Tag Archives: pertussis

Debunking Viera Scheibner on Sunrise

Posted in Anti-Vaccination Lobby, Denialism, Health, Immunisation, Media by

In 1985 a micropalaeontologist who had emigrated from Slovakia to Australia in 1968 was testing the breathing patterns of babies recently vaccinated with DTP.

Using an infant breathing monitor invented by her late husband the geological surveyor with NSW Department of Mineral Resources claimed to have witnessed “stressed breathing”. With this one unconfirmed assertation the woman, Viera Scheibner, went on to claim she had discovered the cause of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. She attempted to alert the scientific community to this Nobel Prize worthy “discovery”.

The claim – having none of the specifics of established scientific inquiry – was dismissed. Thus began the long career of arguable revenge that has driven Viera Scheibner to not only blame vaccines for almost all physical ills but to claim her conclusions come from the very literature source whose authors spurned her “discovery”. Claiming vaccines cause AIDS, asthma, immune suppression, Legionnaires, SIDS, Shaken Baby Syndrome, indeed all infectious disease, Scheibner insists “orthodox medical research” shows this. Disease conversely is “good”.

Scheibner is a role model to Meryl Dorey of The Australian Vaccination Network. However Viera clearly tries to fool Australians. In her book she writes that when Japan moved vaccination age from under 12 months to 2 years the incidence of SIDS “virtually disappeared”. In fact she had sourced her figures from vaccination compensation. In Japan SIDS is only diagnosed in infants under 12 months. Thus SIDS had not disappeared, only the opportunity to link it to vaccination compensation.

Despite claiming that Sweden abandoned pertussis vaccination due to a loss of trust, Scheibner forgets to recount the immediate rise in pertussis cases and their research effort into new pertussis vaccines. Nor does she recount how Sweden resumed pertussis vaccination to great success. She continues to insist vaccines have done nothing more than “sensitise” human beings to viral infection despite dissenting data and massive drops in disease. Scheibner also denies smallpox was eradicated.

This video refutes the claims she recently made on Channel 7’s Sunrise program in Australia.

Viera Scheibner on Sunrise

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

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

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”.

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.

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.