Monthly Archives: August 2010

AVN in the shit again!

Well it didn’t take long….

Now that the spotlight is shining upon the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) as a result of the recent Health Care Complaints Comission (HCCC): Ruling people are now starting to pay closer attention to this anti-vaccine organisation. Publicity is generally a good thing unless you are doing something dishonest in which case publicity can quickly become your downfall.  The AVN is learning this lesson the hard way from the HCCC Ruling to the even more recent NSW Office of Liquor, Gaming and Racing (OLGR) investigation in which the OLGR has asked the AVN to justify it’s status as a charity.

THE Australian Vaccination Network Inc is being investigated after claims it engaged in unauthorised fundraising.

The Bangalow-based anti-vaccination group has three weeks to prove why its charity fundraising authority should not be revoked after an audit by the NSW Office of Liquor, Gaming and Racing (OLGR) found alleged breaches of legislation.

Possible breaches of the Charitable Trusts Act 1993 also have been referred to the Department of Justice and the Attorney-General. –Northern Rivers News

It seems the AVN just cannot stay out of trouble because now they have been caught for commercial copyright infringement. Special thanks to @fuzztwin on twitter for being so quick to share the storey.

An anti-vaccination group is under fire for allegedly breaching copyright laws by selling newspaper and medical journal articles online without permission from the authors.

The Australian Vaccination Network, which was the subject of a public warning issued by the Health Care Complaints Commission last month, withdrew 11 information packs from its website yesterday after complaints from authors. –Sydney Morning Herald

So that’s two government authorities and now Commercial Copyright Infringement. Looks like this is going to be a bad year for the Australian Vaccination Network. I believe their blatant copyright infringement will hit the hardest because it is not simply a mere violation but actually turning a profit by selling another persons work… that is a serious “don’t”.

I am sure somebody will go dirt digging to try and accuse me of being a hypocrite (my views on copyright) so I will clarify my position on copyright. I see no harm in the non-commercial infringement of copyright provided that attribution is applied where it is due and content is not deliberately taken out of it’s original context. However I do not agree with commercial infringement because there is no ethical justification for making a profit from someone else’s work without their permission. By all means information wants to be free and I believe it should be shared for the common good. Many authors and publishers allow such sharing, but no common good arises from commercial infringement. Particuarly when the infringer is a public health menace.

Australian Labor: stepping back to 1984

I think Labor’s proposed National Broadband Network is bullshit. Not because we don’t need faster broadband but because Labor is offering it as bait to try and win back the voters. Having seen how fast Highspeed Broadband in mainland China is I am happy to say ‘no thanks’ to Labor’s National Broadband Network. Because while a faster Internet may seem tempting the idea of being restricted to government approved sites and services via Internet Censorship makes it a pretty raw deal.

Yes, Australia needs faster Internet but I believe there are better ways to achieve it. One of the reasons Conroy wants the ability to censor at the ISP level is because content providers; including Australian Citizens and Businesses often place their websites on United States based servers in order to avoid take down notices from Australian Authorities.

I believe the key to upgrading our infrastructure is to encourage more companies to set-up their data centres over here and the only viable way to do this is to abolish the regime of censorship that our nanny-state of a country has embraced for so long. (We don’t even have R18 for games.) Nobody is going to place servers in Australia if they think there is even the slightest change of being ordered to shut it down. I am not talking about the proposed ISP level censor here but rather the existing censorship that comes from ACMA in the form of take-down notices and $11,000 per day fines. This type of censorship has been around for many years but fortunately the Internet has help liberate the Australian people by giving them a means to speak out. The Internet has given the people a voice and freedom of speech like never before and the Australian Labor party wishes to silence it by implementing mandatory service provider level censorship. This combined with the plan to monitor the Internet usage of all Australian Citizens is destroying our digital economy and moving us towards George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty Four.

Labor will chase any would be investors away with even more draconian Censorship. In order to move forward we need to become a safe haven for freedom of speech and freedom of information. That combined with our own investments into the infrastructure will provide an incentive for overseas and Australian companies to run servers in Australian data centres which ultimately means they will be investing in Australia’s communication infrastructure and economy.

Meryl cries witch-hunt and trial by media

Meryl Dorey of the anti-vaccination group “The Australian Vaccination Network” has broken her silence with fresh accusations against not just Skeptics, The Government and Stop AVN but she now accuses the media of inventing lies about her organisation. It seems Meryl just wants to fight everybody lately.

Newspapers and radio stations have been reporting ridiculous lies stating that the AVN believes in reptilian aliens and mind-control chips. They got this misinformation from Mr Ken McLeod, an active member of a group that has set out to either shut our small, volunteer-run organisation down or shut us up in any way they can. That is their agenda. What is the media’s excuse? –No Compulsory Vaccination

When you’ve been lying and bullshiting in public for as long as Meryl has the past is always going to catch up with you in one form or another. Especially when you earn yourself so much negative attention it always prompts people to look to the past. Meryl once posted the following message to a Yahoo group.

There will come a time – I pray to God that it will happen in my lifetime – when those who have pushed vaccines upon innocent, helpless babies – doctors, pharmaceutical companies, government officials – will be proven to have lied and cheated these instruments of death into our children’s bloodstream. When that occurs, the outcry will be heard around the world and there will not be enough hiding places on the globe for these murderers to hide or enough money to pay for compensation. Of course, it will be too late for the babies, like this poor child, to be saved. But we will be able to take satisfaction from the fact that never again will anyone have to be pushed to poison their child because for once and for all, it will be known as poison and we will all wonder how it was we fell for the vaccine lie for as long as we did. -Meryl Dorey, AVN Yahoo! Group, Tue 16 December 2008 9:08 pm Message #36449

Meryl really is that crazy and now the media are onto the trail and she is not happy. In her latest blog post Meryl also writes.

The AVN are vaccine whistleblowers and, like all organisations that are perceived to threaten an entrenched status quo, we are now being victimised by a group that openly states their object is to stop us in any way they can. Their tactics include death threats, threats of violence, calling our supporters to threaten them, filing complaints with every government body they can think of and generally inciting fear, hatred and violence towards us in the community – all with the support and cooperation of the government and the media. –No Compulsory Vaccination

To start with none of these claims are true except filing complaints with the authorities. The group she claims are threatening her go by the name “Stop the AVN” and they are making a good collaborative effort to monitor Meryl Doreys claims and blow the whistle when necessary. Interestingly Meryl who calls herself and the AVN both a “vaccine whistle blower” and a “Public Health Watchdog” has a problem with whistle blowers and watch-dogs whenever they aren’t serving her agenda.

This is the typical “Special Pleading” fallacy that we have come to expect from Meryl Dorey and the AVN. She may wish to question the efficacy of vaccinations; we are here to question the accuracy of her information.