The driving force behind the Australian Vaccination-risks Network is Meryl Dorey who is tagged on this blog, and was highly active at the time of the HCCC Public Health Warning about this group.

Thanks to a tweet by a highly effective critic of the AVN my attention was drawn to a post Meryl made on her Facebook page during a live video broadcast on April 11th this year. What I found compelling was that suddenly – and I do mean suddenly as Dorey had never made this claim before – she announced that her “personal opinion is that viruses can only be transmitted by injection”. As we’ll see this causes problems for one particular anti-vaccine position Meryl has promoted.

The comment below was posted in the context of discussing viral testing and the strange notion of buying “a private test”, presumably to avoid the COVID conspiracy pitfalls. The last sentence contains Meryl’s view about viral transmission by injection. This pattern of adopting stand out themes of conspiracy theories is one Meryl Dorey has followed for years.

Source: Comment 32

Update: Dorey has now deleted this comment

The compelling aspect to Dorey’s sudden revelation is that this claim had already been made 12 days earlier by anti-vaxxer and erstwhile Involuntary Medication Objectors Party candidate, Tom Barnett. The video in which he made his claims was removed from Facebook and YouTube.

Barnett claimed in the video;

You can’t catch a virus; it’s impossible. The only way you can catch a virus is by having it injected into your bloodstream.

I say. Meryl apparently decided this sounded pretty good to however she is planning to profit from the COVID-19 crisis. Feel free to search her online material prior to Tom Barnett’s comments for a statement suggesting Meryl Dorey believes viruses can only be transmitted by injection. I for one am having trouble finding such a reference.

Claiming to hold such a position enables one to reject the need for immunisation and to argue that vaccination against viral disease may in fact be the cause of the disease.

Meryl is clearly spinning more plates than is wise with this latest addition of evidence denial. To be specific, her claim that viruses can only be transmitted by injection is a form of germ theory denial |Wikipedia|. Denial of germ theory |Wikipedia| is as old as germ theory itself. Thanks to germ theory significant advances in personal hygiene and public sanitation have brought about improvements in health and reduction in the spread of disease.

Which brings us to a real problem for Meryl Dorey. She claims that vaccinations have done almost nothing, if not absolutely nothing, to prevent disease. She has fallaciously argued before that the documented fall in vaccine-preventable disease is in fact due to better hygiene, diet and sanitation and occurred before the introduction of vaccines. This is very common misinformation pushed by anti-vaxxers usually with heavily doctored graphs that chart disease mortality as opposed to morbidity and are falsely attributed to official sources.

It fails utterly to explain the success of vaccines introduced in the later half of the 20th century such as measles (1963) and haemophilus influenzae type b (1993). The WHO do a good job of dispelling this misinformation here. At the beginning of 2012 I looked at the AVN’s use of this myth and included an explanatory video with audio from both Meryl Dorey and Judy Wilyman.

In it we hear Dorey during a radio interview with Helen Lobato on Melbourne’s 3CR in December 2011 make the familiar claim;

Meryl Dorey: A lot of the credit that’s been given to vaccines for the decline in deaths and infectious diseases has nothing to do with vaccines. Because it all happened before the shots were even introduced.

Helen Lobato: Mmmm… and it was more the diet and the sanitation?

Meryl Dorey: That’s right. Engineers did more to improve the health of Australians than doctors ever have.

You might like to listen to Meryl on the audio player below;

Looking back at Dorey’s frequent promotion of this misinformation on the AVN website, social media and other media it is impossible to find any clarification specific to viral infection being only possible by injection. Nor is there any delineation between bacterial infection and viral infection being controlled by sanitation.

Thus in one foul swoop Dorey has removed the logic behind her claim that sanitation, not vaccination, brought about the control of specific viral infections. If viruses can only be transmitted by injection then improved sanitation must only be responsible for reducing infectious diseases caused by bacteria.

This also removes her concerns over “vaccine shedding” [1], [2] with respect to vaccines designed to prevent viral infection. This is highly significant concerning Dorey’s new claim as material presented to defend the notion of unbridled “vaccine shedding” refers exclusively to viral shedding in stools or in the case of LAIV nasal spray, in nostrils.

As Meryl Dorey and the AVN have challenged health ministers and authorities to accept being injected with a body weight adjusted equivalent of the entire childhood vaccine schedule, I do hope there is no intent to demonstrate strength of conviction by ingesting or inhaling any viral material associated with disease.

Therefore as it now stands I would be fascinated to know how Meryl Dorey intends to justify believing that sanitation, not vaccination, reduced the spread of viral disease given her claim that viruses can only be transmitted by injection.

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