Comment and Opinion

Australian Vaccination Network

The Australian Vaccination Network was the big winner in the 2001 Millenium Awards, taking out the prestigious Anus Maximus Award. The award was announced in the following words:

Several years ago I wrote book about the Internet and I had to research pornography and other "offensive" things because it was obvious that I would be asked about this in most, if not all, promotional interviews. Nothing I found then offended, saddened, upset or angered me as much as a web site belonging to an organisation called the Vaccination Awareness Network, where, in perfectly rational and calm language, parents were advised to kill their children with measles and cripple them with polio. It was the closest I have ever come to being converted to the cause of censorship.

In 1999 I discovered that the organisation had changed its name to the Australian Vaccination Network and had a new web site. I can only assume that this change to a more neutral name was made to deceive people into thinking that the organisation was about vaccination, not about preventing children from getting it. That name change and web site were the inspiration for The Millenium Project.

The AVN again has a new web site, with a new domain name this time. I don't know why they have the new domain name unless they are planning to move the organisation into the more lucrative US market. I expect that the organisation name will also change to something a bit more international. It will probably be something a bit more innocuous as well so that more parents can be deceived into thinking that this organisation is interested in the welfare of children.

The AVN has a mailing list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AVN/, but they are so ashamed of their activities that they won't let me join the list. In fact, I have been banned. You can see the full story of the banning by clicking here.

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!

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:

• Meningococcal disease is harmless and hardly kills anybody at all
• Children can gain immunity from disease by picking up objects in the street and sucking on them, so vaccination is useless as well as harmful. (The person who said this is a licensed medical practitioner!)
• The World Health Organisation and the Save The Children Fund "put Hitler and Stalin in the shade" with their deliberate policy of genocide by using vaccination to spread AIDS in third-world countries.  (The person who said this is a licensed medical practitioner!)
• Autism is caused by the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. All of these diseases are less serious than the dangers of vaccination.  (The person who said this is a licensed medical practitioner!)
• Autism is caused by mercury in vaccines which do not contain mercury. A man who murdered a ten-week-old baby is a very fine person and draws very clever anti-vaccine cartoons.
• All vaccinations are unnecessary as homeopathy can not only treat any disease but protect against all things for which vaccine protection is claimed.

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:

• How to swear a false oath that she was a conscientious objector, even if she wasn't.
• How to deceive a doctor by explicitly asking for written advice about which vaccines should be given and then not taking the advice. The doctor's letter could be used if any problems arose getting government benefits.
• How to keep unvaccinated children in school during an outbreak by lying to the school and delaying any action the school could take.
• How to submit spurious '"vaccine adverse effect" reports, including one for the son who is not autistic.
• How to find a homeopath who can cure the autism.

It would be difficult to defame an organisation which does such a good job of defaming itself.

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.

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.

• Birth
  • Hepatitis B (hepB)
• 2 months
  • Hepatitis B (hepB)
  • Diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough (acellular pertussis) (DTPa)
  • Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib)
  • Polio (inactivated poliomyelitis IPV)
  • Pneumococcal conjugate (7vPCV)
• 4 months
  • Hepatitis B (hepB)
  • Diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough (acellular pertussis (DTPa)
  • Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib)
  • Polio (inactivated poliomyelitis IPV)
  • Pneumococcal conjugate (7vPCV)
• 6 months
  • Hepatitis B (hepB) - or at 12 months
  • Diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough (acellular pertussis (DTPa)
  • Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib)
  • Polio (inactivated poliomyelitis) (IPV)
  • Pneumococcal conjugate (7vPCV)
• 12 months
  • Hepatitis B (hepB) - or at 6 months
  • Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib)
  • Measles, mumps and German measles (rubella) (MMR)
  • Meningococcal C (MenCCV)
• 12-24 months
  • Hepatitis A (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in high risk areas)
• 18 months
  • Chickenpox (varicella) (VZV)
• 18-24 months
  • Pneumococcal polysaccharide (23vPPV) (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in high risk areas)
  • Hepatitis A (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in high risk areas)
• 4 years
  • Diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough (acellular pertussis) (DTPa)
  • Measles, mumps and German measles (rubella) (MMR)
  • Polio (inactivated poliomyelitis) (IPV)

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?