Of Chiropractors and Cockypop

Posted in Big Placebo, Chiropractic, Health, Scam by Paul Gallagher

Of course we don’t support vaccination, it’s the biggest medical sham since bloodletting!

Written defiantly on the Australian (anti) Vaccination Network Facebook wall by Jason Parkes, Chiropractor.

Jason’s defiance was in response to the July 27th article, Doctors accuse chiropractors of selling anti-vaccination message. It’s not only chilling in it’s partisan arrogance and ignorance but speaks of a discipline that is unprofessional in the extreme and polluted by an “anything goes” mentality. His musing sits, splendidly, somewhere between Meryl Dorey’s accusation that those who question unproven expensive “therapy” are the “ignorant, anti-choice mob”, and likening herself to Abraham Lincoln and Doug Gwyn on the matter of Truth.

Did Parkes face any professional criticism, perhaps from senior members or his employers at Boambee Chiropractic? Was he contacted by the Chiropractors’ Association of Australia and chastised over the inherent danger and risk to public health in his claim or threatened with disciplinary action? The type of discipline that actual doctors, individually accountable for their actions would face? Did vaccine scaremonger chiropractors such as Nimrod Weiner and Warren Sipser who rely on a veneer of credibility ask him to reconsider?

I don’t really know but as of a few seconds ago his comment remains. And yes, that is Meryl Dorey with a straight face accusing someone of being “shockingly unprofessional”, for quoting a chiropractor on informed choice;

Interestingly, the article included;

The CAA’s research arm, the Spinal Research Foundation recently invited Meryl Dorey from the AVN as guest speaker at a conference in Brisbane.

“I spoke with some third-generation chiropractors whose parents and grandparents were pioneers of this healing art in Australia,” she wrote on her site.

“Many of them are completely unvaccinated and they just glowed … They are the best advertisement for chiropractic and natural health you could possibly get.”

The AMA called on Federal Health Minister to review Medicare payments to chiropractors who supported the anti-vaccination lobby. A spokesperson for Nicola Roxon said chiropractors must adhere to their Code of Conduct, which includes clear directions on promoting public health through prevention and separating personal views from patient care.

So, we’re paying for Earth Mama Moonbeam & Co. to gaze at the navel, conjuring up new ways to pocket fees. The Chiropractors’ Association of Australia claim to not have an official position on vaccination. This is simply not true. Chiropractic today, infiltrated by new age quacks seeks above all, to profit. In this light recommending vaccination breaches their cardinal goal in that it would effectively divert patients toward one of the Arch Nemesi – the medical profession.

Indeed any evidence based health profession is fair game in chiropractic scamming. The CAA’s unspoken position on vaccination is to cast as much doubt on it’s safety and efficacy as possible whilst simultaneously exploiting uncertainty by offering to do the impossible. To improve immunity by chiropractic diddlie dee so that patients won’t need vaccination.

Added to this are creatures like Weiner and Sipser. Warren Sipser tripped over his ego and became the subject of the piece The Chiro Kids in The Australian. Already well known for selling his services as an “expert witness” against the necessity of vaccines, he blundered yet again into the real world and damned himself by his own words and actions. Claiming to cure colds, ear infections, colic, bed-wetting, hyperactivity, asthma Sipser produced the globally debunked journal articles on DNA repair and optimisation of the immune system which makes vaccination unnecessary. This is based on the hokus pokus of their 19th century founder – a magnetic healer – who believed in God given energy flows.

Although the article gave a fair and balanced report on arguments for and against the new age sham, the CAA were consequently rather unhappy about individual practitioners speaking to the media. Much like Dorey’s tantrum above suggests, when it’s actually written down in context it is patently absurd.

Despite having zero qualifications in immunology or medicine, Nimrod Weiner from Newtown Community Chiropractic runs public “seminars”, that he advertises via the Australian Vaccination Network called Vaccinations: An informed choice

Despite the de-registration of Andrew Wakefield for his fraudulent work attempting to link autism to the MMR vaccine, the removal of his paper from The Lancet and careful exposure of how he was to benefit financially from his scam, Weiner admires him. Despite the fact this gastroenterologist lodged a patent claim for a monovalent vaccine well before attacking the trivalent vaccine, Weiner refers to Wakefield as “an autism expert”. A board member of Australian Spinal Research Foundation, and the Chiropractic Association of Australia (NSW), Weiner’s rather predatory conduct is a black mark against his entire discipline.

Weiner’s full presentation is here for those interested. Dr. Rachael Dunlop has written an extensive deconstruction which I highly recommend, of a Nimrod Weiner seminar that she attended. His product is doubt. The more he sells the better for God given energy flows. You can get an idea of Weiner’s Nimroddery from this slide;

Yesterday The Medical Observer published Chiropractors under fire for dubious health claims. It noted that the AMA had called upon the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency – AHPRA seeking “urgent action to rein in fringe elements within the chiropractic profession relating to various unsubstantiated claims about their treatments.” The article continued;

AMA president Dr Steve Hambleton said he understood a high number of complaints had also been lodged with AHPRA over claims made by some chiropractors that they could cure diseases by correcting subluxations in the spine. The demands for closer scrutiny of chiropractors have come amid media reports claiming some chiropractors were advising parents against childhood immunisation. […..]

“Claiming you can fix a patient’s genes or that their children don’t need to be vaccinated is dangerous,” said Dr Hambleton. “We need to make sure that if you are a registered practitioner, the claims you make have a scientific basis.” Chiropractors’ Association of Australia president Simon Floreani said many people “perceived chiropractors as ‘back-crackers’ only, but we really want to be at the primary care level”. He described Dr Hambleton’s comments as “ill-informed”.

University of NSW emeritus professor of medicine John Dwyer said while many chiropractors were skilled at physical therapy, he backed the AMA’s move, saying there were increasing numbers who accepted the “unscientific nonsense” that spine flexibility caused disease. Past president of the Chiropractors Registration Board of Victoria John Reggars said it was frustrating to see the good results chiropractors could achieve for musculoskeletal conditions overshadowed by the fundamentalist fringe.

Clearly the new woo has infiltrated the CAA and Simon Floreani can “want” all he desires. Until these peddlers of cockypop and belief systems can provide evidence supporting their presence “at the primary care level”, they remain a Clear and Present Danger to Critical Thought and proper health management. I find the intent to reciprocate with the wider health community is summed up well by this predetermined, close minded, sarcastic comment from chiropractor Rob Hutchings, another devotee to the twilight zone of the Australian Vaccination Network;

One wonders if the evidence we don’t bother to read includes Jeremy Youngblood’s death certificate and autopsy report.

Jeremy recently died of a massive stroke, cerebral oedema and pulmonary embolism with bronchopneumonia following a severed vertebral artery whilst undergoing a “routine” chiropractic manipulation.

Is this enough “primary care level” for you, Simon Floreani?

————————

Jeremy Youngblood’s death certificate in PDF.

2Aug2011

How Meryl Dorey plagiarised, cropped, edited then published a WHO graph on pertussis vaccination

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

Not that far back, we left Meryl Dorey and her dishonest inner circle $11,000 richer after scamming members to donate toward a non existent Generation Rescue advertisement on the non existent scam of “vaccine induced autism”. A favourite still of the Australian Vaccination Network.

This type of almost febrile exploitation and abuse of gullible parents was abruptly halted when Ken McLeod and others lodged two complaints with the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission. Presently Ms. Dorey is mid testimony in her Supreme Court case against the HCCC over their recommendation that she publish a warning on her web site.

We’ve also previously consulted Meryl Dorey’s reply to the HCCC specific to Mr. McLeod’s complaint, exposing demonstrable plagiarism and untruths about pertussis vaccination. Basically her line is that pertussis vaccination doesn’t work because increasing notifications (in all 18 age groups) have occurred with a rise in vaccination (in the youngest 2 of the 18 age groups).

This failure supposedly occurs across the globe where effective pertussis vaccination regimes exist, Dorey claims. On July 11th I published an article on another rambling attack on the pertussis vaccine in which Dorey claimed, “So not only is the pertussis shot not preventing vaccinated people from getting pertussis – it could also be responsible for the increased death rate.”

Returning to the HCCC reply we find one of my all time favourites. Meryl Dorey’s blatant editing of a WHO graph on pertussis vaccination, cutting out explanatory text favourable to the programme and popping in her own text to make it seem like the vaccine was leading to morbidity and mortality in babies under 12 months, “as indicated by the following graph”. The article in question is Global Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases – Chapter 2, Pertussis: by Arthur M Galazka and Susan E Robertson. Part of a lengthy 1995 submission on vaccine preventable disease by these authors to the European Journal of Epidemiology.

On page 7 of her reply to the HCCC Dorey submits;

The data spans 1951, 1975, 1991 and 1993. It looks compelling. The grey bars show pertussis cases before widespread use of pertussis vaccines, the black show cases after. In both Poland and The USA babies less than one year old show markedly greater infection than children from one year and above post vaccine introduction.

Yet, what do we know of vaccine induced immunity against pertussis? Newborns cannot begin vaccination until about 6 – 8 weeks of age and this varies across nations. It can take a full 12 months to complete the regime and to gain vaccine induced immunity. Indeed babies under 12 months are considered to be partially protected or not protected against pertussis. Children one year and up are considered fully protected.

In this light we can now see that the graph reflects the morbidity pattern changes we would expect after wide spread immunisation (black bars). A marked reduction in the age groups that are protected by vaccine and a comparatively higher infection rate in the under 12 month, unprotected age group. We also know that vaccine induced immunity begins to wane at about ten years. This is exactly what we see in the USA.

Fortunately, Meryl was kind enough to not crop out the names of authors the data was sourced from. Let’s seek out the original source, shall we? I say! What’s this on pages 34-35;

Now we can read the text that Dorey expunged prior to submission to the HCCC claiming, “In fact, many studies have indicated that rather than protecting young infants… routine mass vaccination can lead to an increase in pertussis”, in under 12 month old babies, “as indicated by the following graph”.

It actually reads;

The introduction of widespread immunization against pertussis has changed the pattern of the disease (Figure 2.1). Apart from a considerable reduction in the number of cases and abolishing the endemic pattern of the disease, there has been a clear change in the age distribution of pertussis morbidity.

Perhaps the sources of data confused Ms. Dorey. Perhaps she just completely missed any explanatory text. It’s not like a pertussis vaccine critic should read research on pertussis vaccination is it? Let’s check up on Gordon and Hood (1951), Adonaijlo (1975, 1993) and Farizo et al. (1991). Perhaps it’s all their fault. Ah, on the same page Galazka and Robertson continue in the very next paragraph.

The scope of these changes differs depending on the schedule of vaccine delivery and the coverage rates achieved. In Poland, for example, the most noticeable reduction of pertussis morbidity has been among children 1–4 years of age and the peak incidence has shifted to infants. Infants represented only 12 per cent of all pertussis cases in Poland 1973, compared with 49 per cent in 1993 (Adonajlo 1975, 1993).

In the United States of America during 1980–1989, children under one year of age accounted for nearly 50 per cent of all cases; the incidence rate among infants was nearly 10 times higher than that among children of 1–4 years of age, and more than one hundred times higher than that among adolescents or adults (Farizo et al. 1992).

On page 33 under Epidemiological Aspects – communicability we read [bold mine];

Pertussis is a highly communicable disease. It is likely that no one escapes pertussis in the absence of immunization. By the age of 16 years, almost 100 per cent of children have suffered an episode of pertussis but about 25 per cent of episodes are unrecognized (Thomas 1989). This has been demonstrated by data from epidemic investigations, studies of secondary spread within families, and serological surveys.

In pertussis epidemics, attack rates in unimmunized children are high, ranging between 11 per cent and 81 per cent depending on age (Table 2.1). The high degree of communicability has been repeatedly demonstrated by secondary attack rates of 70 to 100 per cent among susceptibles within families (Gordon & Hood 1951).

Try as you might, you will not find these authors attributing increased infection in under one year old babies to the vaccine itself. Their data on the graph is unambiguous. The jury is in. Meryl Dorey lied. On page 20 Galazka and Robertson write, under Impact of immunisation against pertussis [bold mine];

Immunization is the key to preventing pertussis. Whole cell pertussis vaccines, widely used in industrialized countries since the late 1950s and 1960s, and introduced in developing countries within the WHO Expanded Programme on Immunization in the 1970s and 1980s, are of proven efficacy.

Well, Meryl Dorey can angle this one any way she likes. The graph she sourced was literally surrounded with material reinforcing both the efficacy of pertussis vaccination and the dangers of not vaccinating. Pleading innocence is not an option. It is a clear and intentional breach of copyright, submission of fraudulent material to a government health body and rank plagiarism.

Business as usual one might argue.

Just for the record it might be worth noting the pertussis complications table Ms. Dorey also had access to in consulting this document. Pneumonia, seizures, encephalopathy. It beggars belief that she can refer to this disease as “just a bad cough”.

17Jul2011

How Meryl Dorey stole $12,000 from AVN members and/or donors

Posted in Anti-Vaccination Lobby, AVN, Health, Human Rights, Legal, Media, Meryl Dorey, Scam, Social Media by Paul Gallagher

Back in the days just before community members were forced to take a stand against the Australian Vaccination Network for their harassment and abuse of grieving parents, things were different. Having run almost unchecked as a largely law breaking enterprise their confidence and gall in scamming the public was at an all time high.

Yet the basis of Dorey’s urgent threats (directed at parents) of compulsory vaccination for toddlers never existed. Parent’s have never been forced to vaccinate children. The many alerts such as “Action Alert – compulsory H1N1 (swine flu) vaccination just around the corner” were all scams to scare members into giving the AVN money. Dorey’s claimed funding destinations never existed. The most famous is the Bounty Bags rort. Assisted by sisters Jane and Nicola Beeby, the scam was to take donations to “fund” AVN material in Bounty Bags maternity packages. The problem was the Bounty Bags company despised the AVN and had nothing to do with them. AVN did the same with Copeland Publishing and their Child magazine – an example of which we’ll see below.

The AVN knew no bounds. They had logo polo shirts, T-Shirts boasting Love Them, Protect Them, Never Inject Them, media appearances, glossy magazines resembling competence, craftily tipping uncertain parents further into a maelstrom of doubt. “Tell them they have aborted foetal cells in them”, Dorey was want to advise her minions. Anti-freeze, immortal cells used in production lead to cancer, crushed up monkey kidney, heavy metals, mercury, mercury, mercury. Dorey zipped from community hall to community hall running the same unsubstantiated claims with photos easily dated from the 1970’s. Horrific injuries blamed on every type of vaccination. For unsuspecting Aussies they were dark days indeed. To this day, not one “vaccine injury” has been backed by evidence or accepted by ADRAC.

Until of course, selfless volunteers followed through with the laws they had flaunted for so long. Eventually The NSW Health Care Complaints Commission found that the Australian Vaccination Network website:

provides information that is solely anti-vaccination
contains information that is incorrect and misleading
quotes selectively from research to suggest that vaccination may be dangerous.

And because of this, in their public warning about the AVN, “the Commission recommended to the AVN that it should include a statement in a prominent position on its website to the following effect”:

The AVN’s purpose is to provide information against vaccination, in order to balance what it believes is the substantial amount of pro-vaccination information available elsewhere.
The information provided by the AVN should not be read as medical advice.
The decision about whether or not to vaccinate should be made in consultation with a health care provider.

The AVN never complied, refuting the HCCC observation of being anti-vaccination, claiming that they are for “informed choice”. Bizarre given that academic Brian Martin writes in defence of their “dissenting” anti-vaccination stance. He echoes Meryl Dorey’s complaint that they are an essential whistle blower suffering suppression of free speech.

Below we’ll get a touch of the charity fraud. But reading the group emails of how they mocked legitimate charities associated with medical care was chilling. “I tell them I’m a charity”, boasted Dorey. Ultimately this scam fell apart. The Office of Liquor Gaming and Racing stepped in conducting an “audit that revealed breaches of charitable fundraising legislation”. From the Lismore Northern Star;

These included fundraising without authority, unauthorised expenditure and failure to keep proper records of expenditure. The AVN offices were searched by the OLGR recently and staff were interviewed.

Dorey lied at the time to the public and the OLGR – as I reveal below. Despite these serious offences she claimed that the OLGR found their donation box was the wrong size and;

…the OLGR had found several errors with the network’s bookkeeping system and some minor problems with the way in which fundraising income was accounted for… errors which any small, volunteer-run organisation can and does make…

So let’s examine one very clear example. Documented no less in their own archives – in their own words. Signed off in the applicable financial statement, no less. Orchestrated by Meryl Dorey and the Beeby sisters and the AVN committee I’d like to bring to your attention the admission and publication by The Australian Vaccination Network that they successfully raised at least $11,910 which was to fund an advertisement.

I believe the manner and timing in which the money was raised, the prompt closing of the donation window and subsequent failure to reference the fate of the $11,910 is significant. The source for this is archived editions of Living Wisdom, running from March 2nd, 2009 to June 25th, 2009. These archives may be found here.

I might stress at the outset that material in AVN archives of Living Wisdom is in dissonance to Meryl Dorey’s assertion to the OLGR that the AVN did not have access to auditors between July 2nd 2007 and June 2nd 2009, when it was without authorisation to fund raise. The February 2009 edition, under the heading The AVN needs your help, includes;

The AVN has now reached a crisis point and it’s up to you to decide whether or not we are able to continue to provide these services.
Our auditors have told us that they they have serious concerns about our financial status and our ability to continue as a viable entity…. Our debts are just over $50,000 – more than half of that co-signed for by Meryl Dorey personally…..

On October 16th, 2010 Mel McMillan wrote an article in The Lismore Northern Star entitled AVN seeking legal advice. It includes;

It is understood that between July 2, 2007 and June 2, last year (2009), the AVN was without authorisation to fundraise.
Ms Dorey admits this was true but claimed the OLGR was aware of the AVN’s fundraising status. ‘During this time we were unable to find an auditor,’ Ms Dorey said.
‘It took the AVN 12 months to find an auditor and then another year before the audit was conducted because the AVN was put at the bottom of the new auditor’s work pile’, Ms Dorey claims.

I believe this disparity suggesting a delay until mid 2010 in finding auditors, is quite pertinent. Either Ms. Dorey misled members, readers and donors or misled the OLGR. Which brings the next matter – the successful collection of $12,000 into stark consideration. The appeal began in the very next Living Wisdom publication on March 2nd 2009, 11 days after the published claim that AVN auditors had “serious concerns about [the AVN] as a viable entity”.

Regarding the advertisement, the March 2nd, 2009 edition sought donations from members totalling $53,000 by Monday March 9th, 2009. It suggested readership numbers meant a donation of $20 would suffice. The AVN had been in touch with Generation Rescue in the USA (they claimed citing no correspondence) and were “given permission” to run their USA focused advertisement in Australia. Donors could email judy@avn.org.au for internet banking or donate directly into:
Australian Vaccination Network Gift Fund Westpac BSB 032591 Account – 196282

Further ambiguity as to financial record management appears in the same issue under Your support is amazing! It is claimed that the call for $50,000 11 days earlier had allowed the AVN to “continue… for now”. It includes;

The AVN committee is in the process of working with our accountants in order to develop systems which will make our operations more sustainable. In the meantime, if there are any business mentors out there who would like to help us with advice, that would be very much appreciated.

A suspicious typing error led to Generation Rescue being referred to as Operation Rescue, and was corrected later the same day. Yet they’d just been in frequent contact with Generation Rescue, negotiating a deal…. hadn’t they? Four days later on March 6th, 2009 under Update on Fundraising for Autism Ad, the AVN’s Living Wisdom claims a total raised of $5,000.

By March 31st, 2009 the AVN Living Wisdom claims under What’s been happening? – Item 1 – that $7,000 of $53,000 has been raised. At this point the authors claim to have been seeking to; “Fund a full page ad in The Australian newspaper”. However, rather than a one off ad, they now seek;

“a full page ad in every edition of Copeland Publishing’s CHILD magazine…. This will cost $26,000 in total”.

Copeland Publishing do not accept or agree with AVN material. An advertisement claiming vaccines cause autism is factually absurd, deeply offensive, runs against the ethics and standing of Copeland and CHILD magazine, and would have lost them support and paying customers. The closest the AVN have come was a discussion online to have members flood GP offices and “sneak” anti-vaccination material into existing copies of CHILD magazine.

This attack was phase two in a 2010 revenge attack on Copeland for refusing to publish AVN propaganda, earlier reported in an “Action Alert” by Dorey herself, calling for letters to bombard Copeland Publishing. Later praised here. And still later praised as a “fantastic job”.

The next mention of the fund raising drive is in Living Wisdom, June 14th, 2009 [incorrectly headed “July 2009”] under Two weeks left – please don’t let this effort go to waste! They write (again with no citation of Generation Rescue);

We need to raise $23,000 in total and if we get 2/3 of the money, the American organisation, Generation Rescue, will give us the other 1/3. So far, we have raised $7,000 and we need to raise another $8,000 before Generation Rescue will give us the rest. I feel that we have given it a really good go, but it’s time to say there needs to be a time limit.

We cannot get the media to cover this issue from our side at all. They still insist that there is no evidence that children are becomming autistic as a result of vaccination. We know this is not the case. The US vaccine court knows this is not the case. But the average Australian mum and dad still has no idea. It is vital that we get this information out there. It will blow the roof off of the claims by our government, our medical community and others who want to continue the cover-up of this issue.

Please, if you have not already donated towards this cause (please click here [Ed: no longer functioning] to read more about this effort and to see a copy of the ad), do so today. If you can, forward this letter (using the link below) to your friends, family, workmates or anyone else who has an interest in child health.

Today, is Monday, June 15th. We will give it until Monday, June 29th to raise the rest of these funds. Your help and support are very much appreciated.

Oh, one other VERY IMPORTANT thing. When you make your donation via our website, please use this link [archive] so we will know to direct your donation towards this fundraising appeal? It is for a $20 donation. If you want to donate more, just change the quantity (in other words, if you want to donate $100, just change the quantity to 5 and that will be 5 X $20 or $100 in total).

A fund raising closure date of June 29th is now set.
The bank deposit account details change to;
Westpac Account Account name – Australian Vaccination Network, Incorporated BSB – 032 591 Account Number – 188223

At this point the total sought is $15,000 – $7,000 raised plus $8,000 needed. On June 25th – 11 days later – an additional $4,000 is reported, bringing the total raised to $11,000. They write in Living Wisdom;

We are entering the home stretch folks. On June 14th in our last e- newsletter, I put out an appeal for the final $8,000 needed to get our ad regarding the connection between autism and vaccination into all of the Copland Publishing magazines (Sydney’s Child, Melbourne’s Child, etc.). We have raised about 1/2 of that $8,000 but, like the saying goes (sort of!), you can’t be a little bit pregnant or a little bit dead. $4,000 won’t get the ad in these publications – we need another $4,000 and we only have 3 days to get it.

Based on the last receipt of $4,000 in 11 days, or indeed the initial $5,000 in four days, if the fund raising was extended for a short time past the final 3 days, the $15,000 sought may have been achieved. The outcome of this fundraising attempt or the promised advertisement is not noted again. According to the OLGR it reached $11,910.

No mention is made of monies raised over the final three days in which donations would have continued coming in – perhaps the $4,000 sought. Nor indeed was there any mention of whether the AVN itself could contribute with the help of accountants the AVN claimed were making “our operations more sustainable”.

Donations appear to have been made, or at least called for, into two separate Westpac accounts. The AVN Gift Fund and The AVN Incorporated. No mention of trust account deposits is presented to members. Monies raised in this manner are legally bound to be placed in trust accounts and members notified.

The $11,000 is not mentioned again in subsequent Living Wisdom editions. The only reference to money (two weeks later) are calls to buy tickets to seminars, sign up for membership or subscribe to Living Wisdom. The at least $11,000 is by their own admission, in AVN hands. Money raised immediately after a separate appeal for $50,000 to keep the organisation afloat. After financial auditing found “serious concerns about [the AVN] as a viable entity”. The latter being acknowledged again on March 2nd, 2009.

Of course I informed the OLGR of how this “minor problem with how fundraising was accounted for”, by Dorey and most likely the Beeby’s. Both Meryl Dorey’s and Jane Beeby’s signature’s are on the annual financial statement covering this period. Again, in their own words they damn themselves. The question must be asked: Was there ever a real appeal to fund an advertisement? Or was it a ploy targetting readers touched by autism? The average Australian mum and dad still has no idea. It was a government and media cover up.

The evidence is overwhelming. The money appears as good as stolen. Dorey denies accountability to the OLGR, claiming their motivation to act is derived from the HCCC whose motivation was derived from “forces” intent on suppressing their civil rights. To point out these scams is according to Dorey and the likes of Dr. Brian Martin, suppressing their right to free speech.

I’m afraid I beg to differ.

On October 18th, 2010 the NSW Office of Liquor Gaming and Racing wrote to Mr. Ken McLeod in response to his many complaints about AVN breaches of the charitable fund raising act 1991. It included, along with 17 confirmed breaches of the Act:

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: [….]

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.

Two days later the Minister for Liquor, Gaming and Racing revoked the fundraising authority held by the AVN.

11Jul2011

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

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

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;

/%20

Download Audio

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.

7Jul2011

Australian Vaccination Network 101

Posted in Anti-Vaccination Lobby, Denialism, Health by Paul Gallagher

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.