Meryl Dorey’s Great “Vaccine Testing” Swindle

May 12, 2012 4 Comments

It doesn’t take much digging and delving to discover that Meryl Wynn Dorey is committing fraud and always intended to commit fraud.

In what will be the first post to examine fraud capers perpetrated by Meryl Dorey we’ll have a look at the false promises and schemes used to mislead members about the always imminent “vaccine testing”. One may wonder, where is that money now?

Charity fraud is known to be the choice of cowards. The callous, the cruel, the weak. Fines are so puny as to render the prospect of prosecution remote. The maximum fine for an offence (regardless of it’s size) that can be imposed upon the guilty is $5,500. Little wonder then that in NSW the OLGR has prosecuted one person in seven years. Jesse Phillips informed us of this last July 24th, when writing Why Charity Fraud is The Softest Crime.

He also noted:

Gaming and Racing Minister George Souris has pledged that investigating charity fraud will be a priority and that he will initiate prosecutions where appropriate. [...]

Reports of bogus charities were rare but all complaints about suspicious charities were investigated, he said.

Last year the office cancelled the fundraising authorities for Solutions to Obesity Problems and the Australian Vaccination Network.

Solutions to Obesity Problems had its charity status revoked following publicity from radio presenter Ray Hadley while the AVN’s charity status was revoked after it was found to have breached charitable fundraising laws and potentially misled the public as its appeals were not done in good faith.

Neither was prosecuted.

I suggest checking The Charitable Fundraising Act 1991 (NSW Legislation) for a better understanding of “fundraising appeal”, “participating in a fundraising appeal”. etc. Do note however that Section 10 Participating In Unlawful Fundraising states:

A person who participates in a fundraising appeal which the person knows, or could reasonably be expected to know, is being conducted unlawfully is guilty of an offence.

So let’s ease in to the “vaccine testing” swindle with a generic gimme ya money appeal, that sort of morphed into having a partially stated purpose of vaccine testing. Around June of 2006 Meryl was availing her members with a magazine called Doing The Rounds. In this first issue Meryl opines that the catchy themed “$26 donation from every member donation drive” has yielded a puny $1,700.

Unfortunately, the $26 from every member donation drive has been floundering. After a flurry of donations and pledges in the first days of our appeal, the not-so-grand total to date is just over $1,700. Considering the fact that we have over 2,000 AVN members and another 800 or so readers of this email who have never joined but are reading this information, I hope that this tally can be lifted substantially in the next week or so. If you haven’t donated yet, please do so and if you are not a member, have a think about joining. Also, remember to forward our information on to friends, family and acquaintances who you think might be interested in joining.

Nothing like a bit of flounder to get an Aussie interested. By issue two of Doing The Rounds the total was $6,016 – “a fantastic start” Meryl enthused. We also learn there’s a total goal of $52,000. The detective in you has spotted that 52,000 divided by 26 suggests 2,000 members. And Meryl has put the guilt trip on another “800 or so readers”.

Also great news! Meryl has announced “Our First Project With These Funds”. She has arranged with an independent laboratory to test two different vaccines for the presence of heavy metals. One will be a “supposedly mercury-free shot”. Also this money should now be going into a trust account with a stated purpose.

Issue 3 of Doing The Rounds brought more updates. Another 2 grand had hit the target, but there was $48,000 to go.

As you no doubt remember, we are looking for total donations of $52,000 which equated to a donation of only $26 from each one of you. Since the last newsletter, we have raised an additional $2025 in donations which is lovely but means that we still need more than $48,000 to get to our goal.

And there was a graph headed “How Close Are We Getting?” to prove it:

Next came Doing The Rounds Issue 4. Since July 1st $3,114 had rolled in. One generous donor had given $2,000. Two things also happened in Issue 4. The promise of putting the $2,000 toward testing vaccines for heavy metals “such as mercury” was made. This now locks the AVN into certain conditions laid out in The Charitable Fundraisng Act 1993 (NSW Legislation).

  • Division Three: Application of funds raised

20 Proceeds of Appeal

(1)  Any money or benefit received in the course of a fundraising appeal conducted by the holder of an authority is to be applied according to the objects or purposes represented by or on behalf of the persons conducting the appeal as the purposes or objects of the appeal.

21 Investment

(1)  Money received in the course of a fundraising appeal which is not immediately required to be applied to the purposes or objects of the appeal may be invested only in a manner for the time being authorised by law for the investment of trust funds.

The Charitable Trusts Act 1993 notes:

In this Act:

charitable trust means any trust established for charitable purposes and subject to the control of the Court in the exercise of the Court’s general jurisdiction with respect to charitable trusts.

Effectively money raised toward “vaccine testing” must go toward vaccine testing, or into a charitable trust. Other monies not earmarked for vaccine testing, but raised from the $52,000 donation drive must be invested in a charitable trust as money raised in the course of a specific appeal.

Also, The AVN had applied to be a tax deductible gift recipient. Perhaps being over confident of success changes were made to their constitution. It all got confusing when they accordingly opened a new bank account called Australian Vaccination Network Inc. Gift Fund. Although the AVN’s application “to be a tax deductible gift recipient” was, to this day, never accepted (like say, with Charities), the practice of switching between these two accounts remains a feature of this and future scams.

Next up is Issue 5 of Doing The Rounds. There’s $8,541.59. $2,500 has been “set aside” for testing vaccines for the presence of mercury. I do hope you have no liquids in your mouth dear reader, because it was also announced that a new goal of submitting the “results of these tests for publication in a mainstream medical journal”, had been established.

So to date there should be one trust account holding $8,541.59 as the total so far of the “$52,000 donation drive”. And another trust account holding $2,500 for vaccine testing. The confusion with money going into Australian Vaccination Network Inc. and the meaningless Australian Vaccination Network Inc. Gift Fund bank accounts should also be corrected.

Things go a bit quiet on the Vaccine Testing front for 15 months, until January 2008. Members are then told about Your Donations At Work. Or rather, it seems their donations are not doing much work at all.

No more gushing detail about totals is forthcoming. Indeed members will never hear of any financial total related to vaccine testing again. They will also never hear of the fate of the $52,000 donation drive. Exactly how that $11,000 in total of theirs in the above screenshot is to be (or was) spent is a mystery. The fate of that money is never mentioned again.

Oh, never fear though. There were other feverish donation and fundraising drives in the meantime. Girls were being savaged with “mandatory HPV vaccination”. Only an “urgent $2,000″ could save them. Legal action was to be launched by the AVN to save hospital employees from immunisation. I’ll cover those later. But in January 2008, Dorey had cranked up ye olde “vaccine testing” myth again.

You see, the donations aren’t at work because the AVN now needs a “couple of people with expertise in [vaccine testing]“. Perhaps a Laboratory Scientist, a Research Scientist, a Graduate Scientist or a medical or healthcare professional previously involved in research. They still “plan on submitting it for publication in a medical journal”.

Then came February 2008. Can You Help With Raising Funds For This Project? Suddenly donations weren’t at work anymore. In fact, they apparently weren’t even enough anymore.

I don’t have a problem with total donations not being enough to test vaccines for heavy metals. In truth the entire hoped for $52,000 would have delivered little in that respect. It’s the way this phoney caper is presented that’s concerning. And we see more polish to AVN’s standard conspiracy laden scheme of them saving members from the danger of vaccines.

The call for money blurb was:

In 1999, the Australian government ordered the removal of mercury from all childhood vaccines. It was several years however before the old mercury-laden vaccines were actually used up and in all that time, children continued to receive mercury - a known killer of brain cells – in their shots.

Recent vaccine tests conducted by HAPI (Health Advocacy in the Public Interest) indicate that many if not most childhood and adult shots may still contain this toxic heavy metal. Independent testing is needed!

The Australian Vaccination Network is planning on testing every currently-licensed vaccine for the presence of toxic heavy metals. Funding is required to perform these tests properly. Without proper independent tests, Australian children and adults may continue to be poisoned by the failure of the government to ensure the removal of toxic ingredients from vaccines.

This continued on for four more months. You can check in Doing The Rounds March, April and June 2008. Of course it’s entirely bogus. Whatever amount was needed was never conveyed. Clearly they were not consulting, or knew it was financially prohibitive. Whatever total was raised was also never conveyed. It was a crude grab for dollars. Nothing less.

Nobody ever heard of this “scheme”, any respondents to the request for research help, the proposed medical paper or a single cent related to it again. Nonetheless every AVN publication during and since 2006 have provided options for donating, getting slicker and more bold over time.

To the delight of AVN watchers however, Meryl Dorey did make one other attempt to keep the “vaccine testing” scam afloat. Heavily weighed down with donor dollars Dorey was off to the USA in October 2010. Donors had paid for multiple iMacs, iPads and countless flights around Australia. Why not a trip to good old USA? Why not indeed?

Exciting Times Ahead! gushed the October 2010 edition of Living Wisdom/AVN newsletter. Meryl was off to the Freedom For Family Wellness Summit in Washington. Just in case you were wondering what Meryl was doing jetting off to the USA almost 5 years after first promising to spend your money on Vaccine Testing you got this *:

Of course no feedback followed and no-one was kept up to date with what is essentially the last entry (to date) in the sorry saga of Meryl Dorey’s promised vaccine testing.

Just this one example indicates that the up to 25 breaches of The Charitable Fundraising Act uncovered by the OLGR were not “minor”. Indeed the most basic requirements have not been adhered to. No member has a clue where any money is, exactly what it has been spent on, or in this and other cases at what stage, and indeed how likely, the fruition of certain projects are.

All that is constant is the ongoing siphoning of money from a rapid turnover member base. Rather than accusing her critics of libel Ms. Dorey would do well to address the damning evidence that comes from her own hand. That is published under her own name.

In closing one can only be drawn again to consider the many claims of threats and harassment Dorey claims comes her way from Stop The AVN or members of various Skeptic groups. It’s a tired old line and few believe it. Her critics work from evidence not emotion.

However, if it were true I’d be worrying about the thousands of members schemed and lied to for financial gain.

Maybe someone really wanted vaccines tested.

* I’m indebted to an alert AVN watcher for knowing where to recover this text.

Filed under Anti-Vaccination Lobby, Scam, Legal Tagged with , , , , , ,

P is for Paranoid, Persecutory Delusion

May 6, 2012 2 Comments

Definition - Paranoia:

Paranoia is an unfounded or exaggerated distrust of others, sometimes reaching delusional proportions. Paranoid individuals constantly suspect the motives of those around them, and believe that certain individuals, or people in general, are “out to get them.”
Persecutory Delusion:
A fixed, false, and inflexible belief that others are engaging in a plot or plan to harm an individual.
Fact Sheet - Defamation:

Defamation is a tort, or a civil wrong, which occurs when defamatory material relating to an individual is published.  Material will be defamatory if it could:

  • injure the reputation of the individual by exposing them to hatred, contempt or ridicule;
  • cause people to shun or avoid the individual; or
  • lower the individual’s estimation by right thinking members of society.

For a defamation action to be successful, three elements must be satisfied:

  1. the information was communicated by the defendant to a third person other than the plaintiff (publication);
  2. the material identifies the plaintiff (identification); and
  3. the information/material contains matter that is defamatory, regardless of whether the material was intentionally published or not (defamatory matter).

Some readers may remember the recent AVN post by president Meryl Wynn Dorey, entitled V is for Vendetta.

We shall ignore the theft of that copyright movie name to pursue more pertinent matters. The post was a rant against Mr. Ken McLeod who has devoted massive amounts of his time and effort to protect Australians from a sham organisation convinced it is above the law.

For twenty years Ms. Dorey has peddled misinformation designed to terrify an endless stream of new parents about vaccination. Over this time many of these same parents paid her via donation for the endlessly promised, but never delivered, cornucopia of “solutions”. The children grow, parents move on and for Meryl it was always simply rinse and repeat.

In 2009 Ken filed a complaint against the AVN with the NSW HCCC. The findings of their investigation were damning indeed. The complaints were not found to be “illegal”. The findings have not been quashed. It is what the HCCC did with the findings that was found to be technically outside of their jurisdiction. The AVN have not been “vindicated”. However Ms. Dorey did win an appeal against a Public Warning and an order to warn website visitors that the AVN is anti-vaccination.

The very same Supreme Court ruling ensures that the following remains true and accurate:

An investigation into The AVN by the Health Care Complaints Commission of NSW found that the AVN website:

1) Provides information that is solely anti-vaccination.
2) Contains information that is incorrect and misleading.
3) Quotes selectively from research to suggest that vaccination may be dangerous.

For some legal jargon and a look at what the OLGR position was regarding removal of the AVN’s Charitable Fundraising Authority, prior to it’s reinstatement check here.

Getting back to Dorey’s post we should note the following attacks on Mr. McLeod:

1- The Health Care Complaints Commission received a 90-page complaint by Ken McLeod – member of Stop the AVN and a man whose obsession with me seems to border on the psychotic. McLeod filed the original complaint, resulting in a 12-month ‘investigation’ by the HCCC and a public warning – both of which were later deemed to be illegal by the NSW Supreme Court. It appears that McLeod must spend hours every day trying to prove that I am a liar and that the AVN is responsible for global warming, the current financial crisis and the death of every child from infectious disease no matter where in the world it occurs (this is only slightly tongue in cheek).

Despite the HCCC’s rejection, it is obvious that McLeod will continue to try and get me charged with some sort of crime and will not stop trying to shut down the AVN until one of us is imprisoned or he is finally provided with the psychiatric support he seemingly needs.

2- The Department of Fair Trading which originally investigated the AVN back in 2009 due to another complaint from McLeod and others involved with the Australian Skeptics and Stop the AVN, has come back again due to yet another complaint, involving what appears to be dubious technicalities. [...]

4- Earlier in the week, I received a call from a representative of the Therapeutic Goods Administration’s (TGA) Advertising Codes Council who informed me that they had received a complaint about us (gee, I wonder who would have made such a complaint? I just can’t imagine!) and I would be hearing from them in the next few days in regards to a matter I will have to respond to.

I won’t take up the entire page quoting Meryl Dorey. Follow the link above if you care to. Suffice it to say she blames Mr. McLeod and Government authorities for her own breaches of legislative requirements. That alone seems to require towering hubris.

Yet item 2 here has zero to do with Mr. McLeod, as does item 4 – referring to the TGA.

Regarding the Office of Fair Trading Ken did some digging and found the wonderfully generous complainant. Thanks to that person’s selflessness we can confirm that unless Mr. McLeod has moved to QLD he is innocent of the charges Your Honour.

  • Response/s from NSW OFT:

Clearly there are likely to be many people writing letters, filing complaints and quite simply expressing their keenness to see this sham gig brought to account. There’s no doubt no apology will be forthcoming from Ms. Dorey. A cursory glance at the customary vulgarity of her many transgressions should forewarn us of that.

I for one doubt that paranoid ramblings or a persecution complex will hide the truth for long.

Filed under Anti-Vaccination Lobby, Denialism, Health, Legal Tagged with , ,

American Airlines “blackmailed” by “pharmaceutically funded” organisations say AVN

April 25, 2012 2 Comments

In a predictable reaction to American Airlines’ sound decision to pull her misinformation on vaccination, Meryl Dorey has launched her own petition.

The unsigned petition takes the reader on a journey of unfounded accusation and a synopsis of the original interview. It again makes the same striking distortions of truth managing to claim Ms. Dorey cites “peer-reviewed research”, when in fact she cites Wakefield’s officially retracted and fraudulent paper.

“Pharmaceutically funded organisations” have “blackmailed” American Airlines it claims. More so, removal of of the potentially lethal scheme is “un-American” and “a direct contravention to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution”.

Wow!

Indeed the petition is actually worse than the interview, arguing that not only is the disproved link between vaccines and autism “verified” in the medical literature, but that vaccination:

… has contributed to a rate of autism in the United States that has increased from 1:10,000 20 years ago to 1:88 today

All that needs be stressed on this is that no peer reviewed literature supports this nonsense. Respected autism organisations across the globe agree the change in diagnostic frequency is just that – a change in diagnostic frequency. This is due to changing criteria and other factors increasing the likelihood of diagnosis. Which is vastly different to an increase in the incidence of autism as it was defined two decades ago.

Those scammed this way are playing Russian Roulette according to a mother who didn’t vaccinate her son due to Wakefield’s fraud. The New Zealand Herald reported today on one person’s “informed decision”:

The theory [MMR linked to autism] was eventually retracted in 2010 and Wakefield was struck off the medical register, but not before triggering a worldwide health scare around the MMR vaccine.

Said Mrs Edwards-Lasenby: “It was one of those things where I had made the informed decision at the time not to do the MMR vaccine, with the information I had available to me. But where I went wrong was not going back to revisit that information and the advice available as time went on.”

She urged parents to reconsider immunisation, particularly if advice changes, to avoid playing “Russian roulette” with children’s lives.

It will take her son 12 months to fully recover. He lost 7kg after not eating for 2 weeks, was on oxygen in isolation “fighting for his life” in hospital and even when well enough to return to school:

“Then he just caught anything,” Mrs Edwards-Lasenby said. “Any little scratch he had became an infection and he was constantly on antibiotics.”

Meryl Dorey is leading parents and innocent children toward this very suffering and potentially worse. Her proposed interview includes an entirely manufactured claim suggesting that measles vaccination is ineffective. If you’re wondering what our health regulators and authorities are doing you’re not alone.

The misguided line about new pertussis genomes was dealt with two posts ago, exposing Ms. Dorey’s intentional untruth about vaccine efficacy and infant fatality. Listen to your doctor – not Meryl Dorey.

Yet, the “trial myths” used by antivaxxers deserves noting. Whilst it’s thunderous hypocrisy for those who promote homeopathy, chiropractic treatment of disease and cancer “cures” to bemoan a lack of “the gold standard” in scientific testing (RCT), we also find more misinformation.

Firstly it is quite untrue that vaccines are not tested against a true placebo. Safety trials involve comparison to saline. Yet antivaxxers ignore this and attack efficacy trials as not being “placebo controlled”. These trials compare vaccine components minus the agent/s responsible for the immune response (in one sample), to the full vaccine (in another sample). Such trials are absolutely crucial to delineate a true immune response from other possible responses. This complaint is void and invalid.

Next is the rather amusing insistence of the need to test the overall health of the fully unvaccinated against the fully vaccinated. Exactly how we separate the former sample from protection, and thus good health, afforded by herd immunity and still preserve the integrity of this study has never quite been explained.

More so, how do we correct for fatalities from vaccine preventable disease in the unvaccinated who are no longer alive? If the notion is to begin studies at birth I am sure no ethics committee would pass such an absurdity. This is clear if we consider restrictions on Isaac Golden’s so-called “PhD in homeopathic immunisation”. He writes in the abstract:

The effectiveness of the program could not be established with statistical certainty given the limited sample size and the low probability of acquiring an infectious disease… Further research to confirm the effectiveness of the program is justified.

Of course the subtle suggestion is that vaccinated individuals will be of inferior health due to complications from the frogs and snails and puppy dog tails that wicked vaccines contain. I would suggest that as we’re witnessing the re-emergence of diseases and the fatality they cause as a consequence of lower immunisation levels that the long term and large scale outcome of this hypothetical trial is blindingly obvious.

Next is the complaint that pharmaceutical companies conduct trials and licence vaccines “with no independent oversight on the part of government regulators”. This is also entirely false. Good Manufacturing Practice is moderated by governments and the WHO. In relation to vaccines the WHO state [bold mine]:

WHO defines Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) as “that part of quality assurance which ensures that products are consistently produced and controlled to the quality standards appropriate to their intended use and as required by the marketing authorization”.  GMP covers all aspects of the manufacturing process:  defined manufacturing process; validated critical manufacturing steps; suitable premises, storage, transport; qualified and trained production and quality control personnel; adequate laboratory facilities; approved written procedures and instructions; records to show all steps of defined procedures taken; full traceability of a product through batch processing records and distribution records; and systems for recall and investigation of complaints.
The guiding principle of GMP is that quality is built into a product, and not just tested into a finished product.  Therefore, the assurance is that the product not only meets the final specifications, but that it has been made by the same procedures under the same conditions each and every time it is made.  There are many ways this is controlled – controlling the quality of the facility and its systems, controlling the quality of the starting materials, controlling the quality of production at all stages, controlling the quality of the testing of the product, controlling the identity of materials by adequate labelling and segregation, controlling the quality of materials and product by adequate storage, etc.  All of these controls must follow prescribed, formal, approved procedures, written as protocols, SOPs, or Master Formulae, describing all the tasks carried out in an entire  manufacturing and control process.

The TGA (pages 10, 19, 20, 21, 22) and FDA have similar standards. Many Aussies will remember the visit and warning CSL received from the FDA following the Fluvax scare in W.A [2]. The TGA overview is here. In Australia we have The Pharmaceutical Overview Inspection Scheme.

The petition raises a claim that must be expanded on:

The opponents of this interview cite a public warning issued by the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC) against the AVN. What they have failed to inform you of is the fact that in February, 2012, the NSW Supreme Court found that the HCCC had acted illegally in issuing that warning and the warning has since been removed and costs were awarded against the HCCC in favour of the AVN.

Wrong. That was down to me and as I’ve pointed out already I cited the NSW HCCC findings, which Justice Christine Adamson ruled were still valid by not accepting the AVN submission that certiorari (quashing the HCCC findings), was warranted.

Thus whilst the warning and recommendation were outside of jurisdiction due to the HCCC failure to satisfactorily demonstrate Section 7(1)(b) of the HCC Act 1993 (“a health service which affects the clinical management or care of an individual client”), the investigation findings were not expunged in any manner whatsoever. The petition should thus rightly be amended.

Check the petition out further if you want, but I would suggest that both the interview and the petition have been fairly and honestly outed as scurrilous and dishonest attempts to force demonstrably false fringe beliefs onto a wider unsuspecting audience. Of course, the AVN maintain it’s a conspiracy and Dorey has been unfairly censored. American Airlines have capitulated to “druggies” according to one signatory.

Ultimately I do hope for someone who has had such a good run on the smell of an oily scam, Dorey has the decency to accept the outcome as fair and just.

  • In a bit of a round up there’s ample to read from sites, bloggers and skeptics from the last few days:
  1. Vaccine Awareness and Information Service
  2. I Speak of Dreams
  3. I Speak of Dreams (2)
  4. Peter Bowditch
  5. Australian Skeptics
  6. Bad Astronomy
  7. Bad Astronomy (2)
  8. io9
  9. Australian Doctor
  10. Anti-vaccination group hits snag

Filed under Anti-Vaccination Lobby, Health, Human Rights, Legal Tagged with , , , , , ,

American Airlines grounds Australian Vaccination Network

April 24, 2012 1 Comment

American Airlines have announced they will not air or print anti-vaccination material from Meryl Dorey of The Australian Vaccination Network.

This followed a fantastic response to an online petition and no doubt the submission of a number of letters to American Airlines, key partners and other influential individuals and organisations. Thanks to a simply awesome online community. Phil Plait blogged and tweeted bringing hundreds of thousands on board.

Fully aware of the potentially lethal consequences to flow from such egregious material thousands literally took the view: There’s no way this is gunna fly. Twitter ran hot with promotion of the petition at change.org, and tweets to @AmericanAir asking for cancellation.

@AmericanAir tweeted their decision at 07:15 AEST then confirmed the same for printed material about 25 minutes later. Busy preparing emails for the AusAID Development Office and Scholarship Department I was alerted via phone by the ever-vigilant @fourgirlsmum.

Since the American Airlines confirmation-by-twitter, there has been other confirmation in writing to interested parties ensuring that:

 … the interview in question has not yet been submitted to American Airlines, and we will not be running it if, and when, it is.

American Airlines has done the right thing in the interests of passenger safety, disability rights and public health. For that they deserve a huge thanks and congratulations.

Of course they can follow up this episode with a review of approval processes and communication with producers and editors of in-flight material. Only a couple of days ago we were informed accessing the material was “optional”. Whilst I accept the announcement by American Airlines that Dorey’s diatribe will be dropped, it should never have made it to production initially.

Only through rigorous vetting of applicants and their proposed material for in-flight access can we be sure that dangerous schemes like this do not in future make it in under the radar – no pun intended.

Once again the scale of error and audacity inherent in Ms. Dorey’s rather extremist and outright dishonest performance can’t be overstated. In my previous post I point out a number of very obviously deceptive tactics made only worse by Ms. Dorey’s inability to understand – or perhaps accept – the science of vaccination.

The attempt to malign measles vaccination by impersonating an authority on vaccines and immunity was alarming. As Phil Plait noted in his reason for signing the petition:

In May 2011, an infant with measles was brought on board American Airlines flight 3965, and a hundred passengers had to be tracked down and many quarantined.

Incredibly Dorey had misled that the pertussis vaccine “isn’t working”, was causing a more deadly disease and that the same applied to measles vaccination. Apart from the official sounding peacock label used by the AVN, Ms. Dorey presented herself as a first person authority, suggesting involvement with extremely complex scientific research.

We know vulnerable children and infants are dying as a result of these diseases. That this could be perpetuated by misplaced trust in a calculating charlatan is intolerable.

Thus I do hope American Airlines will very take very seriously the matter of how the producer of their Executive Report, and further the editor of their American Way magazine both made such a mistake.

There was a similar situation with Delta Air Lines wherein hand washing, exercise and vitamins were presented by US anti-vaccination lobby NVIC as superior to influenza vaccination.

This resulted in the sort of review process American Airlines must now consider. ABC news reported last November:

In a response to the AAP, Delta conceded that the video does not point to vaccines as the primary source for flu prevention.

“Therefore, we have changed our internal review processes and procedures to help ensure that submitted content is vetted differently going forward,” Delta’s general manager of occupational health, Barbara Martin, wrote in response.

In view of ongoing financial losses American Airlines would be making a very sound business decision in providing passengers with the same confidence Delta Air Lines does.

For now, American Airlines is to be praised for taking a stand against a malignant force in public health. If you have a chance, tweet your thanks to @AmericanAir.

To all those involved and interested I extend my sincere, heartfelt thanks.

Filed under Anti-Vaccination Lobby, Health, Human Rights, Legal Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Has the OLGR “verified” the HCCC Warning was “sole basis” for revocation of AVN fundraising authority?

April 9, 2012 Leave a comment

I am not a lawyer…

One constant theme that Meryl Dorey has kept up since the OLGR revoked the AVN fund raising authority (the decision is under appeal) is that it was entirely due to the, now removed, HCCC warning.

On February 24th the NSW Supreme Court upheld the Australian Vaccination Network appeal against the HCCC. Justice Christine Adamson found that the HCCC acted ultra vires in conducting an investigation, publishing a public warning and ordering the AVN to post warning notices online alerting consumers that they are antivaccination.

In this case ultra vires, meaning beyond powers, was a technicality of acting outside jurisdiction. The HCCC was deemed to have done so under Section 7 of the HCC Act: What can a complaint be made about? It had not been sufficiently demonstrated to the court that Section 7(1)(b) – a health service which affects the clinical management or care of an individual client, applied to the AVN. Simply, the HCCC needed actual information that Joe or Jane Bloggs had not vaccinated because of the AVN, before it – the HCCC – could act.

So, how does this relate to the OLGR appeal?

The AVN wanted certiorari granted in relation to all HCCC findings. This would have rendered the HCCC findings null and void and legally the findings would be considered quashed. This is quite different to having been found to have acted outside jurisdiction as a result of those findings.

Dorey also submitted that the Minister for OLGR was obliged to take into account the Public Warning as part of his duty under the Charitable Fundraising Act 1991.

Juctice Adamson found on page 21 of the ruling [bold mine]:

The plaintiff argued that the Public Warning was, as a matter of practical reality, a matter that the Minister for Gaming was obliged to (and in fact did) take into account in determining whether to revoke the plaintiff’s authority to raise funds under the Charitable Fundraising Act 1991. When asked to identify the discernible legal right which was affected, counsel for the plaintiff said:

“The damage to its reputation by being labelled a public risk to health and safety.”

[The AVN] submitted that its rights were not only directly affected, but also altered, by the HCCC’s decision to issue the Public Warning and that certiorari is accordingly available. It argued that the decision directly exposed it to a new hazard of an adverse exercise of public power (having its fundraising capacity revoked).

However, the plaintiff could not point to any provision in the Charitable Fundraising Act 1991 that made the Public Warning a mandatory relevant consideration in the Minister’s decision whether to revoke the authority.

Accordingly there is no basis on which I could find that the Minister for Gaming is legally obliged to take into account the Public Warning. For these reasons, certiorari does not lie.

If certiorari does not lie the findings remain. The HCCC conclusions are not incorrect. The AVN has not been found to be acting in the public interest. The complaints have not been found to be without foundation. What happened was that the HCCC did not convince the court it could act further in exercising it’s powers based on the initial findings.

More so, implicit in the above wording, is the failure of the AVN to show that the HCCC Public Warning was taken into account by the Minister for Gaming on legal grounds. Nor is there any provision in the Charitable Fundraising Act 1991 to support the AVN contention that the Minister was obliged to take the Warning into account when revoking authority.

So in the case of AVN vs HCCC the Supreme Court made no order at all affecting the OLGR’s revocation of the licence to raise funds.

At this point the Public Warning carries no weight. The HCCC findings have not been quashed. Justice Adamson has rejected the AVN submission that the OLGR revoked the AVN’s authority to raise funds because of the Public Warning or their claim of an obligation to the Public Warning. Nonetheless the next day Meryl Dorey wrote on Facebook [bold mine]:

For those who have been asking about our chariity (sic) status, hopefully, I will have more information on that early next week. The HCCC decision did not automatically give us back the authority, but I am hopeful that we will get it back since the OLGR relied completely on the HCCC warning to revoke the authority. Therefore, since the warning was invalid, the revocation may be too. Anyway, I will let you know as soon as I have the information myself.

Yesterday writing in her Living Wisdom email of April 8th Meryl noted that whilst they would be reimbursed for expenses against the HCCC they would not be reimbursed for expenses against the OLGR [bold mine]:

… but hopefully, we will soon have our authority to fundraise reinstated since the OLGR have verified that the HCCC’s warning was the sole basis of that revocation. Now that the warning is no more (the HCCC removed it from their website the same day the decision was handed down), we should be granted a charity authority again.

Interesting. There was a Directions Hearing for the appeal on March 27th. I can’t be sure but it strikes me as unlikely the OLGR would “verify” that a defunct warning was the sole basis of the licence revocation at a Directions Hearing. What else has the OLGR said?

On their website they announced the revocation in 2010:

Minister for Gaming and Racing, the Hon Kevin Greene MP, has revoked the fundraising authority formerly held by the Australian Vaccination Network Inc (AVN).

An investigation by the Office of Liquor, Gaming and Racing, a division of Communities NSW, found that AVN had breached charitable fundraising laws and potentially misled the public. [...]

The OLGR investigation also took into account the findings of the Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC) which established that the website operated by AVN provided information that was solely anti-vaccination as well as information that was incorrect and misleading.

The HCCC has published a public warning stating that AVN’s failure to post a disclaimer on its website may result in members of the public making improperly informed decisions about whether or not to vaccinate posing a potential risk to public health and safety.

This fairly clearly states that the OLGR investigation found the AVN breached charitable fundraising laws and also took into account the HCCC findings. These findings have not been quashed. They note the HCCC public warning and the risk to public health and safety.

If they also took the HCCC findings into account then there would be other factors at play. Indeed their findings included breaches of the Charitable Fundraising Act 1991 that are of no business to the HCCC:

Under Section 31 of The Charitable Fundraising Act 1991 the reasons for revocation can be found. In fairness to Meryl we should consider what may be the reason for her insistence that the HCCC Warning influenced the revocation. On October 14th 2010 Meryl published this via email to members:

Approximately 2 hours ago, I received a notification from the OLGR that they would, effective Wednesday, October 20th, be revoking the AVN’s charitable status. They have sent me a letter listing the reasons for this revocation (those reasons are reproduced below) and also the announcement that is being Gazetted today.

(a) that any fundraising appeal conducted by the holder of the authority has not been conducted in good faith for charitable purposes

The Organisation has failed to publish a disclaimer on its website as recommended by the Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC). This has resulted in an unacceptable risk of potential donors to the Organisation being misled when making a decision whether or not to make a donation, which has led to appeals not being conducted in good faith.

(c) that any fundraising appeal conducted by virtue of the authority has been improperly administered

The Organisation’s website is misleading in that it may lead people making donations to believe that they are donating to a cause which promotes vaccination whereas the Organisation adopts an anti-vaccination position. When requested by the HCCC to publish a disclaimer on its website the Organisation failed to do so.

(f) in the public interest, the authority should be revoked.

The failure of the Organisation to comply with the HCCC recommendation resulted in the Commission publishing a Public Warning on 26 July 2010 advising that this failure “poses a risk to public health and safety”. In this circumstance it is in the public interest to not permit the Organisation to conduct fund raising appeals under the Act.

This is an accurate account of the OLGR correspondence as reproduced elsewhere.

I can understand concerns about section (f) which, worded that way, appears to rely only on the HCCC Public Warning. Section (c) appears quite valid when stripped of reference to the HCCC. Furthermore the OLGR cited HCCC findings in conducting their investigation, and these findings have not been quashed. Thus Section (a) and (f) derived from HCCC findings, not recommendations, would potentially still stand.

Nonetheless, in terms of the revocation (and only the revocation) these are the reasons listed by the OLGR. And they do carry an item by item reference to the HCCC, which in turn apparently gives credence to Ms. Dorey’s repeated claim. Given the number and type of breaches of the Act, the OLGR could seemingly have cited other aspects of Section 31.

Certainly when the matter reaches court the defence of Sections (a), (c) and (f) will become far more complex. To this we should add the judgement of Justice Christine Adamson as noted above. An attempt to set a precedent that the licence to raise funds was revoked only due to the HCCC Public Warning was rejected on interpretation of The Charitable Fundraising Act 1991.

All considered it’s a likely simplification to claim the revocation is based entirely on the HCCC Warning. We should remember the OLGR stated it “also” looked at HCCC findings in it’s statement of revocation. Although on examination I can understand Ms. Dorey’s penchant for doing so. After all it drives attention away from other aspects of the OLGR investigation.

The following is from an OLGR letter to Mr. Ken McLeod, October 18th, 2010:

During the course of the inquiry evidence of possible breaches of the Charitable Trusts Act 1993 was detected in relation to the following specific purpose appeals conducted by AVN. :

1. Fighting Fund – to support a homeless family, allegedly seeking to avoid a court order to immunise a child with legal and living expenses. The appeal ran for a short time in 2008 and raised $11,810. None of the funds were spent on this purpose.

2. Advertising Appeal – initially this was an appeal for the specific purpose of raising funds for an advertisement in the Australian commencing in March 2009 and concluding July 2009. The specific purpose was changed during the course of the appeal to fund advertisements in Child magazine. This appeal raised $11,910. None of the funds were applied to the specific purposes. It is noted that AVN did spend some $15,000 during the period December 2009 to July 2010 on various forms of advertising.

3. Bounty Bag Program and Vaccination Testing – for a number of years AVN has solicited for donations generally in a manner where, despite it not being AVN’s intention, one specific purpose was created in that donations could only be spent on one or more of four purposes, including funding the provision of AVN material in the Bounty Bag program and testing of vaccines. No funds raised have been spent on these two purposes.

There is evidence that funds donated for the above specific purposes have been applied to other purposes including the running costs of AVN. Accordingly these matters have been referred to the Department of Justice and Attorney General, the Department that administers and regulates the Charitable Trusts Act 1993

In answer to that question I do not know if the OLGR did base it’s revocation entirely on the HCCC recommendations, nor whether or not it has verified anything of late. I do know one Supreme Court judge has rejected this notion on legal terms and I conclude there are many more valid reasons as to why the AVN should never be allowed to raise funds as a charity.

For an excellent and well laid out article I recommend visiting reasonablehank‘s consideration of exactly the same question.

I do hope however that when this matter gets to court the OLGR brings forth the bulk of their findings and uses them to prevent the revocation being overturned.

The AVN is anything but a charity.

Filed under Anti-Vaccination Lobby, Legal Tagged with , , , , ,

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