? To fill the void and make up for the missing AVN page there is a Facebook group called "Stop the Australian Vaccination Network". Obviously I could never ask people to join such a bigoted and prejudiced group which is trying to deny parents their right to make an informed choice after hearing all the evidence about all the dangers of injecting mercury, formaldehyde, monkey pus, aborted foetuses and other poisons into their children's bloodstreams, but if you go here you could get an idea of what the group is about.
But are they really mad? (23/5/2009)
I sometimes get accused of being a bit harsh on anti-vaccination liars when I suggest that some of them must be insane. I was reminded this week of the time when I sat in a crowded hall and heard a licensed medical practitioner state categorically that vaccination was being used in Africa to spread AIDS as part of a deliberate policy of genocide. Would a sane person say that? Would a sane person believe it? Listen to the actual words and judge for yourself.
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I help out an old friend (30/5/2009)
The Australian Vaccination Network has a page on their web site where they ask for donations. When I looked there recently I found the claim that they are a charity. This is what it says on that page:
I am a naturally curious person, so I thought that I would check on the status of the AVN's charity status, and this was the surprising result:
I thought I would do my bit to rectify this oversight, so I asked the NSW Office of Liquor, Gaming and Racing for clarification. (No, I do not know why charities are combined with booze and betting under the one regulatory authority.) I also acted on my Kind and Gentle policy and sent the following email to Meryl Dorey, President of AVN:
The Charity Authority number quoted on the AVN page asking for donations expired almost two years ago.
Should I notify the Office of Liquor, Gaming and Racing that you are displaying an expired authority and still using it to claim charitable organisation status? Oh, that's right - I already did.
Let's attack some children (20/6/2009)
The Australian Vaccination Network is asking for money to let them run some of their lies in a paper called Sydney's Child, a publication directed, as the name suggests, at parents of young children. AVN states that they are going to be partially funded for the advertisement by Generation Rescue, a prominent US anti-vaccination liar outfit. If you think that these people don't tell lies, look at the image below, extracted from an advertisement that Generation Rescue ran earlier this year. See where it says "[Autism]"? The square brackets are there because the word "autism" did not appear in the statement made by the court. (You can see the full advertisement here.) This was not a case of autism, but that didn't stop Generation Rescue lying about it. That is what they do.
I was told this week that parents suing pharmaceutical companies over "vaccine damage" to their children have been advised by their lawyers not to use the word "autism" in any claim. The corollary to this is that the lack of the word "autism" in any court finding is evidence that vaccines cause autism. Similar thinking would have vaccines causing car accidents, amblyopia, hangnails, fin rot on pet goldfish and flooding in Bangladesh, because none of these are mentioned by the courts either. And people keep asking me why I call anti-vaccination liars "liars".
Speaking of lying ... (27/6/2009)
Back in May I mentioned that the Australian Vaccination Network seemed to have forgotten that you need to be registered as a charity if you want to claim to be one. Now it seems that their valiant effort to be subsidised by Australian taxpayers has come to nought. This is how the tragedy was reported in their newsletter:
As you may or may not know, the government has refused to allow the AVN to become a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) - despite the fact that they have admitted that we qualify. Their reasoning is that people who access our information may decide not to vaccinate. The government doesn’t feel that this is in their best interests and therefore, they don’t feel we should be supported in this way. As a result, your donations can’t be tax deductible.
I want you to consider what that says carefully. Note how it says that the government admitted that they qualify but then said that they do not qualify. The fact is that any organisation which qualifies gets approval. They didn't qualify, and the reason for this is that charities are supposed to do work which benefits society and the tax deductibility of donations recognises that the organisations reduce government expenditure by providing services which would otherwise have to be provided at public expense. As the government is committed to promoting vaccination and good health it was never likely that lying about vaccines and working to increase the infection rates of serious illnesses were ever going to be considered to be appropriate activities to be subsidised through tax deductions.
Conspiracy insanity (11/7/2009)
You would imagine that if a pharmaceutical company had developed a new and deadly virus they would want to keep it a secret. Apparently in the case of swine flu this is not so. That reliable source of medical information, the Australian Vaccination Network, published the following news item on their blog:
BAXTER LABS FILES PATENT ON H1N1 (SWINE FLU) IN AUGUST 2008-1 YEAR AHEAD OF THE OUTBREAK!
We are told that Swine Flu (so-called - the H1N1 virus) which is composed of 2 swine, one avian and one human virus is naturally-occuring. Yet here we have the company that shipped human flu vaccine contaminated with bird flu to 18 countries filing a patent on H1N1 almost a full year before the outbreak started! And, may I add, the outbreak began very close to Baxter's lab in Mexico City - the same lab that has been experimenting with flu vaccines! When is there going to be an independent investigation of this company? When is the government going to test flu vaccines for contamination?
You will note that the claim is that Baxter have invented and patented a new virus. You will also note the specific date of the patent application - August 2008. When I checked the US Patent Office register of patents and patent applications the only thing I could find about Baxter and H1N1 in the last couple of years was a single application in 2009 (not 2008) relating to research into the development of viral vaccines.
The most recent patent issued to Baxter relating to H1N1 is 7,052,701, dated May 30, 2006 - "Inactivated influenza virus vaccine for nasal or oral application". I couldn't find where they had patented the pathogen itself. Perhaps they patented it in Mexico.
I have asked Meryl Dorey of AVN the simple, unambiguous question: "What is the patent number?". As she is certain that Baxter has patented H1N1 she should have no problem providing a speedy and verifiable answer. If she either can't or won't answer then I will have to assume that the story is a fabrication. Wouldn't that be a surprise?
More from the AVN, but is it truth? (18/7/2009)
That's a rhetorical question, of course.
Last week I mentioned that I had asked Meryl Dorey from AVN for the number of the patent she claimed Baxter Healthcare had filed on the swine flu virus. She replied with something like (but not exactly) the patent application number I already knew about. (I loved the way she described it as "so-called - the H1N1 virus". For some reason quacks and their supporters seem to think that putting "so-called" in front of the real name of something has meaning, other than exhibiting the mental inadequacy of the writer. I have seen it many times and it always amuses me.) I sent the following reply to her, but I haven't received an answer yet. (I didn't bother to point out that the virus behind the 1918 flu epidemic was the "so-called" H1N1, which has just been invented.)
Thank you.
That is not a patent, it is a patent application.
It is not a patent of a virus, it is an application for a patent on a method for the manufacture of viral vaccines.
The only mentions of H1N1 (which is also a human flu virus) are in a) discussion of the well-known fact that flu vaccines contain multiple antigens and b) description of how the viruses are inactivated so that the vaccine cannot cause infection.
There are 2816 articles indexed in PubMed with the keyword "H1N1", going back to 1976. Are you suggesting that they are all about the current strain of swine flu?
Anything else you would care to get wrong?
By the way, I live within 50 kilometres of Baxter's plant at Toongabbie? Should I be worried, seeing as that is the evidence for Baxter being involved in the swine flu outbreak in Mexico?
While I had PubMed out I thought I would answer another AVN claim which was made in the same Baxter bashing thread on the AVN blog. The claim was "[n]o vaccine has ever undergone a true double-blind crossover placebo study". My comment did not make it past the blog moderator (I didn't really expect it would), so it also remains unanswered.
HIV Testing Outside of the Study Among Men Who Have Sex With Men Participating in an HIV Vaccine Efficacy Trial. Gust DA, Wiegand RE, Para M, Chen RT, Bartholow BN. 1: J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr. 2009 Jul 1. [Epub ahead of print]
METHODS:: Analyses were restricted to men who have sex with men (MSM) who completed a survey at one or more annual visits in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled efficacy trial of a bivalent rgp 120 vaccine conducted from 1998-2002.
Antibody response to influenza vaccine in coronary artery disease: a substudy of the FLUCAD study. Brydak LB, Romanowska M, Nowak I, Ciszewski A, Bilińska ZT. 1: Med Sci Monit. 2009 Jul;15(7):PH85-91
MATERIAL/METHODS: This was a substudy of the randomized prospective double-blind placebo-controlled FLUCAD study on influenza vaccination in the secondary prevention of ischemic coronary events in patients with coronary artery disease.
A Dose-Escalation Safety and Immunogenicity Study of Live Attenuated Oral Rotavirus Vaccine 116E in Infants: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Trial. Bhandari N, Sharma P, Taneja S, Kumar T, Rongsen-Chandola T, Appaiahgari MB, Mishra A, Singh S, Vrati S; Rotavirus Vaccine Development Group. 1: J Infect Dis. 2009 Aug 1;200(3):421-429
Methods. The neonatal rotavirus candidate vaccine 116E was tested in a double-blind, placebo-controlled dose-escalation trial in India.
Now you have at least three (out of the 1031 in PubMed found by searching for "vaccine double blind placebo") you can stop saying "No vaccine has ever undergone a true double-blind crossover placebo study", because saying it again would be a lie as you now know the truth.
Do you ever tire of being wrong?
Rabid idiotic fringe dwellers (1/8/2009)
Yes, those words were used by Meryl Dorey, president of the Australian Vaccination Network, when describing the public perception of her organisation. I rarely agree with Ms Dorey on anything, but this time I think she is absolutely correct. In fact, during the week she published some material on her blog endorsing some lunatic who claims that swine flu is just an excuse to get people ready to be vaccinated and the real reason for the vaccines will be actually to insert microchips into everyone so that the Rothschilds, Bilderbergs and the Illuminati can track our every movement before the great cull comes to reduce the world's population to a fraction of what it now is. (The lunatic in question stole the piece verbatim and in its entirety without credit from the web site of noted loon David Icke, famous for his claims that the British Royal Family are all lizards. Ms Dorey therefore not only promotes a truly insane conspiracy theory but endorses theft and plagiarism. Nice work.) 
Cody The Religion Hating Dog posted a message to the AVN's Facebook page saying that he was already microchipped and it wasn't doing him any harm. He also pointed out that as he is a dog he is allowed to be barking mad but what was Ms Dorey's excuse? He was banned shortly afterwards.
To give you the flavour of the material endorsed by AVN, here is a quote from the web page offered by Ms Dorey as evidence of the conspiracy behind swine flu:
A cabal of interbreeding families is seeking to impose a global fascist dictatorship of total human control.
Those on the inner levels of this structure are collectively known as the ‘Illuminati’.
This is how they coordinate between apparently unconnected governments, corporations, media groups etc. The Rothschild and Rockefeller dynasties (the same bloodline) are fundamentally involved in this, as I have long exposed, and they dominate pharmaceutical medicine and government ‘health’ policy worldwide.
The web controls governments, the pharmaceutical industry, or ‘Big Pharma’, the World Health Organisation and public heath ‘protection’ agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States. In short, they control the entire medical system.
The Illuminati cabal established global bodies like the World Heath Organisation, World Bank and World Trade Organisation to transfer power from the many to the few. Their goal is a world government, world central bank, world currency and world army.
The Illuminati plan for the world includes a mass cull of the population and the microchipping of every man, woman and child. Microchips would allow everyone to be tracked 24/7, but it goes much further than that.
Computer technology communicating with the chips has the potential to manipulate people mentally, emotionally and physically. This could be done en masse or individually through the chip’s unique transmitter-receiver signal. Killing someone from a distance would be a synch. (sic).
In a major victory for common sense, the AVN closed their Facebook page, removed all discussion and messages, and severely restricted who could post to it. This was done in response to an invasion of sensible people asking sensible questions and providing sensible information about vaccine safety and effectiveness. The sensible people responded to claims that vaccine safety had never been tested by offering the 7,648 papers in PubMed which suggest otherwise, and responded to claims that vaccine efficacy had never been tested by offering the 13,726 papers from the same source which seemed to say different. Needless to say much fun was had with the extremely kooky conspiracy theory mentioned above. The suddenly it was all over. Doors closed, with us on the outside.
In the meantime, I found that I am banned from following Ms Dorey on Twitter.
I sent the following email to Meryl Dorey, and I eagerly await her reply.
On the AVN web site it says:
"1.Both sides of every health issue should be freely available for anyone who is trying to make a decision".
I cannot comment on entries in the AVN blog.
I cannot follow AVN on Twitter.
I am banned from the AVN mailing list.
I have been removed from the AVN's Facebook page, as have many other people, and everything I wrote there has been deleted.
These actions seem to be in direct conflict with the AVN policy reproduced above, and could even be construed as examples of hypocrisy.
You are free to read my web site at any time you like and if you send me comments I will publish them. You are free to join any public mailing list that I manage and post whatever you like to the list and you will not be moderated in any way (unless your messages expose me or anyone else to legal action). You have my permission to follow me on Twitter. You can be a fan or member of any Facebook page or group (or any other online forum) of which I am an administrator and any comments you post there will be left untouched (again unless they expose me or anyone else to legal action).
I have nothing to hide and I am not ashamed of what I say or do. It appears that you can say neither. Prove me wrong.
The idea of AVN claiming that all points of view should be heard blew up my irony meter. Luckily I have a circuit diagram so I can build another one.
Perhaps someone will take some notice (3/8/2009)
On 
August 3, 2009, a complaint was lodged with the New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission about the activities of the Australian Vaccination Network. You can see the officially recorded complaint here. Much whining is expected from the AVN over the next few weeks as they try to convince everyone that they don't offer education (despite saying on their web site that they do) and they don't offer medical advice.
Vaccines - the battle continues (15/8/2009)
The complaint filed with the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission wasn't the only thing that upset the creatures of the Australian Vaccination Network this week. On Thursday, August 6, Australian Skeptics ran an advertisement in the national newspaper The Australian which took the form of an open letter to Australian parents about the danger of the anti-vaccine lobby. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation ran a short news item out of their Lismore office based on the content of the advertisement. Lismore just happens to be the closest ABC office to the headquarters of the AVN, which explains why the story originated there and why they sought out Meryl Dorey from AVN for a comment.
The story appearing on the ABC site now is slightly different to what was originally published. The first edition concluded with the following paragraph, quoting Ms Dorey:
Peter Bowditch, from the Skeptics, even said on his website that he didn't think that this was actually a complaint that was going to go forward, but it was good because it would take up time and harass us and that's actually what the Skeptics have been doing for a very long time
I couldn't let this pass, so I sent the following email to the ABC:
In the news story "Sceptics take aim at vaccination doubters", Meryl Dorey from the Australian Vaccination Network is quoted as saying "Peter Bowditch, from the Skeptics, even said on his website that he didn't think that this was actually a complaint that was going to go forward, but it was good because it would take up time and harass us and that's actually what the Skeptics have been doing for a very long time".
I felt that I had to respond to this.
First, while I am a member of the Committee of Australian Skeptics Inc I do not speak for the organisation, contrary to what is clearly suggested by Ms Dorey.
Second, I did not say anything like this on my web site (http://www.ratbags.com). I admit that the AVN has been a matter of some interest to me for many years and I have had a lot of things to say about them, but this wasn't one of them.
Third, what I did say elsewhere (and what Ms Dorey has misrepresented) is that I didn't think that the HCCC could actually shut the AVN down but the adverse publicity of the complaint might draw people's attentions to the dangerous activities and preachings of the AVN.
Thank you.
I appreciate the ABC's quick reaction but I didn't really care if the words were removed from their web site or not. I don't particularly care what people who don't know me think of me, and people who do know me would not be surprised to find Meryl Dorey dragging me into the conversation and might even expect that what she had to say about me could be politely described as "inaccurate". Three "inaccuracies" in 53 words, in this case.
They just can't stop lying (15/8/2009)
There was much rejoicing in anti-vaccination liar circles this week because a court had ordered the US government to stop the practice of mandatory vaccination. The injunction would have had the effect of preventing any mass vaccination campaign in the face of a possible epidemic or biological threat from a terrorist or foreign hostile power, and would presumably have extended to preventing the military from vaccinating servicemen and health authorities from insisting that doctors and nurses were fully vaccinated.
The victory was announced on many anti-vaccination liar web sites, but I became aware of it when the Australian Vaccination Network issued a media release. You can read the full item in glorious colour here, but the first paragraph gives the flavour:
After more than 30 years
US District Court issues injunction to stop compulsory vaccination
Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 - For Immediate Release:
30 years after compulsory vaccination became US Law:
US Court issues an injunction to stop it and to hold the the government and drug companies responsible for reactions.
A Preliminary Injunction to stop mandatory vaccinations has been issued in the United States District Court of New Jersey. This comes after a federal lawsuit opposing forced vaccines was filed in that court by Tim Vawter, pro se attorney, on July 31st with the federal government as defendant. When the judge signs the Preliminary Injunction, it will stop the federal government from forcing anyone in any state to take flu vaccine against their will. It will also prevent a state or local government from forcibly vaccinating anyone, and forbid any person who is not vaccinated from being denied any services or constitutional rights. Vawter's filings included a Complaint, and several pages of evidentiary Exhibits.
You will notice the specific statements - the matter was filed in the United States District Court of New Jersey, it was filed on July 31, and the lawyer was Tim Vawter whose "filings included a Complaint, and several pages of evidentiary Exhibits". What it doesn't say is the name of the judge or the case identification number so I thought I would see what I could find in the US court PACER system, which is a record of all matters before federal courts. I thought that the best way to find it would be to start with the lawyer's name, and here is what PACER told me:
Well, I have to say I was a little surprised to find that no lawyer with the name Tim Vawter had ever appeared in any matter before the United States District Court of New Jersey. Perhaps someone had made a mistake. To clarify matters, I sent the following email to Meryl Dorey at the AVN:
In a media release today you state that the US District Court of New Jersey has issued an injunction stopping vaccination.
A search of the court records for matters filed by any attorney named Vawter produced no results (see attached search results). Please provide a reference for the case so I can read the ruling on an official court site.
Thank you.
I haven't received a reply yet, but the following notice has replaced the story on the infamous Natural News web site:
Preliminary Injunction to Halt Mandatory Flu Vaccination in the U.S. Has Been Issued (correction)
Tuesday, August 11, 2009 by: Former Contributing Writer, citizen journalist
(NaturalNews) Editor's Note: It has come to our attention that the following article is factually incorrect. It was written by a contributing writer, then approved by an in-house editor who did not catch the significant errors in this article. As a result of these significant errors, and due to our commitment to publishing only true and accurate information to the best of our ability, we have made an editorial decision to reject further articles from this author.
NaturalNews deeply regrets this unintentional error, and we are brainstorming new ways to put in place tighter fact-checking oversight so that the same mistake does not happen again in the future. We thank all those who have brought this important matter to our attention, and we pledge to increase our efforts to reject stories that contain factual inaccuracies.
For the record, what was factually incorrect about the story (which we confirmed by phone with a clerk of United States District Court of Trenton, New Jersey) is that no such injunction has been filed. Thus, the entire premise of the story was factually incorrect.
Here at NaturalNews, we strive to bring you accurate, honest information on these topics, and we deeply regret the unintentional publishing of the inaccurate information that previously appeared in this article space.
Do you see that: "no such injunction has been filed". The story was a fabrication. It was made up. It was a lie.
A lie. A lie. A lie.
It took me about ten minutes to demonstrate that the story was false. I have sent the following email to Meryl Dorey:
It now turns out that as I expected the story about the US District Court banning mandatory vaccination was a fabrication. You could even call it a lie.
Are you planning to issue a media release apologising to all the media outlets who received your initial distribution for misleading them with something which could have been proved to be incorrect with about ten minutes effort?
And what is that they say about having the final laugh?
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Kook fight! (22/8/2009)
Nothing 
elicits a feeling of Schadenfreude quite like watching a couple of people who disagree with you fight it out between themselves. It is even better when they do it in court and have to pay lawyers to do the kook fighting for them. Icing goes on the cake when the judge or magistrate calls them fools (without using those words, of course) and tells them to go away, sort it out themselves and stop wasting the court's time. A cherry and some of those little silver balls go on top when they don't take this advice and come back for more.
In 2004 the Australian Vaccination Network ran off to court to whine about Australia's other anti-vaccination liar outfit, the Vaccination Information Service. Here is the second last paragraph of the magistrate's decision:
You can read the whole amusing story here.
Anti-vaxxers not happy. How unfortunate for them. (5/9/2009)
Australia's best daily television current affairs show decided to take a look at the vaccination "debate". Of course, as all sensible people know, there is no debate, just a pretend controversy beaten up by people with no knowledge of medicine or immunology, conspiracy believers and non-institutionalised lunatics.
The 7:30 Report's online forum was almost immediately taken over by a host of people working from the "my child was normal until the vaccines poisoned him" script. This was not unexpected as various anti-vaccination liar mailing lists were smoking with indignation at how biased the program had been. Imagine that - you ask doctors about what is good for children and they promote something that has saved more children's lives than any other thing that medicine has done since it was invented. (Clean water probably saved more lives than vaccines, but it isn't a medical procedure.)
I have been observing these people for more than ten years now and I really do wish that they could come up with some new stories. As an example of this, when I watched a replay of the show with my daughter I pointed out that the first words heard from an anti-vaccination campaigner in the program mentioned the mercury that hasn't been in vaccines since 2000. Put another way, the first sentence my daughter heard from a major opponent of vaccination contained a lie.
One thing I noticed in the flurry of reaction to the program was a certain inconsistency in a particular statistic. I have seen various figures quoted for the number of vaccines given to children, but the most memorable were "30 vaccines before the age of one" and "20 vaccines given to newborns". Here is a list of all vaccines in the Australian National Immunisation Program. (The list comes from a web page listing adverse reactions to vaccines. You know, those adverse reactions which are so secret they can only be found by a massive two clicks from the web site for the Australian Immunisation Handbook.
That looks like only 14 vaccines to me. Take out dTpa, HPV and Influenza, which aren't given to babies, and take out 23vPPV and HepA which are only given to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who live in particular areas. Now we seem to have only nine vaccines, and they aren't all given to newborns (or even babies in the first year of life). Did I mention that someone supposedly studying for a PhD in vaccination told me that infants get 12 vaccines all at once?
And people still keep asking me why I call these liars "liars".
A conversation going nowhere (19/9/2009)
I was brought to the attention of the readers of the Australian Vaccination Network's mailing list when someone discovered that I had said something about vaccinations. I can't respond on the list of course as I have been banned since 1999 because the power of my presence frightens the residents too much. As my only option is to email the commenters directly I did just that, causing them some angst and hypocrisy.
From: Sue
Sent: Monday, 14 September, 2009 12:12:53 AM
Subject: [AVN] More from a critic
Don't normally give him the time of day, but this just turned up on a search engine...
http://www.ratbags.com/rsoles/index.html#12vax1
From: "wharrison@xxxxxx.net"
To: AVN@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, 14 September, 2009 2:09:09 PM
Subject: Re: [AVN] More from a critic
The man has too much time on his hands...a truly twisted individual.
Winnie
From: oufreshtideas
To: AVN@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, 15 September, 2009 2:08:28 PM
Subject: [AVN] Re: More from a critic
Hi
This man seems to upset a lot of people. I would say he is hardly credible when he has alienated his family and spouse, incensed the Police Force to take action against him etc. Google Peter Bowditch + Australian Skeptic Society and you will find lots of info but hardly anything pretty.
I live with my spouse, I communicate with my daughters on almost a daily basis and the police have never taken any action against me (unless you count the fine for doing 43km/h in a school zone a few years back).
One day I am going to start taking legal action against people who defame me and lie about me. Do you have a nice house? Would I like living in it?
There is no such thing as "Australian Skeptic Society".
I realize that he isn't the person who made the claim against AVN to the HCCC but obviously Mr Ken McLeod (yes, that info is on Wikipedia too) is influenced by these Skeptics. At least one of the comments of Mr Bowditch was that Scams, Phishing etc happened before the Internet, but the Internet can also be used to expose these Scammers etc. Well, yes the Internet can be used to expose these hateful tyrants too.
Anyone with any sense will not take these people seriously. I am really surprised that Dick Smith has sided with these hate-mongers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Skeptics
As you will see with this link Mr Smith is a prominent leader. Sorry Andrew but Dickie seems to be fully behind Skeptics - not as you suggested that it was someone in his organization.
From: oufreshtideas
To: AVN@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, 15 September, 2009 3:43:21 PM
Subject: [AVN] Skeptics meeting in November - Qld Uni. St Lucia
Hi All,
Hello again,
I have been told that you have issued a challenge to me. Perhaps you should do it somewhere where I am not banned from reading it and replying. Maybe you could ask Meryl Dorey to honour her organisation's commitment to free speech and allow me to subscribe to the AVN list.
Since Mr Peter Bowditch is so secure in his belief about Vaccinations and what they do, I think he should be given the opportunity to roll up his sleeve and accept the adult vaccinations for
I have offered to do this on several occasions, usually just after some anti-vaccination liar has said that nobody would do it.
* DTPa -diphtheria- tetanus-pertussi s acellular (infant/child formulation)
* HepB - hepatitis B vaccine
* Hib - Haemophilus influenzae type b vaccine (PRP-OMP or PRP-T)
* HPV - human papillomavirus vaccine
* Influenza - influenza or flu vaccine
* IPV - inactivated poliomyelitis vaccine
* MenCCV - meningococcal C conjugate vaccine
* MMR - measles-mumps- rubella vaccine
* 7vPCV - 7-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine
* Rotavirus - rotavirus vaccine
* VV - varicella vaccine
Why did you pick that lot? Why not the actual childhood vaccination schedule?
These are all the ones that Mr Bowditch seems to think that newborns get
No, I do not think that. Why would I think that newborns get vaccinations that are only given to adults, adolescents and children over one year old? I can read the schedule. Perhaps you should do that too
- but maybe not all at once.
Well - are they given to newborns or are they spread out over five years? A two-year-old is not a newborn.
I'm not sure how old PB is but I am sure that he must be due for boosters if he ever had some of these.
I have had several of these. My parents were scrupulous in protecting me from disease, just as I have been for my children.
This is the date for the meeting. http://www.qldskeptics.com/ Is there someone that can help with these vaccinations as I'm sure Mr Bowditch is enthusiastic to prove that he will come to no harm by getting these, and will be doing the public a great service?
One condition - you and at least four other members or supporters of AVN will have to be there as witnesses. You can register for the convention (not "meeting") at the site you provided.
I'm not sure why AVN followers have this thing about me and Australian Skeptics. I speak and act for myself. I was running my web site and pointing out the mendacity and danger of anti-vaccination liars long before I had any involvement with Australian Skeptics.
Oh, and just a warning for the unvaccinated, I would avoid Mr Bowditch for a while because of shedding.
I doubt that there will be anybody at the convention who is so careless of their health that they will be completely unvaccinated.
You might like to point out which of the vaccines in the list can make someone infectious. I'm sure that someone in AVN can tell you.
See you at the convention in November
From: Meryl Dorey
To: AVN@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, 16 September, 2009 2:00:31 PM
Subject: Re: [AVN] Response from Bowditch
To be honest Christine - you seem to feel that you will change peter bowditch in some way. It is my understanding from the few emails I have received from him, that for whatever reason, he is inflexible and won't be moved. So why waste energy trying?
I don't reply to him when he writes to me - nor do I reply to any of the other skeptics. Their disrespect does not merit a reply.
All the best,
Meryl
From: Christine
To: AVN@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, 16 September, 2009 1:41:57 PM
Subject: [AVN] Response from Bowditch
Hi All
I have been considering what to do about the responses that I received to my postings yesterday.. Firstly these are copies of what he wrote and sent to my personal email. This one was titled I'll be there. Will you? ... And this one titled Be careful what you say
Christine is the new identity of "oufreshtideas". I have snipped complete quotations of the messages and my replies of 15 September, 2009 2:08:28 and 15 September, 2009 3:43:21
Everything that I wrote in my postings was available from the Net. This is one source that I came across. http://www.ratbags.com/rsoles/onews/onews.htm Read some of the comments, especially from William P. O'Neill on 25 August 2002 and you will see that there is more than just a speeding ticket that he has against his name. Anyway I have decided that I need to at least inform you what is possible in this forum.
I see that you are talking about me on the AVN list again.
Why don't you reply to me directly? I am not allowed to post messages to the AVN list so I have no option but to email you.
I have no idea why Meryl Dorey is so frightened of what I have to say that she even blocks me from following her on Twitter.
You should also check your research about me. I am hardly going to worry that someone has posted what Mr O'Neill had to say about me on the web. In fact, I suggest you go to the page where you found Mr O'Neill's comments, click on "About this site" on the menu and see who owns the site. Then ponder why that person would publish things about me.
That's right folks - she goes to Google to research me and then quotes something from the hate mail collection on my own site as evidence against me. She doesn't notice that the web site and my email address both end in ratbags.com. I love the smell of incompetence in the morning.
"Obviously Peter Bowditch doesn't have to have AVN approval to be on this forum, as his 'little moles' spy for him and send him copies of posts from the forum. I received these emails at my private email address from the man himself. Obviously he couldn't write back via the "grubby little mole" because that would give the game away, so he decided to write to me personally. I believe that if Peter Bowditch wishes to install spies on the forum so he knows what is going on, then he should reply "via the spies", not contact AVN Forum members privately. I thought I would share his views with the group. Also, many times he calls AVN and its' members liars. Hiding behind moles is a form of deceit, so three fingers are pointing directly back at him.
From: oufreshtideas
To: AVN@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, 16 September, 2009 3:08:46 PM
Subject: [AVN] Re: Response from Bowditch
Hi Meryl,
No, the point I am making is that there are some people here that read and report back. I do not appreciate being emailed at my personal email. The other point is to highlight that this happens, so beware.
I know you have spoken of them before, but I guess I had to experience the foulness for myself. Experience is a great teacher.
from Christine
Hello Christine,
It's no good whining to Meryl about me. If you don't want me emailing you at your private address either get a throw-away address you can use for subscribing to Yahoo! groups or get Meryl to allow me to post to the AVN list. If I can't post there how else can I respond to what is said about me there?
By the way, have you decided whether you are going to be at the convention in November to witness me getting all those shots? I now have someone else who has volunteered to roll up their sleeve and line up with me. Should be great fun.
Another thing you should consider, but I expect you found this in your extensive Google research about me. http://www.ratbags.com/rsoles/files/about.htm#email
From: Sheri Nakken
To: AVN@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, 17 September, 2009 2:37:45 AM
Subject: Re: [AVN] Response from Bowditch
I wouldn't bother and waste your precious time with him It is for the purpose of distracting you from your very important work
Sheri
How crazy can anti-vaxxers get? (26/9/2009)
I am occasionally accused of inaccuracy when I say that some anti-vaccination liars are insane. Sometimes the critics suggest that I am unsympathetic towards people with mental illness and that using the adjective "insane" is similar to using such no longer politically correct terms as "spastic". I have had occasion to deal with inmates of high-security mental hospitals and many of the people I met inside would look at some of the things said by anti-vaccination liars and say "That person is nuts". Similarly, I have met children in kindergarten who, if presented with anti-vaccination "logic" would say "That's stupid". I came across marvellous examples of both insanity and stupidity this week.
The example of insanity was referred to me by Meryl Dorey, President of the Australian Vaccination Network. (Remember how she told us the swine flu vaccine was designed to kill most of the world's population?) In her latest newsletter she included the following:
Hidden contraceptives in the flu vaccine
According to this information, the flu vaccine can not only cause pregnant women to lose their unborn child, they can also cause sterility. A must see - please forward to others as well. This video has been taken down twice by youtube.
And here is the video that "has been taken down twice by youtube (sic)". This is the copy in my YouTube account, and nobody has tried to take it down.
Am I fair in describing the content of the video as insanity? I will let you be the judge of that. Remember, this is the sort of material which Meryl Dorey and AVN believe will convince people that vaccination is bad.
That HCCC complaint (3/10/2009)
I have been asked how the complaint to the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission about the Australian Vaccination Network is progressing. The situation is that the HCCC have agreed that investigation of AVN falls within the HCCC charter. This doesn't mean that anything has been done yet, just that something might happen in the future. AVN is of course squealing like a vaccinated baby about the attack on their freedom of speech and making specious claims about witchhunts and the evil conspiracy against them, but I'm holding off buying the Moët and sending out the invitations to the celebratory party until I hear the shovelfuls of dirt hitting the top of AVN's coffin.
AVN responds to HCCC (15/10/2009)
The Australian Vaccination Network has responded to the complaint made about its activities to the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission. In a moment of confusion, the AVN asked the HCCC to keep the response confidential and then published it on their own web site and talked about it in a newsletter.
As they don't seem serious about confidentiality I thought I would give it wider distribution, so you can read it here.
I counted three "misunderstandings of the truth" in a brief glance though it (not counting "AVN is not anti-vaccine"). Feel free to see how many you can find. Here are my three:
Oops! I got carried away there counting to three. That's what happens when you see lie after lie in a written document.
Who's a naughty girl, then? (24/10/2009)
When I reported last week that Meryl Dorey from the Australian Vaccination Network had apparently included several "misunderstandings" in her response to the complaint lodged against AVN with the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission, I deliberately avoided any comment on the scurrilous claims made in the document about Ken McLeod, the author of the complaint to the HCCC. I did this because I wanted to give Ken the chance to respond himself. He has now done so, and in an email to me he said:
Meryl Dorey's response to the HCCC regarding my complaint to them went far beyond addressing the matters I had raised; she went on to make the most scurrilous defamatory untrue allegations against me personally. I regard the worst defamation to be her claims that I threatened her and her family with violence. This is indeed a very serious allegation, and I will not let it rest.
I completely support Ken in this. You can read the full text of his response here.
Breast cancer empathy (24/10/2009)
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month all over the place, and anybody with a hint of compassion would think that this is a good cause to support. But what would happen if a volunteer telemarketer randomly rang the number of the Australian Vaccination Network soliciting a donation to this worthy cause? Well, if you can believe the message to the AVN mailing list which can be found at http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/AVN/message/40204 (and why wouldn't you believe it?), then they might get a less than friendly reception. Here is AVN President Meryl Dorey on how to handle someone asking for money to research cures for one of 
the biggest killers of women in the world:
I think they end up being sorry that they ever called me because I don't just say no, I tell them why :-) I say that I work for a children's charity that is involved in preventing cancer and that in 50 years, the cancer council and other bodies have done nothing. Cancer is more prevalent today then it was when they started to supposedly research and if I am going to be making a donation, I want it to go to a good cause, not just to line the pockets of some researcher who has no interest in actually seeing their research come to fruition rather than just keeping themselves in a job. They don't know what to say... But hopefully, it makes them think that maybe there is more to this cancer stuff then they were told?
Here's some news for Ms Dorey - AVN is not "a children's charity" and is in no way involved "in preventing cancer". In fact, you are implacably opposed to a vaccine which is specifically targeted at preventing a cancer, the vaccine against HPV, and some of the ludicrous claims you have made about the danger of this vaccine would lead people to think that you want women to die of cancer. And I can tell you what the person on the phone thinks - it is that they managed to randomly ring someone who talked nonsense and insulted them for no good reason.
Tough week at the Australian Vaccination Network (14/11/2009)
Everyone at AVN has been busy this week, misrepresenting government statements, repeating old lies about the Vatican and vaccines and annoying charity workers and advertisers.
First, remember how AVN had been reported to the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission. The official line from AVN, as expressed on their Wikipedia page (before edits were closed off):
The commission agreed to look into the complaint, but a spokesperson admitted that they "did not have power to shut down or gag the Australian Vaccination Network."
He left open the possibility of pursing action against individual members of the AVN or making a public statement against the group's activities. As of November 2009, no official action had been taken.
Here is what the HCCC actually said (you can see the full letter here):
Following preliminary gathering of information, on 23 September 2009, the Commission, has determined that your complaint should be investigated as it raises significant questions of public health and safety.
The purpose of the investigation is to obtain further information in order to determine, what, if any, further action is required. The possible outcomes of an investigation into a health service could include making comments and / or recommendations to the Australian Vaccination Network or terminating the investigation with no further action.
Given that Ms Dorey is not a registered health practitioner, in accordance with section 39 of the Health Care Complaints Act, 1993 (the Act), at the conclusion of the Commission's investigation, the possible outcomes of this investigation are:
The Commission is currently seeking information. You will be advised of progress with the investigation and you may also be contacted to provide further information if it is required .
Next, that old lie about how the Vatican had ruled that Catholics shouldn't vaccinate their children because of the aborted foetuses in vaccines was rolled out again. You can see where I pointed out the truth in 2005 here. I posted a correction on the AVN blog, but I very much doubt that it will ever pass moderation and be released so that sensible people can read it.
According to the Internet Archive, the web page at http://www.avn.org.au/donation.html has contained the following words since at least February 2007:
As a volunteer run charity organisation the AVN relies on the support of others. No matter how small the contribution it all adds up to help keep us in operation.
What your donation will go towards-
Yes, the misspelling of "Parliament" has been there since 2007, but that is not the real problem. First, as AVN's public accounts show salaries, wages and consultants' fees it is stretching things a bit to say that it is "a volunteer run charity organisation", not to mention the fact that for a large part of the last two years AVN has been operating without the benefit of registration as a charitable organisation.
The second thing is the soliciting of donations for the purpose of "offer[ing] our services and our magazine in the Bounty Bag". Remember that this has been on the AVN site since the start of 2007. The people who run the Bounty Bag program have never heard of the Australian Vaccination Network and have stated categorically that they would in no circumstances allow anti-vaccination literature to be included in the bags. So where have those donations been going?
The next people to be alienated were the folks at Baby BeeHinds, who distribute those things our mothers told us about - recyclable, washable nappies (or even diapers, for you non-Australians). They had been encouraged to advertise in the AVN's magazine which is called Living Wisdom this week (the name changes frequently for no apparent reason). There was no mention in the media kit or advertising rate card of the AVN's anti-vaccination activities and the people at Baby BeeHind were appalled when they found out that their name had been associated with activities that they wonderfully described as "deranged".
So let's sum up the week. AVN misreported the progress of the HCCC inquiry, repeated something that they had been told was a lie in 2005, used the name of Bounty Bags to solicit donations which never reached the intended target and annoyed an advertiser by hiding the truth. All in all, a very good week.
And speaking of hiding the truth, AVN is very shy about who can and can't communicate with them. I have been told that someone who is a member of their Yahoo! mailing list was refused permission to join the AVN Facebook page. He had only been using Facebook for a couple, of weeks and the reason given for blocking his access to the group was that his Facebook profile didn't show enough friends. In a beautiful confluence of irony and hypocrisy, the person who refused his permission has a completely private Facebook profile and reveals nothing except her name (and maybe not even that is real).
Weekly dose of anti-vax idiocy (21/11/2009)
In marketing there is the concept of "brand extension" where a well-known brand identity is expanded and used on a range of products. Sometimes this can be varieties of the original product (the various different types of Coca Cola) or related products (toothpaste makers selling toothbrushes. insurance companies going into mortgage broking or banking). Sometimes the link can be quite tenuous where it is assumed that the cachet of the brand name is all that is important (Porsche sunglasses, anyone?).
It looks like some brand extension is going on at the Australian Vaccination Network and they have now branched out into AIDS denial. Their Internet email list this week has been carrying a conversation with the usual idiocies - there is no such thing as HIV and even if there were, it wouldn't cause AIDS. This is inconsistent with claims on the AVN web site that vaccines can activate HIV to cause AIDS and that the MMR vaccine is being used in Africa to spread AIDS as a form of genocide, but nobody ever said that mad people have to make sense.
I felt that this justified a Kind and Gentle email, but this time it was merely copied to the President of the AVN rather than being sent directly. The principle addressee of the email was the AIDS Council of New South Wales:
Something that might interest the AIDS Council -
It seems that another organisation has climbed on the AIDS denial bandwagon.
The Australian Vaccination Network is apparently no longer content with spreading misinformation about vaccines and now appears to be spreading the standard lies about HIV and AIDS. All the usual stuff is there - there is no such thing as HIV and even if there were it couldn't cause AIDS, homeopathy and other forms of quackery are effective treatments (for something they say doesn't exist, but who ever accused them of consistency or logical thinking?), and so on.
Not content with containing this idiocy to private conversations on their internet mailing list, the president of AVN, Meryl Dorey, is publicly listed along with such people as Peter Duesberg and Matthias Rath as signatories to a statement denying the reality of HIV and AIDS.
http://rethinkingaids.com/quotes/rethinkers.htm
There is also a claim on the AVN web site that certain vaccines can cause AIDS (http://avn.org.au/library/index.php/vaccination-information/10-reasons-why-parents-question-vaccination.html - Item 3). Bizarrely, they claim in the same article that a vaccine can "switch on the HIV virus and cause it to become AIDS in humans". But I thought that there was no connection ... (I did mention their lack of consistency and logic.)
The AVN has a reasonably high media profile and are often consulted on news stories related to vaccination. It disturbs me to think that they might be given credence in the spurious "debate" about HIV and AIDS. They put enough people's lives at risk with their irrational scare stories about vaccines without also becoming a voice for AIDS denial.
AVN is currently under investigation by the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission for offering medical advice as part of their anti-vaccination activities. It seems that such advice has now extended to denying the reality of AIDS, just as they deny the seriousness of diseases such as measles, pertussis and polio.
As I commented after attending an AVN seminar where the claim was made that there is a deliberate policy by the World Health Organisation and others to spread AIDS in Africa through the medium of the MMR vaccine, there is madness about and it is manifested greatly in the anti-vaccination movement. Please do whatever you can to limit their attempt to spread the infection of their unscientific and dangerous ideas.
Thank you.
A homeopath speaks, and drivel comes out (12/12/2009)
I make sacrifices for you. This week I sat though a web presentation about the use of homeopathy to treat autism. Sorry, it doesn't treat autism, it treats the autistic child. Except when it's treating autism. The presentation was a webinar organised by the Australian Vaccination Network and featured a homeopath named Fran Sheffield. All the usual buttons were pressed - homeopathy works (it really, really does!), anecdotes and testimonials are evidence, chelation can be used to get the heavy metals out so that the homeopathy can get in there and do its curing, autism is related to vaccination, ... 
I think that web sites promoting sessions like this should be required by law to display a sign like that at the right so that viewers can be warned that they might suffer damage from the intensely hot sparks of burning stupid.
The AVN has promised to make the entire webinar, with sound and all slides, available on their web site for free download, but I can't see if it is available yet. Some previous webinars are supposed to be available but they don't have links either. The AVN's web site is in a state of reconstruction at the moment and could politely be described as a dog's breakfast, with broken links, unreachable pages, conflicting styles and general messitude. As a professional websmith I could offer to help them to fix it up. Only joking, no I couldn't.
I will have the full awfulness of the webinar up here as soon as someone at the AVN gets around to providing a link. In the meantime, here is a sequence of screen shots of the slide show. Even without the sound the idiocy shines through. Don't forget your welding mask.
The AVN's Bent Spoon (12/12/2009)
Meryl Dorey of the Australian Vaccination Network was the 2009 winner of Australian Skeptics' Bent Spoon Award, given for the most preposterous piece of paranormal or pseudoscientific piffle observed during the year. This is not the sort of award that most people would be proud to receive. Ms Dorey, however, completely missed the point and issued the following media release. My comments are interspersed in italics.
Sunday, November 29th, 2009 - For Immediate Release:
Meryl Dorey, President of the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN), Australia's vaccine safety watchdog, is very proud to have won the Australian Skeptics' bent spoon award for 2009. She joins such prestigious former winners as Dr Kerryn Phelps (2008), former head of the Australian Medical Association, every pharmacist in Australia (2006) who won because they chose to offer their customers the option to purchase vitamins, minerals and other nutritional supplements in store, journalist, Mike Willesee (1999) and vaccine safety researcher, Dr Viera Scheibner (1997).
Dr Phelps was not head of the AMA when she won the Bent Spoon, but had retired to a life selling "medications" that violate all the science she learnt as a doctor; the pharmacists won for a similar reason, as they continue to stock and sell such nonsense as homeopathy which their training must tell them is fraudulent (not "because they chose to offer their customers the option to purchase vitamins, minerals and other nutritional supplements"); Mike Willesee was a respected journalist (and previous winner of Skeptic of the Year!) who found religion and consequently forgot what "evidence" meant. Dr Scheibner won for the same reason that Ms Dorey did - promoting dangerous pseudoscience which puts the lives of children at risk.
In subsequent comments to radio and newspapers, Ms Dorey added the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to the list of previous winners. Australian Skeptics has had a long standing friendship and respect for the ABC, but occasionally they fall from grace by transmitting programs which are below their normal high standard. They won their awards for programs sympathetic to psychic "detectives" and medical quackery which stood out just because of the quality of the programs around them.
Ms Dorey took the prize despite some formidable competition from the likes of News Limited, Senator Stephen Fielding, philosophy and bioethics writer Peter Singer and the University of QLD, all of whom were also nominated.
Lots of people get nominated for lots of different reasons and Australian Skeptics accept all nominations that come in through their web site. Tim Flannery and Ian Plimer were both nominated for their positions on climate change but they are at opposite ends of the spectrum on the issue. Australian Skeptics was also nominated, and I am surprised that Ms Dorey doesn't mention this in her list of people she would like to be aligned with.
"I am very grateful for the recognition of an organisation such as the Skeptics." says Ms Dorey. "It will inspire me to try even harder to continue promoting the message of free, informed and scientifically-based health choice."
Ms Dorey would have to start "promoting the message of free, informed and scientifically-based health choice" before she could continue doing it.
For those who have never heard of it, the Australian Skeptics is an organisation whose religious belief is that anything Western medicine approves of is always right and anyone who questions the safety or efficacy of drugs, vaccines, or surgery is always wrong.
As science always questions everything, Ms Dorey is displaying her ignorance of what science is. Australian Skeptics can speak for themselves, but nobody that I have ever met in the decade I have been involved with them has ever said that all "Western" medicine is right or that questioning science is wrong. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard anybody ever use the ridiculous term "Western medicine" unless telling a joke or pointing out the idiocy of the expression. Ms Dorey might like to consider that homeopathy originated in Germany and chiropractic in the USA, and both must therefore qualify as "Western" medicine.
They hide behind terms such as pseudo-science despite being offered copious quantities of peer-reviewed research to show that not every medical procedure is safe - not every drug or vaccine is effective.
Nobody has ever claimed absolute safety for every medical procedure or absolute efficacy for every drug or vaccine. Science does not deal in absolutes. Ms Dorey is employing the logical fallacy called "Straw Man" here, but when you don't have the science logical fallacies make a useful fallback position (and when they don't work there is always abuse and vilification). By the way, when Ms Dorey and her ilk are referred to the tens of thousands of scientific papers dealing with vaccine safety and efficacy they employ another logical fallacy, non sequitur, to change the subject back to their denial of such evidence.
Much like the medieval church, their main tactics are to ridicule and try to silence anyone who speaks out against their blind beliefs.
As Ms Dorey is so against silencing contrary views I must wonder when I can expect to be allowed to join the AVN's mailing list and Facebook groups, to have my comments published on AVN Internet forums and to be able to follow her on Twitter. I can't do any of these things now.
"I could almost wish that an honourary membership to the Skeptics came along with the award. But then again, I don't feel that I have the necessary unquestioning, single-minded zealotry such membership requires." Ms Dorey concluded.
I will suggest to the committee of Australian Skeptics Inc that they add Ms Dorey to the magazine subscribers' free list. In radio and press interviews Ms Dorey also complained that nobody would actually present the trophy to her. It is a perpetual trophy so no winner ever gets to keep it, but I offered on the night of the award presentation to take it to her, so the next time she is in Sydney I will be happy to have a photograph session with her and the trophy.
Ms Dorey is now trying to claim that her media release was disguised sarcasm, and the following email exchange took place in forums that I am prohibited from participating in.
From: Sheri Nakken
Subject: Meyrl on ratbags front page
Meryl, I guess you fooled him - he didn't understand your sacrasm, I guess, did he
Sheri
http://www.ratbags.com/rsoles/
Meryl, director of AVN in Australia just won one of their awards - The Bent Spoon Award.................
"One reason I want to wait to provide a full report is that another winner was Meryl Dorey from the Australian Vaccination Network who won the annual Bent Spoon Award for the promotion of preposterous pseudoscientific piffle. Ms Dorey has responded with media releases, letters to newspapers and radio interviews which indicated that she didn't get the point of the award and thinks that people calling her a fool are actually supporting her. I need some time to analyse and respond to all her ludicrous responses to the award. "
He didn't understand her sacrasm, I guess, did he
From: Meryl Dorey
Well, this is just my opinion, but I don't necessarily feel that he is the sharpest stick in the woodpile :-) I mean, anyone who calls himself a ratbag must not be very familiar with irony or sarcasm...
Perhaps next time I put out a release like this, I should put in a translation for the skeptics and those who are just a wee bit slow on the uptake... do you think? :-)
Notice how Ms Dorey says that I am not "the sharpest stick in the woodpile" and "a wee bit slow on the uptake" and says them somewhere where she forbids me to be able to respond? What was that she was saying about "their main tactics are to ridicule and try to silence anyone"? When can I join the AVN mailing list, Ms Dorey? Oh, and by the way, I have never called myself a ratbag and I simply don't believe that a media release is ever supposed to be sarcasm (or even sacrasm, as Ms Nakken said twice).
Ms Dorey might be somewhat hypocritical in the way that she implements "free speech" in places she controls, but nothing stops her exploiting the freedoms granted by others. The event that triggered media scrutiny of the AVN this year was the death from whooping cough of a baby named Dana McCaffrey. Ms Dorey posted a version of her "sarcastic" media release to a Facebook group set up as a memorial to Dana. While other group members were horrified at this lapse of good taste (although not surprised by it) there was no attempt to censor Ms Dorey or remove her message. (The AVN has contracted its Facebook presence to a page where I'm banned from comment (of course) and any pro-vaccination messages are immediately removed.) Both of Dana's parent asked Ms Dorey to go away and leave them alone but she persisted in posting more of her version of events surrounding Dana's death to the group. She was allowed to do this because the people running the group have a commitment to free speech, no matter how offensive that speech is to them.
The AVN has been progressively turning inwards and restricting their conversation to their own little group. The mailing list that had about 750 members was purged and now has just slightly more than 50. At least two Facebook groups were closed to outside scrutiny and now appear to have been gutted of all members, and the remaining Facebook page is simply a one-way conduit for Ms Dorey to spout nonsense, with nobody given the right of reply or critical comment. Their web site is a mess, although this is supposed to be fixed shortly (one rule of web site development is that you don't mix a radical new design with the old stuff), and it looks like their magazine is coming out of newsagents and going to mainly electronic subscription only (which means no paper copies for naturopaths' waiting rooms). Some of the magazine advertisers have been less than happy with being in it, once they found out that it was produced by an anti-vaccination organisation.
With the Health Care Complaints Commission investigating their health advice and the Office of Liquor Gaming and Racing taking interest in their claimed charitable activities I expect to see many more "sarcastic" media releases from the AVN over the next few months. With any luck the media will stop treating them as if they have anything worthwhile to say about vaccination and commit them to the obscurity they so richly deserve. As Ms Dorey said herself, they are "rabid idiotic fringe dwellers" and the fringe is where they should stay.
Cancel Christmas for some kids (19/12/2009)
The Australian Vaccination Network is planning to run some advertisements on television. If they were to get their way there would be a much reduced need for Christmas presents as there would be fewer live children. There would be a boost to the economy, though, as funerals generally cost more than birthday parties. Here is the proposed advertisement. Notice how, in the tradition of professionalism being shown with the redevelopment of the AVN web site, the agency data has not been edited from the front of the video.
Get a bucket ready to catch the vomit and lock any dangerous weapons away in case your rage makes you want to hurt someone.
Did you catch the list of reactions reported by vaccine manufacturers? SIDS? Autism? I think I might have to call this lying. No, I'll go beyond thinking it and say it. This advertisement contains outright lies, and the people responsible know that they are lying.
If you see this advertisement on television and feel the need to complain (and why wouldn't you?) the people to complain to are at the Australian Advertising Standards Bureau. They take complaints about advertisements very seriously, and as the total number of complaints is quite small it doesn't take much action to get a reaction. (I was an extra in an advertisement which received special attention because people felt that it showed a child in distress. It was the fifth most complained about advertisement in 2008 but only generated about 65 complaints.) To lodge a complaint, go to the ASB web site and follow the obvious links. While you are there it is worth spending some time looking at the complaints which have been upheld and wondering at the sort of things that people find offensive. And yes, I agree with some of them and I am hardly a prude.
Ah, yes, the AVN ... (19/12/2009)
The 
Australian Vaccination Network seems to have lost one of its erstwhile supporters. The local paper in the area surrounding the AVN's headquarters, The Northern Star, used to be somewhat sympathetic (there are very many woowoo believers in the north of New South Wales and papers like circulation) but now seems more aligned with rationality. Here is a recent story:
Vaccination group investigation 
Mel Mcmillan | 18th December 2009
The Bangalow-based Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) and its founder, Meryl Dorey, are the subjects of an investigation by the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission.
The AVN is accused of 'engaging in misleading and deceptive conduct with the intent of persuading parents not to vaccinate their children,' by Ken McLeod, a member of a group known as Stop the AVN.
When Mr McLeod first filed his 20-page complaint in July it was unclear whether the AVN or Mrs Dorey would fall under the commission's jurisdiction and complaints process, as neither were registered health-care providers.
However, the complaint was referred to the Health Commissioner, who decided an investigation should proceed.
Mr McLeod's complaint lists instances in which he claims the AVN has provided false and misleading information about whooping cough, bacterial meningitis, the Gardasil vaccine and the safety of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, MMR.
And while the commission may take several more months to complete its investigation, the ABC last month released a statement to say that information supplied by Mrs Dorey which was broadcast on ABC Mid-North Coast local radio in September was found to be misleading.
The presenter of the morning program, on which Mrs Dorey and Lismore obstetrician Dr Chris Ingall were guests, referred to statistics supplied by Mrs Dorey.
The investigation found the use of these statistics, about whooping cough, was misleading as they were 'drawn from different data sets and related to different groups of children'.
The statistics were also presented as vaccination rates for 1991, when they were, in fact, for 2001, the ABC said.
The broadcaster received two complaints about the statistics used during the segment.
The use of the data was found to be in breach of the ABC's editorial requirements for accuracy and context in factual content.
Professor Peter McIntyre, from the National Centre for Immunisation and Surveillance, said better reporting and diagnosis of whooping cough had lead to an increase in the number of cases reported each year.
Prof McIntyre said it was wrong to suggest the prevalence of whooping cough had increased and that vaccination did not work.
He said the five per cent of children who were not vaccinated accounted for 30 per cent of all reported cases of whooping cough.
"They have around seven to eight times the chance of contracting whooping cough than vaccinated children," Prof McIntyre said.
Mrs Dorey said the network sourced its information directly from the Australian Government and peer reviewed medical journals, and that it was the ABC which got it wrong.
"I believe they have misunderstood what was on the graphs," she said.
Mrs Dorey is currently having her information verified by the editor of a peer-reviewed medical journal in the United States and would be filing her own complaint with the ABC should her interpretation of the data be verified.
I eagerly await the report from "the editor of a peer-reviewed medical journal in the United States". I'm reasonably certain that the journal will not be JAMA or NEJM. I would not be surprised, however, if it turns out to be a rag drawn from the likes of The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons or Medical Veritas, both fully committed to the extinction of vaccines (and therefore children, I presume).
Speaking of Haiti ... (16/1/2010)
It's good to see that some people have their priorities right. While people all over the world were reaching for wallets, cheque books and credit cards to find money for the victims of the earthquake, Meryl Dorey of the Australian Vaccination Network was looking at the ways that the money might be spent:
This is a sort-of off-topic question. I would like to donate to the efforts to help in Haiti but I don't want ANY of my money going towards vaccines so that red cross and Unicef are out. Does anyone know of an organisation doing work on the ground there helping without vaccines? I want to provide food, ...clean water, education, housing - but not drugs (and I'm sure there are others here who want to do the same).
No drugs! She wants doctors to perform emergency surgery without anaesthetics? No morphine for pain relief? No antibiotics for infections? No sterile drips for people suffering from crush injuries? No antiseptics? What sort of hell does she want the people of Haiti to live in? Tell me how this disgusting lack of compassion is any better than the sewage spewing out of religious loons like Pat Robertson and Fred Phelps. Perhaps I should ask her:
Dear Ms Dorey,
I have been told that you won't donate to organisations providing relief to the people of Haiti if the relief includes the supply of drugs. As many people were injured in the earthquake, does your antipathy to drugs include the anaesthetics needed for emergency surgery, painkillers such as morphine, antibiotics and antiseptics? If so, what are the natural remedies you recommend be used in their place?
Thank you.
Ms Dorey and the folk folk (16/1/2010)
Meryl Dorey hasn't confined her recent activities to just increasing the torment of earthquake survivors. She was a speaker at the Woodford Folk Festival. Why a music festival would want to have people come along to promote opposition to medicine is a mystery, but apparently having a bunch of quacks address the crowd is an annual feature of the event. This how Ms Dorey was presented on the festival program.
"Australia's leading expert in vaccination"? "Unbiased and well researched knowledge"? Was this meant to be a joke, or had the festival organisers been smoking too much of the agricultural produce that the area around Ms Dorey's home is notorious for? It would also have been informative to try to guess how long Ms Dorey would spend speaking about the benefits of vaccination, although I think it would have needed the instrumentation of the Large Hadron Collider to measure a period of time that small.
And here is how Ms Dorey reported her appearance to her loyal followers:
I'm just back from a wonderful week at the Woodford Folk Festival where I was lucky enough to be invited back for the third year in a row to present information on vaccination. I gave one presentation on the Swine Flu (AH1N1) vaccination and participated in 2 forums with some very eminent healthcare practitioners including several doctors who I was very happy to meet and who will be writing articles for up-coming editions of Living Wisdom. My family and I also really enjoyed the music, comedy and good feeling at this incredible event.
Of course, our 'friends' at the Septics did their usual routine of sending emails to the organisers of the event asking them to not let me speak, but thankfully, the Festival cares very much about balance and not at all about suppression of information and my talks were very well-attended and this vital information was able to get out to those who wanted to learn more about vaccinations and health.
It's a bit disturbing that she managed to find some real doctors who support her idiocy, but someone has to come bottom of the class in medical school. As for those emails from the "septics" (oh, how I laughed at that, it must be only the millionth time I've heard it), the email came from me. I don't know what it would take to get Ms Dorey to stop identifying me with Australian Skeptics because I have pointed out on many occasions that not only do I speak for myself, not anyone else, but she was defaming me and accusing me of criminal activity long before I ever became involved with the Skeptics. And did you see where she said that the email "ask[ed] them to not let me speak"? Here is what I wrote, and I leave it up to you to find where I suggested that she be banned.
Meryl Dorey from the Australian Vaccination Network is proudly promoting her speaking appearances at the Woodford Folk Festival, but I wonder what relevance her anti-vaccination campaigning has to the objectives of the festival.
Surely the festival is about promoting music and a sense of community and not about encouraging people to reject medicine and common sense or to provide a platform for people whose activities place the lives of children at risk. Ms Dorey might like to say that she and her organisation are simply presenting facts about vaccination but this is not so. I can confidently predict that her talk about the swine flu vaccine will consist of almost nothing except scare-mongering and misrepresentations of the facts. It would be amusing, however, if she were to repeat the story she was recently spreading about how the swine flu vaccine is an element in a world-wide conspiracy to kill off 90% of the world's population and implant mind controlling microchips in the remaining few.
I have been a follower of folk music for half a century, but I would not like to attend a festival where even a small part of the agenda had been hijacked by someone whose full-time job is spreading fear about one of the greatest life-saving advances ever introduced into the practice of medicine.
Folk music might have its roots in tradition, but that doesn't mean that it should be used by people who want to deny progress.
Thank you.
Does she ever get anything right? Or doesn't she care?
Not flush with cash, AVN is flushed (6/2/2010)
All 
the hard work might have finally paid off. You can see the wonderful news here, where Meryl Dorey announced that she was resigning as President of the Australian Vaccination Network at the end of February. If nobody can be found to take on the job the AVN will fold, die and disappear. In order to help out, I have applied for the job.
Dear Ms Dorey,
I am sorry to hear that you are resigning as President of AVN. I have enjoyed our communication over the last decade and I will miss you, as will all the other supporters and members of AVN.
I would like to formally apply for the position of President of the Australian Vaccination Network. I have extensive knowledge of the arguments used to oppose vaccinations, I am well known in the anti-vaccination movement, and I have written widely on the matter. I have had experience on the boards of several non-profit organisations and have held the position of President of Australian Skeptics Inc.
I feel that I have a lot to offer to AVN and look forward to helping the organisation to get its message to all the people who need to hear it.
As time is short and I will need to make arrangements with my current clients and adjust my TAFE teaching load in order to take on the AVN duties, an early response would be appreciated. As you are in Bangalow and I am in Wentworth Falls it would probably be more efficient if interviews were to be conducted by telephone or Skype.
Thank you.
Peter Bowditch.
For some reason, however, the story seems to change from day to day. Sometimes Ms Dorey is leaving because she wants to spend more time with her family, and sometimes the AVN is folding because it has run out of money, and sometimes it is the horrible "septics" who have been disrupting its activities and wasting its time. (The reason is never that the AVN has been getting so much bad publicity over the last year that it is time to fold the tents and run away.) There is a fire sale going on and donations are being sought, so perhaps there will still be an AVN next month, and there might even be a Meryl Dorey at the helm. This sort of "we're about to close" appeal has gone out before, so I won't be breaking out the Moët until I hear the really good news - that the death is true.
If the AVN finally goes into the cesspit where it belongs there are some people who need a special mention for their part in its decline. Daniel Raffaele set up the Facebook group "Stop the Australian Vaccination Network" which provided a meeting place and information exchange, Christine Bayne, Peter Tierney and Rachael Dunlop monitored the AVN's rantings and brought them to a wider audience so that more people could see the idiocy of their agenda. Ken McLeod took the time to file a complaint with the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission. A special thanks must go to my anonymous friend who frequents a large number of anti-vaccination liar mailing lists and forums and passes on information from places where I am not allowed to go. There were others who helped as well - you know who you are.
The highest level of thanks and respect, though, goes to Toni and David McCaffrey. The death of their daughter Dana from whooping cough and their willingness to take this tragedy to the media and demand change was the catalyst which turned the media away from being unwitting mouthpieces for Meryl Dorey and her child-endangering behaviour and caused them to start questioning what she had to say. Two years ago, any story in the media about vaccination seemed to require an unchallenged comment from Meryl Dorey. Now, if she is asked at all there is usually someone talking sense brought along as well. Even if the AVN survives they will no longer be seen as the sole authority on vaccine safety, but will be recognised for what they are. In fact Meryl Dorey even provided the description herself- "rabid idiotic fringe dwellers".
I knew it was too good to be true! (22/2/2010)
I 
go to all the trouble to build the AVN Deathwatch Countdown counter, I fill the refrigerator with expensive French champagne, I invite all my friends around to celebrate, and what happens? The Australian Vaccination Network carcass gives a twitch and then someone detects a pulse. The thing is still alive! You can read the awful news here.
You might notice where Ms Dorey says:
Well, no sooner had I sent out the email from Sam Statham offering a case of organic wine to the first person to donate $1,000 to the AVN, then (sic) he started to get threatening emails and phone calls.
One email was from a known member of the incorrectly-named Australian Skeptics who has posted many angry messages on boards across the internet - messages whose intent is the denigrate the AVN and myself.
Well, here's a fact for you, Ms Dorey. No member of Australian Skeptics contacted Mr Satham at Rosnay Wines. None, zero, zilch. The person who did contact him is not a member of AS, although he probably shares some of the ideals and principles of the organisation. Also, he did not threaten Mr Statham - he asked him politely if he was aware of the nefarious activities of the AVN. And, Ms Dorey, there was no need for him to denigrate the AVN. You do that yourself every time you spread misinformation about vaccines and medicine.
I also notice that Ms Dorey is standing down from the position of AVN President. I still haven't heard anything back about my application for the job, and I even found someone to fund the entire AVN operation if I became President. I suppose the answer and its accompanying employment-related paperwork has been caught up in the rush of activity at AVN HQ. I hope I hear about it soon because I am settling in to teaching and it becomes harder to reorganise my time as each week passes.
But is the AVN ever really going to fail? I have seen the stories before about its imminent collapse and there always seems to be a saviour who comes along at the last minute. I'll believe it's dead when I hear the clods of earth hitting the coffin.
And one final thing. Ms Dorey said:
I foresee some wonderful additions to the AVN's already impressive range of vaccination information as well as the beginning of scientific research which we have been planning for years.
Elsewhere in the release she mentions that she has tears in her eyes. That statement above brought tears to my eyes. Tears of laughter. They provide an "impressive range of vaccination information"? They are going to do scientific research? I will have to stop now before the laughter triggers an asthma attack.
Hypocrisy corner (6/3/2010)
It looks like nothing has changed at the resuscitated Australian Vaccination Network. One of the first announcements to come out of the outfit following its almost miraculous reprieve from collapse was this reiteration of their commitment to free speech and open comment.
This is the discussion list that has banned me from participation since 2001, although there is no ban on discussing me. That discussion of me can apparently go too far, it seems, because someone was banned from the list recently despite calling me an arsehole. His problem was that he then provided a link to what I had said that annoyed him. The inference is that talking about me and what I say and do is acceptable provided that nothing is done which might allow denizens of the AVN mailing list to actually see what it is that I say and do.
A cynic might also comment that if all messages which "make broad statements about vaccination or disease without backing it (sic) up with references" were to be eliminated then the list would be very bare indeed. As for not welcoming "those who behave in an abusive or dismissive manner towards those whose views do not match their own" and "The list is about intelligent and referenced discussions on vaccination issues", all I can say is that I am glad that my irony meter is still away being repaired after the last whopping lie from the AVN otherwise it would have exploded and I would have had to pay to get it fixed again.
Speaking of Schadenfreude ... (13/3/2010)
Look what I found on the web.
My first assumption was that the Australian Vaccination Network office had simply forgotten to pay their web hosting bill in all the excitement that has been going on there lately. I made the same mistake myself once and, of course, the suspension of my sites happened on Friday and could not be rectified until the ISP's accounts staff came to work on Monday. It's a great law, that Murphy's Law.
You might find this hard to believe, but I was wrong. The site has been closed by the hosting organisation because of some unspecified "legal complaint". This has caused an outbreak of paranoia and conspiracy theory at the AVN the like of which hasn't been seen since Meryl Dorey published a blog post suggesting that the swine flu vaccine contained microchips and was a tactic in a plan to kill more than 90% of the world's population and control the minds of the rest. Here is a sample of the hysteria.
As soon as I hung up the phone with the web hosting company, I received a phone call from a friend who works in the Australian media. This person warned me that a media smear campaign against the AVN is about to start. They said that this campaign has been planned for some time and that it will involve trying to link the AVN with pornographic material.
We will be speaking with legal counsel as soon as we are able to (it is hard when these things take place on the weekend since it is almost impossible to get in touch with anyone over the weekend) and will be taking whatever actions are necessary to get our website back up and to oppose this attack against our right to communication and freedom which should be guaranteed under our democracy
Hey, Meryl - there was no attempt to link you with pornography. You did that yourself when you chose the same abbreviation for your organisation (and a very similar domain name) to that of the Adult Video Network.
Here's the joke though. On the tenth anniversary of starting The Millenium Project I wrote:
Where it started (14/3/2009)
In
1996 I wrote a book about the Internet. (It was published in early 1997 and modesty forbids me mentioning the name of the author of the biggest-selling non-fiction book in Australia that year.) One of the distasteful things I had to do while researching the book was to examine how easy it could be to find and look at pornography, because that was (as it is now) a concern for some parents and I assumed, rightly as it turned out, that the subject would be raised in almost every interview I did while promoting the book. While doing other research I came across a site from a crowd calling itself the Vaccination Awareness Network, and I remember saying at the time that none of the porn sites I looked at were anywhere near as offensive as this pile of garbage from a pack of child haters.
In 1999 I discovered that the group of clowns had changed their name to make their opposition to vaccination less obvious to the casual observer. They were now called the Australian Vaccination Network, and this change of name to something deceitfully inoffensive made me think that there were people who needed to be offended and offended often. I was looking for a name for my new project, and that was 1999 so everyone was talking about the millennium except those that were talking about the millenium. A metaphorical light bulb flashed over my head and I thought "millenium - a thousand arseholes". The rest is history. What started as just a list of the first hundred offensive sites on March 13, 1999, has turned into what you see today. Unfortunately, the Australian Vaccination Network is also still with us and they are just as offensive to sane and rational people as they were back then, so I have been paying them some attention in this anniversary week.
So the link to pornography has been there, in my mind at least, for over a decade. And I haven't changed my mind a single bit. The Australian Vaccination Network is still more offensive than any legal pornography site that I can imagine. The worst that most porn sites can do is cause a feeling of inadequacy and raise some false expectations. They don't suggest that you should endanger the lives of children, or lie about collecting money for charity, or offer dangerous medical advice that can cause people to avoid real medical care.
You can read Meryl Dorey's snivelling nonsense about the web site problems here. Note the list of defamatory accusations she makes when listing the AVN's problems. Maybe one day she will be asked by a court to justify her paranoid claims.
Australian Vaccination Network and the HCCC (13/3/2010)
As part of the ongoing investigation by the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission into the activities of the Australian Vaccination Network, submissions have been solicited from anyone with an interest. My friend Tom Sidwell went that extra step and not only submitted a complaint but included three excellent analyses of the nature and quality of the AVN's medical advice. These need a wider distribution than just some bureaucrat's in-tray, so with Tom's permission you can read them here.
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they vile? One of them said this on the Australian Vaccination Network's mailing list recently: "Wow, thanks so much for posting this! It's an invaluable article for our anti-vaccinations cause. I will print this out and take it with me to the doctors when I have to go in a few months". You might wonder what "this" is that was so invaluable. It was a news item that said:
