So-called “research” in anti No Jab, No Pay submissions

Posted in Anti-Vaccination Lobby, General, Health, Human Rights, Legal, Science by Paul Gallagher

A casual review of anti-vaccine submissions pertaining to the Social Services Legislation Amendment (No Jab, No Pay) Bill 2015, reveals a striking repetition of unsubstantiated or demonstrably false claims, mixed with more of the misguided beliefs that have brought Australia to this point in the first place.

The most prominent theme backed by deceptive pseudoscience or distortion of genuine science is that vaccines are harmful. More so they are either not needed due to the wonders of modern snake oil or have never had the dramatic impact on the scourge of vaccine preventable diseases, that they have indeed irrefutably had. Vaccines are however, capable of causing the diseases the public is deceived into believing they prevent, and go on to enable their spread.

A while back I touched on the triumphant antivaccinationist claim of “having done my research”. I suggested a lack of critical thinking and cognitive bias left a great deal of these “researchers” incapable of discerning reputable source material from nonsense. That the unwary reader is presented with huge volumes of championed material, yet lacks the rather vital tools of cognition to identify and trust the genuine expert. This is a fast track to accepting opinion (or worse) as fact.

Tim Harding tackles this problem in more depth and with far more care than I, in his article How Dr Google spawned a new breed of health ‘experts’. Harding identifies key elements contributing to this phenomenon. Under the heading Misunderstanding democracy, he writes;

Reducing the influence of experts is sometimes mistakenly described as “the democratisation of ideas”. Democracy is a system of government — it is not an equality of opinions.

While the right of free speech prevents governments from suppressing opinions, it does not require citizens to treat all opinions equally or even take them into account. Equal rights do not result in equal knowledge and skills.

[…]

Deakin University philosopher Dr Patrick Stokes has argued the problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that it has become shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” without justification; and that disagreement is somehow disrespectful.

Dr Stokes suggests that this attitude feeds into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.

The truth and import of Dr. Stokes’ observation of false equivalence between experts and non-experts is a reality I feel we should readily accept. Skeptics and science advocates have experienced and will continue to experience such when it comes to the anti-vaccination lobby.

In recent weeks this lobby has accused its critics of being worse than Nazis. They have launched a concerted attack against the families and grieving parents of infants lost to pertussis. They have produced memes likening vaccination to rape – and defended criticism of this. Whilst less insulting but no less ludicrous they’ve insisted democracy in Australia is dead.

Yet they never doubted their democratic right to swamp the No Jab, No Pay Social Services Amendment process with submissions accommodating a host of patently ridiculous, fallacious and time wasting material.

Some don’t know they are parroting nonsense. Meryl Dorey’s old trick attacking pertussis vaccine efficacy pops up here and there. 1991 was the first year for compulsory notification of pertussis cases, which were recorded by the National Notifiable Surveillance Diseases System. 1991 was a different time. Not all health professionals were logistically prepared to diagnose, much less report pertussis cases. Sensitivity of diagnostic equipment was magnitudes less than today. This was five years prior to the Immunise Australia campaign, launched by Michael Wooldridge.

So the deception runs that in 1991 with only around 71% of 0-6 year olds vaccinated, there were only (according to one submission) 347 cases. In fact there were only that many cases reported. NNSDS pertussis figures for 1991 still creep up at about five per year. 1991 notifications in 2012 are 332. This year to date: 345. The same submission goes on to report that in 2011 with a 95% pertussis vaccine uptake in 0-6 year olds, “there were 38,725 cases of whooping cough”.

Notice the age of vaccination is the 0-6 years cohort, but the pertussis notification figure is Australia wide. This includes overseas visitors, workers and new arrivals who brought the infection with them.

And of course by 2011 it’s not that PCR testing can detect Bordetella pertussis in samples hundreds or thousands of times smaller. And days older. Or that practitioners are constantly on the lookout for signs, or that documentation of notification is meticulous. Or sciencing in this field is better and faster.

Or that it is therefore significant that last year’s total of 11,866 (approx. 700 more than 2005) is comparatively low, and the high figures collated for 2009 – 2011 reflect the national outbreak that is reported as beginning in Meryl Dorey’s backyard. NB: article uses a number of media sources.

Nay. It’s the vaccine whatdunnit, dear reader, and Meryl Dorey has been peddling that lie and tripping up people who “do their research” for years. She never has replied to my January 2012 email wherein I step by step showed her how she pulled off this trick.

Vaccines it is argued, still cause autism. One may read that “autism-like symptoms” are in fact autism. That the US Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has compensated cases of autism arising from vaccination. This is most certainly untrue. The VICP continue to deny ever having compensated any individual for autism caused by vaccination.

Whilst terms such as “autism-like symptoms” are used the Compensation Program at no time refers to anything like “autism arising from vaccination” or “autism as a result of vaccination”. The Pace Law School scandal is deconstructed here. Meryl Dorey’s fraudulent addition of the word “[Autism]” to the US Court of Federal Claims case file dealing with the case of Bailey Banks is documented here. Sadly it is not realistic to think these claims have not influenced opinion in some.

Across the internet the false tale of 83 vaccine induced autism cases, compensated by the US Vaccine Injury Compensation Program will pop up. It refers to a paper written by Pace Law School Students entitled, Unanswered Questions from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program: A review of compensated cases of vaccine induced brain injury.

I wrote in 2011;

Reading the document reveals ample use of terms such as “settled cases suggesting autism”, “language that strongly suggests autistic features”, “published decisions that used terms related to autism”, “payment of vaccine injured children with autism”, and not – as Seth Mnookin pointed out – “because of their autism”. More so, the authors spend some time arguing why there should be no distinction between autism and autism-like symptoms. This is a major concession they award themselves.

The paper includes caregiver opinion, parental opinion, phrases from doctors who gave evidence at hearings and provides a case table of “Language suggesting autism or autistic-like symptoms”. A notable concern is referencing The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine and a Manmade Epidemic [2010] by Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill.

This issue of insisting “autism-like symptoms” should be accepted as autism may have an intuitive feel to it but would ultimately reap an injustice on individuals involved. If we consider patients who have experienced brain injury from head trauma, stroke, near drowning or drug overdose, each may present with near identical symptoms. However the mechanism of brain injury is different and demands specificity of treatment.

So it is with autism. Diagnosis, treatment and prognosis are not opinions one can choose. Other erroneous opinions we find as a result of anti-vaccine research lean towards the legislative change being an abuse of rights and freedoms. It is an abuse of our constitution. Vaccines, being poisonous and responsible for chronic disease in children will reap harm because natural is best whilst chemicals and toxins are bad.

In fact the submissions rejecting No Jab, No Pay appear to be a cornucopia of all anti-vaccine misinformation. The authors have indeed “done their research”.

31Aug2015

Floppy Fascism

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

Since announcements that the Abbott government will from January 2016 introduce a “no jab, no pay” policy, noting the increasing misuse of particular terms became inescapable.

Fascism, Nazism, Nazi, Fascist, Mandatory, Forced, Freedom. These words are being used increasingly by anti-vaccine lobbyists to describe changes in public health policy. Changes planned to protect the wider community from the impact of increased vaccine preventable disease notification consonant with lower herd immunity.

The words are being used incorrectly due to error born of ignorance by some, and plain cunning to create fear and loathing by others. By that I mean the terms are employed to elicit maximum effect even though their association with the proposed policy is absurdly tenuous and patently wrong.

For this reason I’ve come to muse over it as “Floppy Fascism”, for want of a description. Take away the sneering thugs on social media, the logical fallacies contending that democratic rights and freedom are at risk. The same conduct was evident in the USA in the lead up to and after the signing of SB277. Clearly from reading this there is no “mandatory vaccination” – nor mandatory any hint of impending vaccination checkpoints as somberly depicted below.

Indeed, to get an idea simply turn to Melbourne Australia and the public response to a poorly prepared press release indicating the silly Border Force would be checking visas on Melbourne Streets. The Abbott government’s disdain for refugees and it’s hype over border protection was likely to create the mess it did. But the lesson is that if Australian rights are under threat, we will know. The world will know. Who won’t know? Why… the government. Who else?

So, back to the rot about Nazism and those wicked vaccines.

Despite the ranting, hysteria and proclamations of freedoms crushed under mandatory vaccination there is indeed no mandatory vaccination. In both Australia and the USA the choice to not vaccinate remains. What is unfolding in front of us are nothing more than the consequences of those who, for whatever misguided reason, insist upon conscientious objection to, and the spreading of lies about, mass vaccination.

In Australia from January 2016 “conscientious objection” will be removed as an exemption category for childcare payments (Child Care Benefit and Child Care Rebate) and the Family Tax Benefit Part A end-of-year supplement. Consecutive states are also making vaccination compulsory for children to attend day care, under the “no jab, no play” laws. Western Australia has rejected this to date as “not proper”.

Ignore the passive-aggressive support behind that gentle Michael Leunig mask and his offensive Fascist Epiphany cartoon, the genuine manifestation of Godwin’s Law based upon flawed thinking. Replace the intuitive magnetism of floppy fascism with reproducible, falsifiable, cold, calm evidence and the notion of Health Fascism collapses like a house of cards in a slow drizzle.

Fascism most importantly, is a dictatorial system of government. Key elements stand out in basic definition:

A governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.

The most striking example of Fascism is the government of Mussolini; Italy 1922 – 1943. Other features are active racism, upholding the belief of supremacy of the Fascist ethnic group and unquestioned obedience to an individual leader. Thus:

The term Fascism was first used of the totalitarian right-wing nationalist regime of Mussolini in Italy (1922–43), and the regimes of the Nazis in Germany and Franco in Spain were also fascist. Fascism tends to include a belief in the supremacy of one national or ethnic group, a contempt for democracy, an insistence on obedience to a powerful leader, and a strong demagogic approach.

One may be familiar with contempt for democracy and social responsibility manifested by anti-vaccine activists, passive aggressive demand for obedience and the demagogic belief in Andrew Wakefield, Sherri Tenpenny, Barbara Loe Fisher, Australia’s Meryl Dorey and more.

Most commonly has been the use of memes, social media posts and conspiracy rants likening features of Nazi Germany to mass vaccination. Other features have been the nonsensical “floppy fascist” commentary postulating that “the unvaccinated” may find themselves with an identifying patch, as did the Jews in Fascist Germany prior to and during WWII.

Another feature I’ve notice receive extra currency, despite already being a long time favourite of antivaccinationists is the rewording of Martin Niemöller’s famous poem. First they came for the Socialists and I did not speak out – because I was not a Socialist. This is not new. I remember a deft hand at reproducing works such as Martin Walker’s Health Fascism in Australia, July 2010.

Meryl Dorey of (the then) AVN later wrote Make an informed vaccination choice, March 2, 2012. On July 20th 2012 one Tom wrote to “Admin”. He was concerned about “the vilification of people who choose not to vaccinate their children in the mainstream media” and the inclusion of polls inquiring after reader views on mandatory vaccination (Please note it’s vilification in mainstream media, not vaccination of children in mainstream media).

Dorey replies in floppy fascist style that were the AVN not there did Tom really believe, “the people trying to take away your rights would go away? Wouldn’t vaccination be more likely to be compulsory without the AVN opposing it?” Purportedly the AVN has been “so successful in helping parents become aware of their rights and of the scientifically-based downside to vaccinations.”

She argues it is AVN success that has brought sustained activity against and exposure of the AVN, contending, “… the attacks are a sign of their fear of our success – not of our failure.” She adds:

And if the AVN weren’t here, vaccination would have been compulsory years ago because back in 1997, the government was trying to bring this in and it is only via our lobbying for the conscientious objection clause, that it did not become a reality.

Oh really?

And before we forget Martin Niemöller, Dorey continued:

To diverge a little, keeping pace today with the “fascist vaccinators” (shall we say) is an almost identical drama unfolding with respect to fluoridation of water supply. The mayor of Lismore in NSW, Jenny Dowell was assaulted on June 20th this year. Since Lismore City Council decided to fluoridate the town’s water supply in December 2014 there have been episodes of verbal abuse and threats.

However on this occasion an out of control 43 year old woman bailed the mayor up to unleash her verbal concerns about fluoride. The mayor had to leave and as she was getting into her car, the woman slammed the door into her head, called her a “f…ing bitch” and scurried away. The episode left a tender aftermath on Jenny Dowell’s cheek and ear. It isn’t surprising that since the decision was made to fluoridate the water, Mayor Dowell has been subject to “more than a dozen verbal attacks”.

The content of these attacks? Unsurprisingly Jenny Dowell informed The Northern Star:

“I’ve been called Genocide Jenny, I’ve been called Hitler…”

So it’s no surprise memes such as these exist. In fact the central claim is immediate Godwin’s Law at play.

In a piece entitled Beware the violent antis – Lismore Mayor physically assaulted, reasonablehank draws on Jenny Dowell’s observation that public office came with the consequences of being seen differently by “some people”. Not seen as a person, or worthy of normal, decent behaviour.

“You’re fair game”, she said. As Hank notes this resonates uncomfortably with the history of respect and mimicry the AVsN has for Scientology.

So what drives such aggressive conspiracy tones? The evidence needed to condemn vaccines is 100% absent. No vaccine is 100% effective and any vaccine presents a miniscule risk. Yet the risk-benefit ratio is so far in support of vaccines that the discussion of vaccinating vs not vaccinating is pointless to have. Our grandparents lived with the constant fear of vaccine preventable diseases taking lives or making children very, very sick.

We live with the luxury of pretending they make our kids sick. This is not to say there are no reactions. There are at a minuscule rate. The present claims of injury by anti-vaccine activists of frequent and very harmful injuries are incorrect and/or intentionally deceiving.

So, without the evidence they need the anti-vaccine lobby commonly fabricates “vaccine injury” rates. The content of vaccines are purposely fabricated and/or the effect of vaccine ingredients are presented as highly dangerous. Judy Wilyman who lobbies against the HPV vaccine insists today’s generation of children “are the sickest” we have seen. She readily instills fear over trace elements in vaccines. Despite the fiction of this quote, Wilyman has used it to instill fear into parents.

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 counter-intuitive to suggest adding toxins to infant’s bodies makes them healthier. It doesn’t make them healthier. Black is not white.

Source W.A. Audio (at 26min)

The scale of deception here is stunning. Health authorities “don’t know” how vaccine “toxic” components “react” following vaccination? Then from a PhD student the audience is actually led to form a conclusion based upon intuition. Intuition! Not science, dear reader, but intuition. And why? Because Wilyman has decided trace element vaccine components known across the globe to be absolutely safe, are “toxic”. Yes, that meaningless marketing word that we cannot really define.

Sidestepping the role of antigens, Ms. Wilyman’s feelpinions focus on “toxins” that sound nasty, so must therefore be unhealthy. After all – black is not white.

Floppy Fascism includes the unquestioned notion that governments, health authorities and evidence based medical institutions will harm the populace.

An excellent example of completely ludicrous abuse of terms from the Fascist dictatorships responsible for WWII is the recent use of “Gestapo” by Sherri Tenpenny. Thanks to @reasonable_hank for tweeting what goes on in Tenpenny’s mind.

Why did she choose “gestapo”? The Gestapo were:

The German secret police under Nazi rule. It ruthlessly suppressed opposition to the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe and sent Jews and others to concentration camps. From 1936 it was headed by Heinrich Himmler.

The specificity of the Gestapo role is touched on above. They existed to solidify Nazi rule and acted to identify and eliminate any potential opposition to Nazi supremacy. Tenpenny strongly likens a call by the American Nurses Association to have their members protected, and to protect their patients from vaccine preventable disease to the activity of a dictatorship. Perhaps she sees the ANA as an enforcement arm of Fascist health authorities.

Consequences of wide acceptance of this mindset may lead to violence, harm and/or vandalism perpetrated against public health and/or civic authorities due to the belief the individuals and institutions are genuinely perpetrating crimes against democratic peace. In short the continued peddling of this mindset, along with the efforts to sustain the belief of being victims may easily lead to more events such as the assault of Lismore Mayor, Jenny Dowell or indeed worse.

The escalating reference to senior members of the Nazi party and the likening of Nazi human experimentation and/or Josef Mengele to vaccination in Australia is appalling. This again, is not without history. The reasoning follows the line that vaccines have never been properly tested, and never tested in randomised controlled trials (both false).

Antivaccinationists insist the components of vaccines include poisonous elemental heavy metals, dangerously high amounts of other heavy metals (such as Al), carcinogenic levels of poisons (e.g.; formaldehyde), unstable biological material (the false claim of foetal cells and animal tissue), and that all these have never been monitored over long periods (incorrect). It is claimed that vaccine viral material is poorly understood and of course, “too much, too soon”.

It thus follows, that essentially an experiment is underway. Recall Wilyman’s false assertion above that “they don’t know” how trace elements do or do not effect infants and children.

In this present anti-vaccine cry of persecution one may well anticipate, and find, reference to The Nuremberg Code. Briefly put The Nuremberg Code is ten points that were accepted after The Doctor’s Trial held during the Nuremberg Trials post WWII. They constitute research ethics for human experimentation. The Nuremberg Code is not accepted as law globally or in the USA, Germany or the UK. Along with the Declaration of Helsinki it constitutes the format of the USA Code of Federal Regulations of the Department of Health and Human Services. This code oversees federally funded human research in the USA.

It is true to say that The Nuremberg Code has been incorporated into the law of individual states in various countries. One such state is California. It remains one of medical ethics most important documents. Yet in reality The Nuremberg Code is no friend to the anti-vaccination movement. Their constant insistence for a trial of “vaccinated vs not vaccinated” would not pass an ethics test using the ten points of The Nuremberg Code.

These are:

1   Required is the voluntary, well-informed, understanding consent of the human subject in a full legal capacity.
2   The experiment should aim at positive results for society that cannot be procured in some other way.
3   It should be based on previous knowledge (like, an expectation derived from animal experiments) that justifies the experiment.
4   The experiment should be set up in a way that avoids unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injuries.
5   It should not be conducted when there is any reason to believe that it implies a risk of death or disabling injury.
6   The risks of the experiment should be in proportion to (that is, not exceed) the expected humanitarian benefits.
7   Preparations and facilities must be provided that adequately protect the subjects against the experiment’s risks.
8   The staff who conduct or take part in the experiment must be fully trained and scientifically qualified.
9   The human subjects must be free to immediately quit the experiment at any point when they feel physically or mentally unable to go on.
10 Likewise, the medical staff must stop the experiment at any point when they observe that continuation would be dangerous.

Update: Sept. 1st. Facebook’s Vaccine Resistance Movement.
This post highlights the significant flaw in the anti-vaccine movement’s continual citation of sections of, but particularly Item One of The Nuremberg Code. That flaw?

Mass vaccination is not a human experiment. Indeed the conscientious objection to vaccination based upon manifestly erroneous beliefs and opinions is somewhat experimental in the vaccine/anti-vaccine dynamic.

Reasoning with certain mindsets appears pointless. These entries follow:

Striking a Walter White theme for his profile Paul seems to believe vaccination is “planetary culling”. By that I guess he means global culling, not planetary as opposed to say, Lunar Culling.

End Update

Prior to widespread effective mass vaccination one manner of managing outbreaks was quarantine. Judy Wilyman has previously misquoted Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet. One reality of the time in which Macfarlane Burnet worked and researched was the quarantine of individuals with infectious disease.

I do wonder how today’s self-righteous anti-vaccine warriors would weigh up the balance of non-negotiable quarantine or access to a vaccine that would provide immunity to diseases citizens were regularly quarantined in response for. Quarantined for their own safety or quarantined by order of the state.

In reality the changes in legislation are a reaction to the public health damage caused by the anti-vaccine lobby. The damage they have caused is due to absurd pseudoscience, fear and deception. There is no risk of forced vaccination. There is no fascism. There are no mandatory health changes under way.

Little wonder then, that their only response is Floppy Fascism.

31Jul2015

Family Court continues to defend vaccination

Posted in Anti-Vaccination Lobby, Big Placebo, Human Rights, Legal by Paul Gallagher

While ever the child remains unvaccinated, he remains at risk of contracting these diseases

– Justice Jenny Hogan: Family Court of Australia. July 17, 2015 –

“I’ve done my research”.

So goes the inaccurate claim of the anti-vaccine convert. As I’ve noted before this claim should be questioned as to what independent evaluation took place to discern the quality of such “research”. I realise this isn’t very user-friendly. Thus it’s a way of underscoring the inappropriateness of mums and dads using the term to defend their ignorance of vaccine efficacy and safety.

Perhaps this “research” should be compared to the advice and conclusions published by reputable health authorities. Perhaps the most simple approach is to run up a tally of reputable source information vs that from woo and quackery public health menaces. Ideally parents will see that ample research has already been done and their role is to seek advice from a GP.

Yet we know in a number of cases that won’t happen and anti-vaccine fear mongering and deception will be eagerly devoured and believed by some. Many will continue this “research” to varying degrees, perhaps joining forums, Facebook pages and YouTube channels, sinking ever deeper into hive mentality.

A July 17 Family Court of Australia finding provided a glimpse of the harm such forays into the dark and absurd realms of the Internet can potentially cause. In this case of “Arranzio and Moss” before Justice Jenny Hogan, Ms. Moss had told the court she intended to;

…never consent to the child being vaccinated [because she] has a conscientious objection to vaccination on the basis of her research.

Moss was seeking an injunction that would prevent her six year old son (who has never been immunised) being taken by his father for immunisation, “without her written permission”. She believes vaccines may cause cancer and “other health problems”, and believes her son suffers from “a range of allergies to different foods”.

Both parents had witnesses appear on their behalf.

The mother’s doctor, known as Dr J, told Justice Hogan that she had previously held ‘anti-vaccination views’ but now believed that vaccination was sometimes appropriate for children who were, for example, not breastfed.

[…]

Justice Hogan said that “no weight could sensibly” be given to Dr J’s views on the case at hand, because Dr J had not even seen the child when she decided that he had an “underlying immune shift” that might make vaccination problematic for him.

Dr. G, appearing for the father had studied at the Mayo Clinic and is a specialist in childhood allergies. He commented on the uselessness of “tests” Dr. J suggested the child was in need of, describing them as “total nonsense”. He went on to reject the claim that the chicken pox vaccine causes shingles as “bunkum” and noted that allergic reactions to vaccines are so rare he had “only one or two people referred to him over the years”.

The injunction was not granted. The finding quite firmly highlights the risk of contracting disease due to being unvaccinated, as opposed to the fallacious beliefs of the anti-vaccine lobby:

Justice Hogan said “the consequences for the child of contracting a disease weighed significantly against the grant of an injunction” – meaning the father should not be banned from having the child vaccinated because harm from potential diseases posed unacceptable risks.

“While ever the child remains unvaccinated, he remains at risk of contracting these diseases,” she said.

“Having regard to the above, I am not persuaded that an order restraining the father from having the child vaccinated is appropriate for the child’s welfare or in his best interests.”

What is immediately apparent with respect to these cases is that the so-called “evidence” that makes up the body of anti-vaccination “research” is presented in a law court in opposition to genuine evidence provided by qualified medical professionals. Family Court findings uphold the best interests and welfare of children.

In these cases the efficacy and safety of vaccines are themselves arguably on trial.

When the Australian Vaccination-skeptics Network reacted to the announcement that Family Tax Benefits would be denied on the basis of vaccine conscientious objection they posted a Facebook meme likening vaccination to rape. This was the second time this group has used that comparison to vaccination.

On January 15, 2011 Meryl Dorey (then steering the group under its old name: Australian Vaccination Network) reacted to the first Family Court case of this type. In this instance the Court favoured the father’s wish to have his five year old daughter vaccinated. Dorey exploded on Facebook:

Court orders rape of a child. Think this is an exaggeration? Think again. This is assault without consent and with full penetration too. If we as a society allow this crime to take place, we are every bit as guilty as the judge who made the order and the doctor who carries it out. If anyone knows this family, please put them in touch with me – xx xxxx xxxx – I would like to see if there is anything the AVN can do.
MD

In this case the witness for the anti-vaccine mother was chiropractor Warren Sipser. It was reported:

The mother produced opposing evidence that the vaccinations were unnecessary, but was criticised in the judgment for submitting evidence from an “immunisation sceptic”, who made what the magistrate described as “outlandish statements unsupported by any empirical evidence”.

Chiropractic Association of Australia (CAA) member Warren Sipser quite recklessly described the outcome as “dangerous”. Sipser is unsurprisingly also a past professional member of the AVN (2004 – 2011), and a board member of CAA Victoria. He is also Secretary of CAA Victoria. The important thing is this “paediatric chiropractor” was comfortable with “outlandish statements unsupported by any empirical evidence”, being put forth to advance his client’s case.

In an October 19, 2012 Family Court ruling Justice Victoria Bennett rejected a Victorian mother’s claim that living a simple lifestyle, avoiding toxins and eating organic and unprocessed foods would develop the immune system of her eight year old daughter. A senior paediatrician from the Royal Children’s Hospital advised Justice Bennett that the homeopathic methods used by the mother had no basis in evidence.

In this case the child’s father had remarried and it was reported his daughter;

…was immunised for diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, hepatitis B, polio, HIB, measles, mumps, rubella and meningococcal C.

The father told the court he hoped to continue to “secretly vaccinate” her because he did not want to play “Russian roulette with her health”. He said he wanted to protect her from infectious diseases, and he was also concerned the child of his new wife, who is now pregnant, could contract a disease from an unvaccinated child.

In a convoluted and drawn out Family Court case that ended in April 2014 a Sydney father won the right to have his children – who turned 12 and 14 last year – vaccinated. Justice Garry Foster quite rightly observed that the 42 year old mother was narrowly focused with vaccination “perhaps to the point where the best interests of her children have been subsumed”.

As other matters of separation between Mr. Randall and Ms. Duke-Randall continued the court restrained either parent from vaccinating either child until a three day hearing into vaccination took place. The mother kept the children on a low-salicylate and low-amine diet, and was apparently wasting court time in an attempt to obtain evidence that the children would be adversely effected by vaccination. However:

Justice Foster [found] the mother had been deliberately delaying proceedings and ignoring directions, which led to the ”strong inference that she has done so to suit her own end that the issue as to vaccination be delayed for as long as possible”.

[…]

Justice Foster accepted evidence from a senior consultant in immunology, given the pseudonym Professor K, that both children are healthy and do not have any allergies or any other contraindications to vaccination.

This case was particularly concerning in that the children’s mother sought to have immunisation declared a “special medical procedure”. [Family Court: March 11, 2013. July 18, 3013]. This would have placed vaccination in the same category as gender reassignment or sterilisation of intellectually disabled girls. Her quest to convince the Family Court her children would suffer adversely from vaccination included collection of blood, urine and faecal matter.

It is fortunate the Family Court found in favour of the children’s father.

Similar trends are documented in the USA, the UK and other developed nations where an anti-vaccine lobby seeks to spread deception and misinformation. It would appear these cases may well become more frequent. Thanks to the work of groups who tackle the anti-vaccination lobby the public is becomming increasingly aware of the extent of harm “anti-vaxxers” have on their children.

As I mentioned above, these Family Court cases are in many ways a legal challenge to, or opportunity for, anti-vaccination beliefs.

Fortunately in the Family Court of Australia, the anti-vaccination lobby has had no success at all.

9Oct2014

Plot to cull humanity via vaccines is “real news” claims Meryl Dorey

Posted in Anti-Vaccination Lobby, Denialism, Human Rights by Paul Gallagher

Mainstream media won’t listen to or report the REAL news until they are forced to do so. THIS is the real news – and they are intentionally suppressing it.

Meryl Dorey: October 9th 2014

I’ve lost count of the number of times Meryl Dorey has provided evidence of not just her belief in conspiracy theories, but of conspiracy theories wild and whacky.

A strident defender of Meryl, and an active critic of the notion Australian Vaccination-sceptics Network lends credence to conspiracy theories is Professor Brian Martin. Please note from here on I’ll refer to AVsN simply as AVN because in material I’ll source and at the time frame I’ll often refer to, the group was AVN Inc.

I guess Brian has a vested interest in setting up his approach to belief in conspiracy theories about as close as you can get to demanding evidence for a negative without actually saying so. That vested interest is his role as PhD supervisor of Judy – vaccines are a crime against humanity – Wilyman. In “preparing” for her PhD Wilyman has played many conspiracy cards from the paranoid to the dishonest. Little wonder Martin has argued for pointlessly high standards of confirmation before considering the AVN or Dorey entertain conspiracy theories.

I got interested in what I initially, and still, think is an unworthy issue for an academic around mid 2011. It struck me as a cheap shot to try to discredit the purpose of SAVN or defend the malignancy of the AVN over something so petty. Brian Martin summed up his viewpoint and level of evidence required on July 27th 2011 as part of an email exchange (emphasis mine):

Thanks for your emails. I think I understand where you’re coming from. You’ve provided what you think is good evidence for AVN members believing in various conspiracies. Let me state again my perspective on this. In “Debating vaccination” I noted that SAVN’s Facebook page had, as part of its basic information, the statement that “They [AVN] believe that vaccines are part of a global conspiracy to implant mind control chips into every man, woman and child and that the ‘illuminati’ plan a mass cull of humans.” I called this an “unsupported claim” because no good evidence for it was provided by SAVN or anyone else. It is, to my mind, a rather extraordinary claim, requiring persuasive evidence to be credible, for example a survey of AVN members. I consider the claim to be an attempt to discredit the AVN based on assertion rather than evidence. The claim was prominent on SAVN’s Facebook page, which is why I gave it such attention in my analysis.

There is a quite a bit of research on conspiracy theories. I believe it is accurate to say that many people believe in conspiracies of one sort or another. The obvious way to find out is to ask them, and that has been done often enough in survey research. To back up SAVN’s Facebook claim, it is not enough to show that some AVN members believe in this or that conspiracy – it’s necessary to show many or most believe in the mind-control-chip conspiracy, as stated.

Okay, so he has set the confirmation bar rather high. In fact out of reach. A survey of AVN members? Impossible for any cooperation. The “good evidence” I “think” I provided was in fact conspiracy references from AVN members, a screenshot of a post by Dorey on a video on mandatory vaccination and microchipping and part of this blurb from Dorey;

Injected Chips? To me, the scariest thing about the health smart card, is that it is only the beginning. The next and most logical step is the use of microchips which will contain all of the same information contained on smart cards but which will be injected into us and read and updated from a distance.

Now, before you start to think that this would never happen and that it’s all a bit too much like science fiction, be aware that as of January 1999, the NSW State Government has mandated that all domestic animals be injected with a microchip which would identify them. Pet owners don’t have a choice – they must do this by law or face fines. And how are these chips being put into the family dog or cat? Why, through their vaccines, of course. These microscopic chips are nothing more than contactless health smart cards. How long will it be before you or your child receive this “gift” from the government? They will sell it to us as a gift too. You will no longer have to worry about robbery because nobody will be carrying cash – this chip will contain your bank details so you can pass your hand over a reader and have the amount of your purchase automatically deducted from your account. Your child will never have to worry about getting lost because they will have an indelible identification mark which would have been inserted at birth. It’s all so exciting, don’t you think?

– Source Internet Archive – Wayback Machine

I won’t list all the references I sent to Brian Martin. He was defending Ms. Dorey’s management of, and honesty with free speech at the same time she was falsely claiming ownership of material to execute bogus DMCA take-downs of material on Scribd, actually owned by SAVN members. His erroneous claim that the AVN and Meryl Dorey were quite separate has been shown wrong many times. Reasonablehank touches on DMCA here, along with some seriously messed up AVN conspiracy leaning.

Suffice it to say I decided to take the statement Martin objected to, examine as much material confirming AVN members and Meryl Dorey’s belief in wild conspiracies and see how much of the statement could be supported this way. It turned out not much was needed. The offending comment Brian wanted evidence for:

They [AVN] believe that vaccines are part of a global conspiracy to implant mind control chips into every man, woman and child and that the ‘illuminati’ plan a mass cull of humans.

Could be stripped of one word and remain accurate:

They [AVN] believe that vaccines are part of a global conspiracy to implant ~~mind~~ control chips into every man, woman and child and that the ‘illuminati’ plan a mass cull of humans.

But yes, yes I know. Brian had already told us this. As he finished off in his email to me, it’s necessary to show many or most believe in the mind-control-chip conspiracy, as stated. So. No human culling? Perhaps he was in a hurry or something.

Let us then consult Prof. Martin’s What SAVN doesn’t want you to read, published by Martin last July 14th. I did visit this article in a post and discussed the relevant piece September 2012: SAVN and conspiracy theories. As you can see I chose not to focus on his reference to conspiracy theory, but instead on his reference to Peter Tierney and myself.

Do note however that Martin only refers to the mind control chip conspiracy and omits his initial concern with human culling. Again. It would seem if we were to apply the same standard of required evidence to Martin he appears to have intentionally drifted away from human culling.

Today Meryl Dorey has again confirmed her belief in this wild conspiracy of human culling through mass vaccination.

Following the link we find at one of the worst of the worst conspiracy madness sites, this delight (scroll down to CDC busted for burying vaccine related autism link);

A visit to this site Dorey refers to as “REAL news” reveals ample conspiracy – including the “Hear This Well – Vaccines Do Cause Autism” YouTube rubbish. Nonetheless what Dorey is believing here is clear.

Outbreak of the Ebola virus is a hoax and the plan behind it has precipitated removal of anti-vaccine websites.
A vaccine designed to kill human cells using a “T4 bacteriophage nanobot” and cause a human cull will be spread worldwide by the “elite” – The Illuminati.
This is part of the New World Order for global depopulation “and the establishment of compact slave cities that can be managed with ease”.
This is why “they are pushing vaccines so hard”.

♠ Elsewhere on Meryl Dorey’s “real news” page we find material contending that:

Jews want to “dumb down” all children via tainted vaccinations causing autism.
As owners of YouTube Jews are censoring audio on “many videos” and will likely remove the “Hear This Well – Vaccines Do Cause Autism” channel.
Vaccines are a “bioweapon”.
“FACT: Vaccine induced autism is an intentional act of war on Western civilization and anyone else who is in competition with a certain tribe (the Jewish race)”.

As an academic who writes extensively on dissent one would expect Professor Brian Martin to address this in depth. Arguing that AVN is not Dorey or a few AVN members are not “the AVN” just does not cut it with this mob. Any AVN members who were not Dorey clones were banned and the content deleted. Martin would argue in the absence of Dorey plainly stating – perhaps via interpretive dance – that she believes every word there is still nothing conclusive. Technically he would be right. But actually he would be wrong. It is clear he has failed to defend his claim that Dorey has no love for this depth of nonsense.

—————–

David Icke’s microchips and the human cull – copied and published by Dorey.
Hank responds to Dorey’s “dossier”.
Visit the corridors of Brian Martin’s mind in the comments

♠ 4 points added after publishing.

11Sep2014

Measles Vaccination: make an informed choice

Posted in Anti-Vaccination Lobby, AVN, Denialism, General, Health, Legal, Scam, Science, Skeptic, Social Media by Paul Gallagher

Recently in Melbourne Australia, the wanderings of a baby infected with measles prompted Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Dr Rosemary Lester to name certain venues and alert the public. The 11 month old had, while infectious, visited four major shopping complexes, two restaurants, a cafe, a children’s play centre, a church and a chemist. Dr. Lester stressed those who attended these venues should ensure they pay extra attention to symptoms such as;

…common cold symptoms such as fever, sore throat, red eyes and a cough. The characteristic measles rash usually begins 2-5 days after the first symptoms, she said, generally starting on the face and then spreading to the rest of the body.

A bit of a rash, sore throat and temperature then. I’ve heard groups who insist vaccines don’t work or aren’t needed pass measles off as nothing to worry about. Yet the article also included this from Dr. Lester;

“Anyone developing these symptoms is advised to ring ahead to their GP or hospital and alert them that they have fever and a rash,” Dr Lester said. “If you know you have been in contact with a measles case please alert your GP or hospital emergency department. The GP or hospital will then be able to provide treatment in a way that minimises transmission.”

Hmmm. Maybe hospitals in Victoria are running drills this month. Practising for something serious with this little rashy-coughy thing. After all a Slovakian micro-palaeontologist had described it as a simple “right of passage”. And if anyone would know about infectious disease in Australia it is a Slovakian micro-palaeontologist, not a mere Chief Health Officer of a state holding around six million people. But then the piece by the paper’s Health Editor went on to state measles is highly infectious. It is particularly dangerous for young children and young adults.

Those most at risk of getting the disease are people who have not been vaccinated, particularly adults between 33 and 47 years because many in this age group did not receive measles vaccine, and people whose immune systems have been compromised because of cancer treatment, for example.

Perhaps, as they say, this is not a drill. I remember reading material from those against vaccination. They spend a lot of time and caps lock justifying why vaccines are dangerous, or useless, or part of a conspiracy. The claim that vaccines are useless is backed by graphs which plot disease induced mortality against time and contend X vaccine was introduced well after mortality reached zero. Clean water, nutrition and better living standards stopped these infectious diseases they insist, not vaccines. So I decided to check the measles graphs drawn up by renowned antivaccinationist Greg Beattie.

Greg Beattie’s “Figure 1” from Fooling Ourselves

The above graph is from Beattie’s Fooling Ourselves. The Australian Vaccination-sceptics Network is littered with this and many others from Beattie. Material published by the AV-sN has been independently examined and discredited in the preparation of a public statement and warning by the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission. It appears then, Beattie’s graphs have been examined and discredited in an official capacity. There is no mistake as to why the HCCC warned the public to exercise caution in viewing “misleading” material. It is important to focus on Beattie’s intent here. Namely that vaccines had no impact or an irrelevant impact on the control of infectious disease. In part this post challenges the intent of Beattie’s graphs by presenting independent data that show vaccines most certainly had a powerful effect in controlling the spread of vaccine preventable disease.

Thus Beattie’s cunning use of mortality rate above, is met with absolute and predicted numbers. Greg Beattie cites the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Commonwealth Year Books and “data published by the Commonwealth” in Cumpston’s 1927 The History of Diptheria, Scarlet Fever, Measles and Whooping Cough in Australia. One notes the first problem is his reliance on mortality and not morbidity. Death as a consequence of a vaccine preventable disease is a limited indicator of how effective vaccination has been in reducing infection. Overall morbidity (infection) offers a more realistic picture. Indeed the anti-vaccine lobby are today only too quick to point to the number of pertussis notifications in those vaccinated, when launching attacks on the efficacy of the vaccine or the need to be vacccinated. They concomitantly avoid noting pertussis mortality in Australia hits the unvaccinated.

The vaccinated cop a less dangerous, and to date, non-lethal infection. [Update] Children not vaccinated against pertussis are 24 times more likely to be infected with the wild strain, than those who are vaccinated. Below is another graph from Communicable Diseases Intelligence. I’ve boxed in measles in red and used coloured horizontal lines to link mortality to years pre and post introduction of the measles vaccine. It’s clear that the greatest gap – or in fact drop – in mortality follows the introduction of measles immunisation. Thereafter reductions are smaller and more evenly spaced.

Source: Communicable Diseases Intelligence

Could there be more important facts left out by Beattie? Clearly his graph is designed to visually convince the reader that the measles vaccine was introduced when measles was all but eradicated. Thus Beattie contends vaccination had no impact on its control. So what of Beattie? Do we afford him the benefit of the doubt? You be the judge. Immediately after the graph he writes in Fooling Ourselves.

The graph for measles (Figure 1) shows us that the five-yearly death rate, 100 years before the vaccine was introduced, was around 170. One hundred years later, and immediately prior to introducing the vaccine, it was less than one. That’s a reduction of 99.5%—before the vaccine arrived. The remainder of less than 1% is therefore the only portion of the decline to which the vaccine can possibly lay claim, because it simply was not around for the first 99.5%. […]

Let’s check that again: One hundred years later, and immediately prior to introducing the vaccine, it (the five year mortality rate from measles) was less than one. Looking at the CDI graph above, and countless others that can (Source: Measles Deaths, pre-vaccine – archived) be wheeled out from developed nations around the world he is simply misinforming his readers.

Update 10 January 2024: I originally published this post with no display of the graph in question. They are USA data, and the aim here is to expose Beattie’s deception, referencing the Australian figures he worked so hard to conceal. Recently, a pingback alerted me to the fact one Jordan Henderson criticised my linking to it. Jordan opined;

For example; he attempts to claim that Beattie’s Australian death rate graph is wrong by referencing a graph for the USA as if that somehow makes the Australian graph wrong because it doesn’t show what the USA graph shows.

Errumm, yes. Or rather, no. The graph in question impressively eliminates Beattie’s case by simply highlighting the impact of vaccine introduction when actual numbers of deaths (not diluted using “per 100,000”) in a population larger than Australia, are presented. Include case numbers and the illusion of his craftwork vanishes. Also, if vaccines didn’t succeed, they didn’t succeed globally, would be my reasoning. Not just where Greg Beattie lived. Anyway, Jordan offers a cornucopia of conspiracy woo online. He writes numbered articles called “The Acorn”, and has sprouted bud by bud (sorry, couldn’t resist) into anti-5G, psyops, sheeple, the great reset, slavery, anti-mask beliefs, the awakening, more acorns and of course, being anti-vax. Now, as they all do as per their manual, he’s defending Beattie. Is Beattie a sprout I wonder? Perhaps more of a chunk of crispy old lichen, given the age of this tale.

So, onto the graph, with some added red annotation:

measlesvax_usaintro1

If QR codes are your thing, enjoy. Otherwise, it’s archived here now. Do read the piece, if the “clean water and sanitation, not vaccines controlled disease”, argument is one you’re entertaining. Engineering, clean water and sanitation did indeed catapult our health and standard of living forward. Diseases were controlled, but not eliminated. In the case of measles, vaccines later eliminated hundreds of fatalities per year and thousands of cases of brain damage, pneumonia, middle-ear infections, deafness and diarrhoea. But this argument is so petty, because we actually have successful vaccines developed long after sanitation, clean water and flushable toilets emerged.

Take the Hib vaccine. In 1985 the first Hib vaccine was launched in the USA. A more successful conjugate vaccine was licensed in 1987. Is it necessary? Have we actually seen its impact?

Hib can cause invasive diseases in young children and people who are immunocompromised. The case-fatality rate for Hib meningitis is between 3% and 6%. Up to 30% of individuals who survive Hib disease have permanent neurological sequelae. Source.

Okay, dear reader. Apologies for the interruption. Where were we? Ah yes. Up above we had… Let’s check that again: One hundred years later, and immediately prior to introducing the vaccine, it (the five year mortality rate from measles) was less than one.

Less than one for five years? Whilst the CDI graph plots 150 from 1966 – 1975. An excellent way to further debunk Beattie’s “vaccines-didn’t-save-us” mess is through statistical estimation of the deaths that would have occurred without immunisation. Cost effectiveness and the money saved through improved health is vital. Love it or loathe it the cost of running a vaccine-conspiracy would be monumental. The savings to be made in controlling infectious disease are also wonderfully impressive and much time and energy goes into ensuring we invest in what pays for itself. The figure loving, graph scribing, number crunching chaps at Applied Economics (archived) are deft hands at such dark arts. In a semantic flick of the bird to antivaccinationists they write;

The trend in measles deaths since 1940 reveals a secular decline. This reflects a reduction in case fatality associated with a general improvement in health status as well as the introduction of antibiotics in the late 1940s (Russell, 1988). By fitting a trend to measles deaths for the period 1940–69 and extrapolating it from 1970 onwards, we can estimate the deaths that would have occurred without immunisation. A trend can also be fitted to actual deaths that occurred with immunisation. The difference between these two trend curves is our estimate of the lives saved because of immunisation.

I’ll leave you dear reader to pop over and peer at their graphs revealing the “lives saved because of immunisation”. They also sacrifice many pure white A4 sheets doing the same with Hib vaccination. Nonetheless here is (the businesses end of) the table born of such mysterious chanting and ritual. Pre immunisation years from 1940 are available. The point here is to further debunk the antivaccinationist claim that vaccines did nothing. By analysing pre and post immunisation mortality and morbidity trends, a strong estimate of lives saved and disease prevented can be clearly demonstrated.

Estimated deaths due to, and notifications of, measles tabulated as with or without immunisation

Consequently estimated lives saved and estimated cases averted based solely on measles immunisation can be calculated as the difference

	Deaths			Notification
Year	Without Immunisation	With immunisation	Estimated lives saved	Without immunisation	With immunisation	Estimated cases averted

1970	16	10	6	110,693	77,000	33,693
1971	15	10	5	112,391	67,459	44,932
1972	14	10	4	114,061	59,100	54,961
1973	13	10	3	115,706	51,777	63,929
1974	13	9	4	117,325	45,362	71,964
1975	12	9	3	118,921	39,741	79,180
1976	11	9	2	120,494	34,817	85,677
1977	11	8	3	122,044	30,503	91,542
1978	10	8	2	123,574	26,723	96,851
1979	10	7	3	125,083	23,412	101,671
1980	9	7	2	126,573	20,511	106,062
1981	9	7	2	128,044	17,969	110,075
1982	8	6	2	129,497	15,743	113,754
1983	8	6	2	130,932	13,792	117,140
1984	8	6	2	132,351	12,083	120,268
1985	7	5	2	133,753	10,586	123,167
1986	7	5	2	135,139	9,274	125,865
1987	6	4	2	136,511	8,125	128,385
1988	6	4	2	137,867	7,118	130,749
1989	6	4	2	139,209	6,236	132,973
1990	6	4	2	140,537	5,464	135,074
1991	5	3	2	141,852	4,787	137,065
1992	5	3	2	143,153	4,194	138,960
1993	5	2	3	144,442	3,674	140,768
1994	5	2	3	145,719	3,219	142,500
1995	4	2	2	146,983	2,820	144,163
1996	4	1	3	148,236	2,470	145,765
1997	4	1	3	149,477	2,164	147,313
1998	4	0	4	150,707	1,896	148,811
1999	3	0	3	151,927	1,661	150,266
2000	3	0	3	153,136	1,455	151,680
2001	3	0	3	154,335	1,275	153,059
2002	3	0	3	155,523	1,117	154,406
2003	3	0	3	156,702	979	155,723

These are impressive figures. Lives are saved and disease is averted due to the MMR vaccination. Conversely with no vaccine induced protection from measles lives are lost, disease is spread and disability and suffering ensues. There can be few better examples as to the efficacy of mass immunisation, or indeed, the danger of the anti-vaccine lobby.

Consulting reputable publications we can see that measles is indeed a potentially very serious disease. Health authorities have never denied that vaccination carries a negligible risk. The anti-vaccine lobby is apt to demand vaccines be both 100% effective and 100% safe. As a public we are rather poor at assessing risk-benefit and thus many fall prey to the anti-vaccine slogans and lies.

Encephalitis is a one in a million plus risk as a consequence of measles vaccination. As a consequence of measles it is a one in a thousand risk. In short those who argue “natural immunity” is best subject their children to the risk of brain damage or death at a rate 1,000 times greater than had they chosen MMR. For every ten who contract encephalitis one will die and four will be permanently brain damaged. Around one third of those infected will develop complications that will likely require hospitalisation.

Depending on age, one child dies for every 2,500 – 5,000 cases of measles.

Recently the vaccine-autism zombie had some life breathed into it. Fortunately it turns out that just as Wakefield perpetrated his original – and ongoing – fraud for money, the author of the latest scam is a member of a group erroneously believing vaccines cause autism and will stop at nothing to mislead the public to this same misconception. The “paper” was withdrawn in one month. A statement has been published by Dr. William Thompson who was deceived into becomming a “whistleblower”.

He was recorded against his will and it appears the anti-vaccine author Brian Hooker had worked for months to get the pro-vaccine Thompson on record as sounding like a whistleblower.

And so it continues. This is indeed not a drill. We do have reasonably healthy rates of vaccination but the return of measles, varicella and other vaccine preventable diseases means there is no room for complacency.

Make an informed decision. Vaccination saves lives.

The history of measles

Australian Immunisation Handbook – 2013

MMR

Measles Fact Sheet – WA Health

NCIRS – events in MMR vaccination practice

♠︎ ♠︎ ♠︎ ♠︎

Last Update: 10 January 2024