Category Archives: Denialism

You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it

Posted in ACCESS Minintries, Australian Christian Lobby, Chaplains in schools, Denialism, Religion by

You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it

So reads Matthew 16:18.

What a splendid analogue we have today with self appointed missionary and cross bearer, the Reverend Canon Dr. Evonne Paddison, receiving the blessing and permission of fellow Christian Peter Garrett. Also raised as an Anglican, if his desire was to transform from rock star to rock of foundation it has certainly been realised.

Garrett’s so-called “federal inquiry” into the proselytising of ACCESS Ministries and their stated, observed and reported intention to convert public school children has miraculously “cleared” them of doing any such thing. Backed by the insistence of devout Catholic and career Christian education whip, who recently became Victorian education minister, Martin Dixon, that not a single substantial complaint has been received, Paddison is now free to build. Of course Evonne never doubted the righteousness of her “God given open door”. The justified concerns raised and reported to ministers with the bipartisan staying power of wet tissue paper, were simply a grossly unfair “concerted attack”. As she reinforced, perhaps a little creepily at last Sunday’s Forward Together rally;

We know with absolute certainty that our message and the centre of our faith remains the same. It remains firm because the one we serve is the same yesterday, today… forever. And his purposes will not be thwarted.

In The Age today Jewel Topsfield and Dan Harrison report;

A FEDERAL investigation into the Christian group that provides religious education in Victorian schools has found no evidence that its chaplains tried to convert students in breach of government guidelines.

The federal and Victorian governments ordered inquiries after a recording emerged of Access Ministries’ chief executive Evonne Paddison telling a 2008 conference: ”We need to go and make disciples.” […..]

But federal Education Minister Peter Garrett said the investigation found there had been no breach of the guidelines and no further action would be taken. He said he had received an explanation for the comments made by Dr Paddison and was satisfied the group was not trying to convert students.

Access Ministries had recently sent a letter telling chaplains who also taught Christian religious education in schools to stop doing so to avoid any blurring of lines in the roles.

”There are very strict guidelines in place to ensure that chaplaincy service providers do not engage in proselytising or misuse their positions, and we will fully investigate any complaints,” Mr Garrett said.

Victorians and the Education Union who have voiced concerns – and voted for an end to ACCESS funding have every right to be appalled at this whitewash. The concerns raised are specific to CRE and the evangelical passion of volunteers. Volunteers who in the main have less than one days training. Manufacturing a “solution” wherein chaplains have been told to no longer conduct CRE is poppycock. More so, this raises an entirely new dynamic. Is Paddison now admitting chaplains did proselytise to children or is this just a token gesture to “avoid any blurring of the lines”? More so, it is totally dismissive of the needs of our multi-faith and multicultural society.

And intentionally so. Last month, for example, ACCESS Ministries and education department representatives were invited to partake in preparation, and contribute to genuine parental evaluation with Hawthorn West Primary’s school council. They played along only to apply pressure – after considerable grassroots effort – to withhold the survey. The stated reason? That the “survey withheld the fact that under the present legislation schools are obligated to offer special religious instruction when it is made available by providers”, suggesting that the council had overstepped it’s obligation to comply with the Education and Training Reform Act, 2006. In other words the thrust should have been “you have no choice”.

Finally, Garrett’s continued mantra of “the guidelines, the guidelines, the guidelines” being in place to prevent abuse of Paddison’s “God given open door” is laughable. Evonne Paddison is the real thing when it comes to snubbing “earthly laws”. Her aim is “to implant the gospel in every school” so that the ACCESS goal can be realised. Paddison wants to “reach every child in Victoria with the transforming love of God and His son, Jesus [and] through CRE we aim to reach 80% of primary school children by the year 2012”.

This is not a person who even considers the option of compromise, laying ownership to student issues such as “bullying, drugs and self worth… The need is great but God is greater”. The needs of students who are not Christian, not theistic, not heterosexual or not celibate are bound for the scrap heap. What’s worse is that it’s now clear ACCESS have a distinctly anti-science and anti-evolution theme to their teachings. God most certainly did not make the world and everything in it.

By 2050 when these students will be at the peak of their careers Australia’s population will have grown at a rate of 65% to an unsustainable 35 million. The global population will grow at a much smaller 38%. Land temperatures in Australia may be 5 degrees Celsius higher – with mean global rises at least 2.5 degrees. The very last thing our youngest minds need now is to be targetted by blinkered, if not arguably deluded zealots intent on pursuing demonstrably fatalistic falsehoods at the expense of anything, and anyone, else.

We recently found out her goal to “reach every child in Victoria” includes independent schools – some of her harshest critics. In the mind of a zealot like Paddison, a woman who sees herself as Jesus’ scarred disciple there must be no barriers to the divine plan she has been chosen to deliver. Despite children being at these schools for the benefits of a secular education Paddison sees it as her business to change this. Reported in an Age opinion piece two days ago, was Paddison’s pronouncement at the ACCESS rally;

Those poor independent schoolchildren – I don’t want them to miss out

Talk about overstepping obligations to the Victorian Education Act. As the opinion piece pointed out;
One of the basic tenets of the Victorian Education Act is that public education should be secular, a sentiment that first emerged in the 19th century, and was reaffirmed in the past decade when the act was reviewed.

Herein lies the sheer temerity and arrogance of Evonne Paddison and her discriminatory view that “Without Jesus our students are lost”. Whilst a few anti-theistic voices are raised to claim that this means no religion in schools, the clearly specified intention in 1872 was that no religion should dominate to the detriment of any other. No doubt a wise choice in days when Protestant and Catholic rivalries were high, but there now can be only less doubt about the wisdom of this approach. Her defence is that CRE is “entirely voluntary… that’s the beauty of it”. But of course, this is in utter dissonance to her stated goals, aims and ambition. It is in every way offensive to parents who are essentially pressured to not evaluate CRE and to remember there is no choice. Or the hundreds and more parents fed up with having their children’s minds filled with confusing debris that clashes with family, diversity and social values. There is only compulsion.

The problem is very simple. The wording of the legislation includes the word “may” offer religious instruction. It is conveniently interpreted as “must” offer RI. From here flows the ridiculous notion that it is compulsory for schools to allow these misguided and opportunistic purveyors of fantasy and bigotry into our children’s presence and thence begin misrepresenting the very world in which they live. As Paddison declared at the EFAC National Conference – 2008;

We must give our children and young people a model of discipleship that promotes belief in, and responds to the word of God. And trains them to abide in it. It teaches and models for them the love of God and how to be in a community of faith to love one another and love God’s word. We need a model that is marked by fruit bearing and involves our young people in evangelicalism and disciple making.

We need a model that points to the glory of Christ in his incarnation his work on the cross his resurrection is exultation and sees his disciples continuing that work and reflecting in in his world. We are constantly tempted to water this down in order to attract young people through our activities, our music, our fun, or whatever it is. Resist the temptation to replace substance with superficiality.

Our gospel is not in need of massaging for acceptability. It alone will transform lives and bring salvation. My view is that we have every opportunity to create new congregations through our schools ministries, as we do this we have the responsibility to fulfill the great commission of making disciples. We need to see our Scripture teachers, our chaplains, especially as facilitators of this as established Anglican churches.

We need to be missional. As leaders in the church we are called to be leaders and enablers of god’s mission for his world…. Our task is to have a biblical model of discipleship that is presented in a contextually appropriate manner… What really matters is seizing the God-given opportunity we have to reach kids in schools. Without Jesus, our students are lost.

Our churches in the West are on a slow death march. We have the opportunity to create life. It may be uncomfortable but so what? What a commandment, make disciples. What a responsibility. What a privilege we have been given.

Let’s go for it.

Evonne Paddison is a clear and present danger to the psychological health of Victorian children. ACCESS ministries can be viewed as nothing less than a malignant and corrosive presence in our education system.

Peter Garrett must be proud that he is the rock on which this exploitation is being built.

Frankstongate: Declan Stephenson intimidates female Greens voter

Posted in climate change, Denialism by

As Tony Abbott pushed his vengeful NeoCon apocalyptic anti-carbon tax hatred at Frankston on July 13th, he, his attendant minions and assorted flying monkey’s were suitably wound up by Greens member Vicky Kasidis. Vicky announced, rather politely, to The Church of Denial, that she was in favour of the tax.

Then Vicky plunged the Green Dagger into the Black Heart of the party faithful. She admitted that her tea cosy hat, rainbow coloured scarf, imitation carpet bag and sweeping sorceress’ coat weren’t just for show. Nay! Vicky had actually been to the Other Side. She’d voted Greens! Vicky was heckled by the evidence denying crowd who, lost in their monochrome world, had never seen a critical thinker in real life. Being a former militant leftist Vicky took this in her stride.

After the Abbott style “Evangelical Amway For Wreckers” had pumped his crowd into submitting to his idea of making up reality as you go, things got ugly for Vicky. As she was speaking to media, an apparently heavily pregnant – or perhaps pot-bellied – Liberal Party Flying Monkey, Declan Stephenson told Vicky to “get back under your rock”. Coming from the irksome lurker Stephenson himself, that comment alone was sheer gold. But it merely got better.

Stephenson is a long time Liberal party member in the Dunkley FEC. Dunkley covers the majority of the City of Frankston and part of the Shire of Mornington Peninsula. Not happy with just verbal abuse of the very polite Vicky – who was invited to attend, and had RSVP’d – Stephenson took his anti-democracy show on the road. Just prior to this it is rumoured Abbott’s Press Secretary was seen instructing members to “fly and bring me that girl” – apparently caught here on video.

The below footage is ample explanation of what occurred next. Using his belly like a battering ram, the malfunctioning Neocon flying monkey Stephenson, follows Vicky with perhaps the best example of dysfunctional and cowardly passive-aggressive intention I’ve witnessed for ages. Vicky ends up trapped between a power pole and a pot belly as the seemingly witless Stephenson self sabotages with a mix of arrogance, misogyny and thuggery.

Poor Declan. His pomposity is first rate. He appears convinced he has a right to bully a much smaller female. “It’s a free country, a free city, I live in Frankston, I’m prepared to walk around Frankston”. He surely must have lost his grasp on cognition, actually admitting he lives in Frankston?! Telling the media it’s “none of their business” what he’s up to, he refuses to move away at their urging. Vicky had clearly stated she felt intimidated.

One media member points this out. Getting in his face, Stephenson offers, “Why don’t you and the rest of your people leave her alone… then she won’t feel intimidated”. Asked if he treats women in his family this way, and told it’s appalling he answers Vicky, “That’s your opinion”. He maintains he’s not following her despite having followed her for some distance and indicating he would not leave even if the media did.

At one point Vicky says, “I wish for you to leave me alone”. He replies, “I don’t wish to”. He also urges Vicky to go to the train station – her stated intention. Hilarious given the member for Dunkley, Bruce Billson opined in Declan’s favour in parliament last September 30:

“It is important to acknowledge that team: Geoff Shaw, Robert Latimer, Declan Stephenson, …. just kept contributing day in and day out, whether it was at arctic dawns at railway stations through to the slog of letterboxing with a campaign that needed to be quite resourceful, given the funds available.”

Somehow I doubt this creepily resourceful flying monkey was intending to hand Vicky a brochure.

The Australian Vaccination Network: Meryl Dorey’s continued pertussis misinformation

Posted in Anti-Vaccination Lobby, Denialism, Health, Scam by

Last time we left The Australian Vaccination Network, or rather President Meryl Dorey, we’d had a close look at her use of unrelated data sets and the tendency to use two figures twenty years apart, to argue pertussis vaccination is not efficacious.

Four days later, an AVN member repeated the very same claim on the very same forum. Also, back on the day I posted Meryl had written an extraordinary attack on official health figures based upon the newspaper article, More testing finds more coughing. Dorey’s completely unreferenced and innuendo filled post is entitled 100 times increase in Whooping Cough – is it REALLY just more testing? 

The article quoted is quite sensible and accurate. Dorey’s feverish and misleading extrapolation can only be examined if one reads her entire diatribe then copies and pastes the news article link at the bottom into a browser. What sets her off is focusing on the first paragraph, whilst ignoring the second. The article opens with the observation that better testing has more to do with the outbreak in NSW than with drops in immunisation. Then continues in the second paragraph with [bold mine] “there was no doubt whooping cough increased in areas with low vaccination rates”, according to Professor Booy who is a professor of child health at Westmead Children’s Hospital.

Dorey uses the same leap in notifications from 1991 to today, ignoring the peaks and troughs of infection, smirking that the outbreak, “isn’t real – it’s just more testing”. Then a simple falsehood. “So the fact that we have gone from 300 cases in 1991 to more than 35,000 cases today is just a figment of our imagination…”. From 332 cases in 1991 we had 34,794 last year and as of “today” have 18,299. Source here. Then it’s classic Reductio Ad Persecutorum, the classic logical fallacy named after Meryl Dorey herself.

And the vilification of families who have chosen not to vaccinate by the media, the medical community and the government that has occurred over the last 2 years because of this non-existent epidemic…

There’s been no vilification. Facts are facts. The Reductio Ad Persecutorum we see is entirely down to denial of vaccine efficacy and germ theory. Dorey ignores here the effect on herd immunity in areas with low vaccination rates, and has now redefined the epidemic as “non-existent”. Astonishing. The Hon Nicola Roxon, Federal Minister for Health and Ageing released Protecting Bubs: Whooping Cough Epidemic on February 21st this year, including;

As the current whooping cough epidemic continues, Health and Ageing Minister Nicola Roxon has reminded parents to protect their children with vaccinations, which can begin six weeks after birth.

“All parents should take advantage of the free vaccines provided by the Australian Government to protect young children from whooping cough,” Ms Roxon said. “Babies can be protected with vaccinations at six to eight weeks after birth, then at four months, and then when they reach six months old.

“Vaccines worth about $86 million will be provided in 2010-2011––free of charge for infants, children and adolescents.

[…..]

“Babies are not fully protected until their third dose of the vaccine, so it is important for those around new babies to be free of infection.

Remember, Dorey’s continued demonstrably false argument is that high vaccination rates and increasing pertussis cases prove the pertussis vaccine is not efficacious. This, she argues, is supported by a corresponding rise in diagnoses and notifications. In her article she is clearly selecting the reality of more widespread testing and using it out of context. Her context is that reported effective wider testing is a ploy by the government to dodge the higher notifications of pertussis (and thus vaccine inefficacy). In reality, more widespread testing explains the rise in notifications over the past four years.

Nonetheless she states without any supporting references;

But be that as it may, the fact is that the government has declared an epidemic by their own figures and now, faced with the inconvenient fact (which we have been stating for years) that vaccination rates are at an all-time high, they are now trying to say that there was no epidemic in the first place -it’s only smoke and mirrors. Don’t count on our statistics -they’re only rubbery figures, after all.

Oh, and we haven’t actually seen an increase in pertussis deaths either because Professor Booy says that they were much higher ten years ago. In fact, there were NO deaths at all from pertussis for well over a decade prior to the deaths that occurred in 2009 – one of which was in a child too young to be vaccinated and the other 2 in older, partially-vaccinated infants. So again, don’t trust the government’s statistics because they seem to be either inaccurate or simply made up on the spot!

“Inconvenient fact… smoke and mirrors… rubbery figures… no deaths ‘for well over a decade prior to … 2009’… statistics made up on the spot”. Statistics Dorey uses to make her entire “failed vaccine” argument, I might add. That’s quite a tantrum to throw over one small news article that refers only to vaccination rates in NSW, whilst Dorey is using national figures. Professor Peter McIntyre in a Rapid Roundup article for the Australian science media centre written in September 2010, addresses both death rates and the most important factor in recent diagnostic increases: Local GP access to PCR testing;

“The problem with whooping cough is that it is hard to get a laboratory diagnosis that is definite and doctors may not order the relevant tests so it does tend to be under-recognised. Having said that, the availability of the PCR test (since about 2000 in hospitals but especially over the past two years at the GP level) has greatly increased the number of cases and hospitalisations being recognised.

There have been big national epidemics in 1996/7, in 2000/1 and most recently in 2008/9. In South Australia, where this death occurred, the epidemic was later than in many other parts of Australia and is still current.

Bearing this in mind, it is important to note that despite a very large increase in reported cases in the 2008/9 epidemic compared with 1996/7, there were a total of nine infant deaths in 1996/7 but there have been, with the most recent death in SA, a total of four deaths recognised in 2008-2010.

Meryl Dorey also makes some alarming and demonstrably false claims about the documented mutation in two strains of pertussis. Firstly she claims it’s the “elephant in the room” that the medical community almost never refers to. This nonsense is followed by arguing that the cause is overuse of pertussis vaccination, “much like overuse of antibiotics” led to decreased antibiotic effectiveness. Vaccination levels required for herd immunity and “overuse” of antibiotics are quite different issues however.

Dorey argues incorrectly that nobody seems to know if the vaccine is ineffective or less effective. So, she then makes up her own mind claiming without evidence that the mutated strain is more virulent and dangerous, thus leading to more deaths here and around the world. Then we get this stunner;

So not only is the pertussis shot not preventing vaccinated people from getting pertussis – it could also be responsible for the increased death rate.

So what is happening? There are several strains of circulating bordetella pertussis bacteria. In early 2010 researchers from the University of NSW school of biotechnology and biomolecular sciences discovered mutations in the two most common strains – MT27 and MT70. The whole cell pertussis vaccine contained hundreds of antigens providing widespread protection. It also correlated to more cases of irritability and fever. The acellular vaccine introduced in 2000 is highly tolerable with several variations. Each variation contains between three to five purified pertussis antigens.

This certainly makes it easier for any potential mutation to defeat vaccine induced immunity. Yet in the absence of conclusive data we can only be sure that some strains will have greater effect. Co-author of the study Associate Professor Ruiting Lan says the acellular vaccine might have contributed to the mutation. What we can say is that the pertussis vaccine may not be fully effective.

Professor Lyn Gilbert is a clinical microbiologist at the University of Sydney. She was involved in the study and notes that whilst bordetella pertussis may mutate to bypass herd immunity, bacteria can and do evolve spontaneously. Dr Nick Wood, from the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance has also noted that antibiotic use may have played a role in this bordetella pertussis mutation. Do note this is not the overuse of antibiotics leading to antibiotic resistance and super strains Meryl Dorey was alluding to. The World Today covered this back on February 11th, 2010 including both Professor Lyn Gilbert and Associate Professor Lan;

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A comprehensive US article in The Journal of The American Medical Association, Research Aims to Boost Pertussis Control quotes Fritz Mooi, PhD, senior scientist at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands. He suggests lowered efficacy and faster waning of immunity associated with the acellular vaccine isn’t a sufficient explanation, for the present outbreaks. He and his colleagues, “posit that this is occurring in response to selection pressure from the vaccine”. What’s quite bizarre is that Meryl Dorey posted this article on her Facebook page. It includes;

James Cherry, MD, a pediatrician at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, in Los Angeles, and one of the world’s leading experts on whooping cough, maintains that the increase in cases reflects greater awareness and improved recognition of the disease among clinicians as well as availability of better laboratory tests and greater access to them.

The one thing I don’t want to do here is to use Ms. Dorey’s misplaced confidence in blaming a pertussis mutation on “overuse” of vaccination, to convey a conclusive argument that B. pertussis strains MT27 and MT70 have not adapted to the acellular vaccine via mutation. This may well turn out to be the case, but it does not justify attacks on vaccination regimes or the vaccine. There have been mutations before through adaption of B. pertussis to the vaccine.

This was the case for The Netherlands outbreak in 1996. Ironically, Dorey has been referring to this outbreak for years as proof of general pertussis vaccine inefficacy. She has been most cautious to not admit or refer to the mutation in The Netherlands as this ran contrary to her claim that pertussis vaccination – both whole cell and acellular – was ineffective. Frankly it now beggars belief she has jumped on the band wagon only to use the situation in Australia to spread fear, rail at health departments, misinform and mislead further.

As I pointed out above, whilst Professor Booy is referring to sufficient levels of vaccination in NSW, Dorey has inexplicably launched an attack on Australia’s national figures. Less than a month before, a Herald Sun article reported AMA Victorian president Dr Harry Hemley as saying “immunisation in the community is tending to wane”.

Ultimately this is another hysterical and difficult to follow anti-vaccination rant from Meryl Dorey. She definitely wants to eat her cake and keep it also. In attempting this she meanders throughout the entire bakery emerging into the spotlight covered in flour and jam, with no more evidence than the odd crumb picked up accidentally along the way.

This Today Show clip on the pertussis epidemic offers good advice and disturbing figures.

Australian Vaccination Network 101

Posted in Anti-Vaccination Lobby, Denialism, Health by

Meryl Dorey of The Australian Vaccination Network says opposition to her operation is an attack on free speech. That claim however, is a simple ruse to divert attention from the reality of dangerous and illegal conduct.

A Mother’s Choice: The tragedy of the Australian (anti) Vaccination Network

HCCC Find AVN Risk Australian Health

AVN Lied To Members Over Charity Status

Poll Source

How The Australian Vaccination Network misleads Aussies on pertussis (whooping cough) vaccination

Posted in Anti-Vaccination Lobby, Denialism, Health by

She’s doing it again.

That’s all I could think when I saw the below lie published about noon by Meryl Dorey, on the Australian Vaccination Network‘s Facebook page.

Facebook post misileading about pertussis vaccine efficacyI do mean “lie” – not misunderstanding or difference in conclusion. Dorey’s had this pointed out to her countless times – as recently as last week. This was also dismissed in 2009 by the ABC, following a complaint as a breach of their editorial guidelines for fairness and accuracy in reporting. More so, she presents this sleight of hand with obfuscation of conflicting data sets published by the same government bodies and insists on cherry picking. To make the entire sorry matter patently ridiculous, a high school student would receive a dressing down if this “mistake” was honestly made. That’s because not only is Meryl Dorey hiding the truth about pertussis infection and the undoubted success of pertussis vaccine efficacy, she is using entirely unrelated data sets.

The pertussis notification data tells us zero about the vaccine status of the notified cases. By far the bulk are adults whose vaccine induced immunity has waned. Of the 18 standard recorded age categories, 16 are after the age at which immunity begins to wane. Nor does it inform us as to the location of initial infection. As a legally notifiable disease all cases diagnosed who are from an address within our borders must be reported.

This includes returning tourists, immigrants, refugees, Australian based shipping and flight crews, travel weary business men and women, and so on. Dorey’s attempted causal link is akin to saying people who hold a drivers licence are more likely to be involved at sometime in their lives in a road accident. The more licences issued in the last 20 years, the more accidents we see. Therefore the entire licensing process is either ineffective, causal or both.

Nonetheless it would be remiss of me not to address this trick for the benefit of those with confirmation bias. The burden is on Meryl Dorey to show a robust statistical association between the data she presents. She fails to do so, because it can’t be done. To be absolutely fair, let’s use Ms. Dorey’s selected data. In fact, let’s use the very data, tables and argument she submitted on September 9th, 2009 to the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission in response to a complaint about the AVN. Dorey writes on page 6;

Since the AVN was established, Australia has experienced an increase of over 23% in our rate of vaccination against whooping cough with a concurrent increase in the incidence of this disease of almost 40 times. Please refer to the Australian government graphs below:

Keep in mind, table 2 is above table 1. The 23% increase in pertussis vaccination “since the AVN was established” can be gleaned from these two tables [95.1% (Table 1) – 71.6% (Table 2 – 2001)].

In order to show that pertussis vaccination isnʼt effective, Ms. Dorey must compare vaccination status to diagnoses. Partially, fully or in need of a booster? And use a controlled single sample.

What we begin with is two separate cohorts, the lower table (1) being 2 year olds born in the first quarter of 2006, who received the trivalent Diptheria, tetanus, pertussis vaccine being fully assessed on June 30, 2008. The upper table (2) is of 0 – 6 year olds vaccinated with a monovalent (pertussis only) vaccine between 1989 and 2001.

Knowing full well that pertussis vaccination begins to wane at about age 10 years Dorey then chooses notification only (not age related) data between 1991 and 2009 – below, to secure her “40 fold increase”.

Straight off the Epic Fail factor leaps out. We cannot simply draw a line from childhood vaccination to notification in all age groups, and as I noted above from diverse backgrounds and travel habits. More so, had it been the year before, notification was less than a 17 fold increase from 1991. The two years preceding that show a 35 and 34 fold increase respectively.

In 1998 there was a 14.5 times increase from 1991. A year before was a 27.5 fold increase, whilst 1996 gives us an 11.6 fold increase – only 42% of 1997 notifications.

Clearly using even this non age related data set fails to show the claimed relation between steadily increasing vaccination and infection rates. It appears to show a regular rise and fall in infection.

Evidence of decreasing vaccination uptake and rising infection was causing significant concern in the eyes of Australian health authorities. This was clearly defined in the complaint to The HCCC. So Meryl Dorey offers another fallacy;

[Contrary to assertions] the current increase in the incidence of pertussis has nothing to do with any purported decline in the rate of vaccination. Instead, we are seeing an outbreak of pertussis despite a substantial increase in vaccination against it – an experience which is being duplicated in every country for which mass vaccination against this illness exists.

“… an experience which is being duplicated in every country for which mass vaccination against this illness exists”. Remember that. Dorey lists two references to supposedly support this. I’ll soon be getting on to how she plagiarised a WHO document graph cropping out explanatory text to replace with her own, and severely misrepresented the Netherlands pertussis outbreak. Both publications strenuously support pertussis vaccination and yes, these were the documents referenced in support of that bald faced lie.

A claim of direct causation to the vaccination regimes requires ignorance about herd immunity, pertussis strains, acellular vs live cell vaccines, periodic outbreaks or epidemics, and vaccinated vs non-vaccinated infection rates during outbreaks. Outbreaks do occur effecting unvaccinated and vaccinated children under 10 – 15 notably, whilst adults with no immunity don’t usually exhibit the classic symptoms. Certainly they are not at the risk of injury and death that infants and babies are.

But let’s look more closely at what Ms. Dorey has intentionally avoided. Age groups and the rise and fall of infection rates over the years.

From Communicable Diseases Intelligence, Vol. 32 No. 2, Figure 49 shows the rise and fall of pertussis in the ten years to 2006. Figure 50 just below it, shows notifications for 2006 by age and sex.

Zero to four years is higher than the next two age categories as it reflects the fact infants are not fully immunised until about 12 months.

We can clearly see this is a typical non outbreak year in which most cases are found in middle aged women. It’s a striking reminder that a pertussis booster is absolutely vital to protect newborn babies from infection as they are passed around family and friends or cared for by grandparents. This goes doubly for women.

Meryl Dorey was in damage control mode, trying to refute that the outbreak – now epidemic – that began in 2007 – 2008 was related to declining uptake of vaccination and that certain pockets where vaccination was low presented a lethal threat to young children. This is why her trick linking notification and vaccination rates was, and still is, doing the rounds. In June 2009, three months before our self appointed guru submitted her HCCC reply, it was reported in the Journal of Pediatrics that children who didn’t receive the pertussis vaccine were 23 times more likely to catch pertussis. In 2010 the same journal reported fears over the vaccine were unfounded. What are we to make of Australia’s so-called “vaccination expert” using “sciencey” terms to convey the opposite of research published in prestigious journals that’s pertinent to exactly the topic she claims authority on?

Notification rate for pertussis by age & sex for 2008

Dorey would have done better to stick to the facts, than to defend anti-vaccination pseudoscience and hide the high levels of infection in children.

Whilst there is strong data showing higher rates of infection in areas of low vaccination, overall Australian data showed a nation wide outbreak that we now know that has culminated in disability and death in most states.

This is the tragic irony to this ongoing and oft’ debunked abuse of her readers and members intelligence. Check that 2006 graph above again and compare to the 2008 data reflecting an outbreak on the left, from Communicable Diseases Intelligence, Vol. 34 No. 3.

Horrifically, in two years there’d been over a 6 fold increase for females and almost a 5 fold increase for males 0-4 years old. Roughly a 10 fold increase in 4-9 year olds and over a 6 fold increase for 10-15 year old children. Through all this Meryl Dorey failed to advise parents on how to protect their own and others children. Incredibly she had access to this crucial data through the very National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System she used to create her original sleight of hand above. Here is the 2009 table of pertussis notifications by age and sex.

She continued to urge against pertussis vaccination, plying her members with bizarre pseudoscience and fear mongering, going as far as claiming vaccines are filled with poisons and cause cancer. This was a key element in her roving seminars as seen here in slides one, two, three and four. Denying pertussis infection was anything to be concerned about, her advice was and is to proactively catch it to build “natural immunity” and that it can “be treated homeopathically”.

Dorey refuses to admit she and the AVN (which is in fact one and the same) are anti-vaccination. Although it beggars belief that she would support what she has called “instruments of death”. The mantra is that “they” are for informed choice and provide information parents would not otherwise access, to assist in making a choice on vaccination. Why would parents not otherwise have access to it? Well for one, as we’ve seen here it is manufactured and fallacious. To refute Dorey’s claims with proper evidence however, is to be “suppressing free speech”.

Ironically, I can’t post this on Dorey’s Facebook page because I’ve been banned and had all my other posts deleted. I see this happen regularly to anyone who doesn’t march in goosestep anti-medicine fervor. Free speech was it? We’re all entitled to our own opinions but the assumed right to manufacture ones own “facts” to the large scale detriment of community health is beyond the boundary of free speech.

Be extremely wary of online sources that use grandiose titles reflecting a “national” vaccination service, an “information network”, “total” family health or particularly offering “the truth” or what you won’t be told elsewhere.

Please seek reputable advice on vaccination. Speak to your doctor or a conventional medical professional.

Update: July 8th. In a standard example of how misinformation is spread to misinformed members of the public, an AVN member at about 11am July 8th, posted the below item. It provides a link directly to the same page Meryl Dorey provided on July 4th. What makes this entire charade more absurd is that the URL leads to the NNDSS index – not the Pertussis notification table it is taken from. Our vaccine expert and Co. have so little experience with this data that simple navigation through the site is defeating them. Another high school failure.