Many of you will know of Meryl Dorey’s infamous claim that one didn’t die from whooping cough or measles thirty years ago.
Followed by, “and you’re not going to die from it today”. This was made on an episode of Sunday Night on the 7 Network in April 2009. Recently Ms. Dorey was queried about evidence for this. Rather boldly her response (in full below) included:
This statement was one of 3 or 4 sentences I was allowed in an interview that ran for over 3 1/2 hours and out of which, the TV station took what they could use against me and left out the rest.
Dorey had immediately prior contended that her mother intentionally placed her with other children so she would catch vaccine preventable diseases. “We were supposed to get them and we did and we were healthier for them”.
First, let’s revisit the 26 seconds in question.
Actually there may be some truth to Dorey’s observation of no fatality from pertussis “thirty years ago”. The probable cause? Mass vaccination.
Whooping cough used to be a disease that everyone got as kids, says Dr Frank Beard, acting senior director of Queensland Health’s Communicable Diseases Branch.
However, numbers plummeted following the introduction of mass vaccination in the 1950s. Cases fell to an all time low in the 1970s and 1980s…
As it turns out I’ve already examined much of Ms. Dorey’s sleight of hand pertaining to pertussis this way.
In My personal request of Meryl Dorey, back in January I break down her method of using notification data out of context. I did ask for a response but found myself banned and blocked from social media. No emails were answered.
Here’s a relevant section:
Okay, let’s use your method on another year.
We can see (using the same NNDSS data) that 2007 was the lowest year of infection on record since 1999 – http://i.imgur.com/XOrUY.png. It is also the 5th lowest year since records began.
Many discount the first recording years of 1991 and 1992 as very, very low anomalies that show a slowish start to new legislation requiring reporting of whooping cough. This would make 2007 the 3rd lowest ever. But I’m happy to take the 5th lowest year ever.
Rather different to your claim, no? But from your data source no less.
Now, looking again at your vaccination rate table (http://i.imgur.com/w9I9g.jpg) we see 2001 had only 70.6% vaccination. Infection was 9,541 Aussies. By 2007 – still using both your data tables we see 95% vaccination of babies and 4,864 cases of pertussis (http://i.imgur.com/XOrUY.png).
So, using your “technique” on merely another part of the same NNDSS table we can also claim vaccination more than halved pertussis notifications in a mere 6 years.
Your data, your method, the very same tables you quote from. Why then is this not your message? Why don’t you tell Aussies that these sources show a greater than 50% drop in whooping cough in just 6 years?
So, for the sake of this post Meryl has had that request for evidence of her claim about mass vaccination, long since shown to be the abuse of data that it is. Read the full breakdown for greater context.
Back to the comments. The poster chose to dig in and it seems seek an admission no evidence exists. The exchange is as follows.
Yes. I could ask the same Ms Dorey.
In fact along with the high diagnoses, fatalities are less than during the 1997 and 2002 outbreaks whilst hospitalisations are about the same. The alarming numbers of notifications reflect the sensitivity of PCR testing (now widely available) and the tendency of GPs to suspect pertussis.
However another question has come to mind. If the producers of Sunday Night in April 2009 edited footage they “could use against [Meryl]”, does this apply to her other comment? The one about pertussis being “nothing worse than a bad cough”. In her household it apparently lasted two weeks and was treated with homeopathy.
I wonder if this is down to those shifty producers also. Using material “against” Meryl Dorey.
An excellent review of the preventative impact on liver cancer provided by the full sequence of the Hepatitis B vaccine schedule. Includes a thorough deconstruction of the disinformation frequently pushed by Australia’s Anti-Vaccination Network that the vaccine is ineffective in this regard or (no surprise) is the “cause” of increasing hepatitis B infection.
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The comment cited below;
…however just last night Dorey posted the following comment on the AVN page:
The chart cited below;
Right now I’m going to focus on the claim of increasing liver cancer rates thanks to Hep B vaccination.
One of the commentors over on the Australian Anti-Vaccination Network’s facebook page challenged the group’s president – Meryl Dorey – to comment on a hypothetical scenario as a way of discussing the utility of vaccination against Hepatitis B (Hep B). A conversation ensued and commentor’s question was never answered, however just last night Dorey posted the following comment on the AVN page:
…with this chart of liver cancer incidence in the United Kingdom:
Right now I’m going to focus on the claim of increasing liver cancer rates thanks to Hep B vaccination.
But first the rationale behind using the Hep B vaccine to prevent liver cancer:
Hepatitis B is a virus that chronically infects liver cells.
This chronic infection naturally leads to prolonged inflammation.
A continual inflammatory state is conducive to cancer formation.
(The virus also seems to be able to integrate its DNA into host cells to cause…
A radical conspiracy theorist who once reasoned infant and childhood mortality was a necessary price to prevent fictional “genetic deterioration” she blames on vaccines, has added up to 200 Australian women per year to her body count.
University of Wollongong student Judy Wilyman responded to the release of a Victorian Cancer Council advertisement (below) by republishing misleading information about HPV, and the HPV vaccine Gardasil as part of her ongoing anti-vaccination campaign. The advertisement targets cervical cancer and the importance of pap smears. Judy is unhappy that the Council correctly observe that women “only need to have sex once to risk cervical cancer”. Wilyman writes [emphasis hers]:
This statement is not reflective of the risk of cervical cancer. The majority of women in Australia are not at risk of cervical cancer even if they are infected with HPV 16 and 18.
Yes, cervical cancer makes up only 1.6% of cancers that Aussie women face, leading to about 750 diagnoses annually. The main cause of cervical cancer is HPV – human papillomavirus. Genotypes 16 and 18 are responsible for most cases of cervical cancer. As late as 2007 mortality from cervical cancer was 1.9 per 100,000. Looking at ABS population figures for 2007 this translates to something like 200 women and teens – minus young females.
Wilyman plays semantics with the reality that HPV 16 or 18 “rarely” progresses to cancer. I accept this is important and comforting knowledge. Just as I know road users will “rarely” drive into telegraph poles or be “rarely” hit with severe force from behind. Wilyman then lists what is in the Gardasil vaccine in a typical attempt to scare.
Whilst there’s a lot to pick fault with in both the article and the so-called fact sheet, what I found compelling is the insouciance with which Judy Wilyman regards the death of others. Deaths that can be prevented by vaccine and are thus accepted collateral damage in her war against this aspect of public health.
Using the figures above we can see that 53% of cervical cancer cases are terminal. Put another way a woman may need only have sex once to have about a 50/50 chance of dying from cervical cancer. This would be notably rare. Yet it would also be vastly more probable than the one in a million chance of anaphylactic shock or severe reaction following MMR that Wilyman presents as a near certainty. It would be incalculably more likely than the never substantiated deaths from vaccination.
It seems Judy Wilyman can understand risk-benefit when it suits her. She writes:
HPV 16/18 is a common infection in women in all countries but 90% of infections do not progress to warts or cervical cancer
In 2004, before the vaccine was introduced, the death rate from cervical cancer in Australia was 1.9/100,000 women. This represents a very low risk to Australian women
It’s just too bad if you’re in the 10% or one of the 200 Aussie women to develop cervical cancer each year. But this isn’t Wilymans only stint at suggesting death should take precedence over vaccination.
At an Australian Vaccination Network seminar at the W.A. State Library in mid 2010, Wilyman told the audience that “it is known” that vaccines switch on otherwise dormant genes. “This is called predisposition to disease”, Wilyman continued without providing evidence. “Things like autism, diabetes and asthma”.
This has been refuted in reproduced studies across the globe. The Australian Immunisation Handbook lists these three conditions along with SIDS, inflammatory bowel disease and MS as conditions in which “research has constantly replicated no link”. Wilyman, who wrote to Australia’s federal health minister in November 2011 contending incentives to immunise are a “crime against humanity”, defends this falsehood with two criteria.
Firstly she conveniently dismisses scientific consensus and reputable government backed advice as part of a “conflict of interest” conspiracy driven by profit. This includes the media for publishing reports of fatalities from vaccine preventable disease and even the parents of deceased infants. The practice of accusing grieving parents of being paid to promote vaccination or even to not blame vaccination as the cause of their child’s death is common within the AVN. Despite public claims to the contrary it is a practice sanctioned by AVN president, Meryl Dorey.
The second criteria Wilyman exploits is the misrepresentation that environmental factors that may influence DNA include vaccines. Wilyman asserts vaccine components have “synergistic, cumulative and latent effects” on both health and DNA. Well aware that components are not present at toxic levels, Wilyman set out to scare her W.A. audience:
Your doctor will say “oh yes but they’re only in trace amounts”. I say to you, what is a trace amount? How much is a trace amount? It sounds minute, it sounds small but it’s all relative. And I’ll say to you, what is a safe level of a safe amount of a trace amount in an infant? How does a trace amount of mercury combined with a trace amount of aluminium adjuvant react in an infants body? They don’t know. It is counterintuitive to suggest adding toxins to infant’s bodies makes them healthier. It doesn’t make them healthier. Black is not white.
Wilyman then goes on to misrepresent a 60 year old quote from Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet. Burnet notes that infant and childhood mortality is (to be blunt) a way in which seriously defective genes are removed from the gene pool. He observes that preventative and curative medicine may have an impact on this. Wilyman quotes Sir Frank:
In future years we may have some hard thinking to do. It may be that we will have to realise that mortality in infancy and childhood in the past has been the necessary price that had to be paid to prevent genetic deterioration and that some of our modern successes in preventative and curative medicine, may on the longest view be against the best interests of the state.
A rather challenging ethical and moral dilemma to ponder indeed. Fortunately in the sixty years since Burnet apparently made that statement the science of genetics, modern medicine and our grasp of what it means to be human have marched forward. So much so that we now seek to enrich developing nations with the same advances that have dramatically improved our lives.
We cannot ignore either that modern successes of that time are now long passed. We’ve pursued and realised preventative and curative medicine Burnet could only have dreamed of. Today the hard thinking we have to do surrounds our potential to select genetic perfection.
Yet Wilyman is either so deluded as to see what isn’t there or so deceptive as to bend its meaning to suit her own fantasy. I strongly suspect the first. Whilst Burnet’s comment can be seen in proper context, there’s no doubt Wilyman selected that passage to convey that vaccines inflict such “synergistic, cumulative and latent effects… epidemics of genetic diseases“, that it’s time to realise infant and childhood mortality is arguably a necessary price.
“Today”, she offered publically, the “overall health of children in the 21st century would appear to be supporting Burnet’s prophecy”. Genes, the environment (vaccines) and timing “interact together in the occurrence of disease.”
The intellectual paucity of her so-called reasoning is truly stunning. There is absolutely no evidence that “the chemicals” in vaccines are deleteriously effecting children’s health so as to be placing our genome at risk of deterioration. That the research Wilyman wants to see is deemed unnecessary by experts, does not by default validate her wild speculation.
This is a fiction of her own making. The scale of paranoia and delusion driving her belief in conspiracy has already made way for the callous abuse of others and a career of deception. That the lives of innocent women and seemingly infants and children rate lower than adherence to an ideology is perhaps not surprising.
Judy Wilyman is supposedly “researching” to complete a PhD under the auspices of anti-vaccine academic, Brian Martin. To date no actual research has been produced.
One hopes the University of Wollongong will ultimately address this matter ethically.
Losing In The Lucky Country 