Dan's Journal of Skepticism

What’ is the difference between Skeptics and the Taliban? Because Meryl Dorey, founder of the Australian Vaccination Network wants to know.

That;s because they are NOT normal. Anyone who is even a little bit in touch with reality does not abuse others simply because of differing opinions. Tell me – how do the skeptics and SAVN members differ in any way from the Taliban or any other religious fanatics? They have started a Fatwa against anyone who questions vaccination – even those whose own family members have been injured or killed by shots. They have no compassion for the pain of others and many of them are paid trolls working for the benefits of Big Pharma (you need only look at the number of hours they spend writing on various online forums to see that). 

SAVN are the REAL Australian terrorists and if the law were in any way just, they would have been cited and charged with the crimes of harassment, abuse and threats – all of which are illegal according to Australian Federal and State statutes – years ago.

-Meryl Dorey, 12 August 2013

Meryl Dorey is well known for making absurd comparisons. Just like the time;

Meryl Dorey accuses a family court of raping a child.

Accuses a mobile health service of abducting children.

Likens herself to the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust.

Encourages followers to join a fake church. (Although one could argue that ALL churches are fake)

Is complicit in the abuse of greiving families.

There is more absurd accusations to come, but for legal reasons they will only be made public after the 22nd of August 2013.

Recently the Australian Greens have been speaking out against the deceptively named Australian Vaccination Network, with Senator Richard Di Natale calling upon the Australian Senate to condemn them for their campaign of fear and lies.

So I decided to send a quick thank you note to the Australian Greens for taking a stand against this dangerous organisation.

Dear Senators,

I am writing to thank you for your party’s stance against the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN).

I first joined the movement against the AVN back in 2010 after learning of the abhorrent behaviour of Meryl Dorey and her supporters, namely the harassment and abuse that was being dished out to the McCaffrey family after losing their daughter Dana to Whooping Cough in 2009. Apparently Ms Dorey felt it was appropriate to contact the local health authorities and demand confidential medical records so she could dispute the cause of Dana’s death.

When Ms Dorey came to Perth in June 2010 I attended her lecture held at the state library to witness firsthand the lies and fear mongering the AVN was said to employ. Ms Dorey did not disappoint and spent her entire talk promoting conspiracy theories between doctors, governments and pharmaceutical companies. She even made derogatory comments about Dr Paul Offit; a hero in my opinion for his work in developing the Rotavirus Vaccine. Ms Dorey refers to Dr Offit as “Dr Profit” in her attempts to demonize a man whos work has arguably saved millions of lives.

Meryl Dorey’s attempts to spread fear and intimidation to well-meaning parents in order to scare them away from providing their children with essential medical care and her unrelenting attacks against medical professionals and anyone who speaks about the danger of vaccine preventable disease are my primary reason for joining the campaign to see this disgraceful organisation shut down.

My actions in speaking out against The Australian Vaccination Network have not been without cost. When Ms Dorey came to Perth in 2010 I wrote to the library beforehand to advise them of the nature of the talk, I also encouraged readers of my website to write to the library and express their concern. As I don’t believe it is appropriate for people to lie about science and medicine in an educational institution such as a library. Ms Dorey was very upset that I and many others had been in contact with the library, she was especially upset with the correspondence that I had sent to the library as I also sent her a copy so that she would have the right of reply. Ms Dorey appears to have held a grudge against me ever since.

Over the past three years I have seen Meryl Dorey and her supporters grow increasingly hostile toward myself and other critics. During this time I have seen Ms Dorey progress from simply making snide remarks against her critics to filling Apprehended Violence Orders with the intent of gaging her critics, the order she’s seeking reads: “The defendant must not mention the applicant in any online forum in any derogatory manner.”  I am a defendant of this legal action living more than 4,500KMs away from the ‘Local’ Court in which Ms Dorey filed against me. I have been forced to spend my time and money to defend what I consider to be a fundamental human right; Freedom of Speech.

Other tactics that have been employed in the past by Ms Dorey to silence critics include contacting Internet Service Providers and making a false claim of copyright violation so that material critical of the AVN is removed from the internet. Ms Dorey has even gone so far as to claim under penalty of perjury that she is the exclusive rights holder to a document created by the New South Wales Government in order to have it removed from the internet.  Her supporters have taken to reporting my personal Facebook profile to Facebook’s automated abuse system as “Hate Speech” resulting in my account being banned on no less than three separate occasions, causing much inconvenience for myself and people with whom I communicate via Facebook’s services, family, friends etc.

Another underhanded tactic that has been employed by supporters of the AVN is to report the websites of the AVN’s critics to security companies such as Trend Micro and McAfee so that the security products sold by those companies prevent their customers from accessing websites reported to contain malware. None of the reported websites have contained any malware and the security companies involved (through no fault of their own) have now been made aware of the people trying to abuse their products for the purpose of censorship.

In 2012 Ms Dorey set up a website at AustralianSceptics.com which she has titled “The REAL Australian Sceptics” in an attempt to co-opt the trademark of Australian Skeptics Inc (Skeptics.com.au) a highly reputable organisation that has been a long-time critic of the AVN’s dishonest activities. I would not be at all surprised to see Ms Dorey attempting to impersonate the website of the Australian Greens.

But perhaps most concerning of all is an associate of Ms Dorey’s by the name of Patrick Timothy Bolen (Tim Bolen) who in October 2012 publically expressed a desire to lure critics of the AVN “into a dark place, so to speak, where angry friends are waiting (quietly) to make the equivalent of a “citizen’s arrest.”  And, they are allowed to wait there quietly, armed with the equivalent of a baseball bat, or two, or three, to be used to “subdue, with reasonable force”. Supporters of the AVN haven’t resorted to physical violence so far, I firmly believe that it is only a matter of time until there is a physical confrontation. The disgraceful behaviour of this organisation appears boundless and their hostility towards people who speak against them continues to escalate.

I commend Senator Di Natale and the Australian Greens for speaking out against the Australian Vaccination Network and have no doubt that you will now be receiving a sizable amount of hate and vilification from Ms Dorey, the AVN and their supporters. I believe this group will stop at nothing to silence, bully and intimidate their critics or frighten confused parents into not vaccinating their children.

The Australian Vaccination Network is an organisation that thrives on fear and dishonesty. It cannot be allowed to continue and must be universally condemned by all political parties in all houses, state, territory and federal.

Sincerely,

–Dan Buzzard, via snail mail.

Please consider doing the same. You can find The Greens contact details here.

Yesterday Meryl Dorey, founder and immediate past president of the Australian Vaccination Network was the guest on a podcast called Blog Talk Radio. Because no mainstream form of media will go near her.

During the episode Dorey repeated the same nonsense we’re used to, Government is corrupt, Anti-vaxxers are being persecuted like the Jews in the Holocaust. Generally stuff I wouldn’t recommend people waste their time listening to. However there were two new things that Ms Dorey said that she hasn’t previously disclosed publicly.

1. Dorey admitted that anyone who’s a member of the AVN is obviously opposed to vaccination. While we already knew this it’s alway good to have an official confirmation.

2. Dorey admitted that she isn’t bothered by people making threatening phone calls.

I have transcribed the audio as best I could:

Christian scientists are automatically exempt from any vaccination regulation. Um and when the conscientious objection clause came in we said well anyone who’s a member of the AVN should also be exempt, because by being a member they’re obviously objecting to vaccination on a conscientious level if not a scientific level. -Meryl Dorey; 28 Minutes 10 Seconds.

What’s happening now with the threats. I receive threats constantly. I’m used to it now, I got a call the other night from someone who’s using a voice synthesiser saying “You F-ing you know what, you should just die, please die” and I hung up the phone and I thought oh just another one. The fact that these things are happening is a sign that we are having the right effect. -Meryl Dorey; 42 Minutes 53 Seconds.

So Meryl Dorey freely admits that threatening phone calls don’t bother her? Why then did she initiate legal proceeding against someone she claims (and still hasn’t proven) made threatening calls to her home?

She also took out an AVO against Daniel Raffaele, who helped start the Stop the Australian Vaccination Network group, claiming he made threatening calls to her. Mr Raffaele, who denied making any threatening calls, said he eventually agreed to the order because he was “sick of dealing with it”, although he made sure her “gag order” was struck out. –The Daily Telegraph

Why did her husband Ken Dorey make a statement to the court about another critic of Ms Dorey stating that: 

Because of Bowditch and others, we live in a constant atmosphere of stress and fear. We have removed our letterbox and street numbers. We sleep with batons beside our bed and do not answer phone calls from undisclosed numbers. 

–Statement of Kenneth james Dorey (End of Document)

Ms Dorey has been playing the victims card for years now. So it’s quite refreshing to finally see an admission of no fear.

The podcast episode can be found here.

Australian Doctor reports on the latest dirty tricks being employed by anti-vaxxers to make doctors sign ‘Conscientious Objection’ forms.

Anti-vax parents are intensifying their efforts to have conscientious objector forms approved by circulating a document on how to “bully” doctors for their signatures.
Circulating by email and obtained by Australian Doctor, the two-page sheet of “tips” suggests parents warn doctors they will report them to regulators if they show “disrespect” for their anti-vax views.
The document also urges parents to refuse to pay for the consultation if a doctor does not sign. –Australian Doctor

The reason that anti-vaxxers are so keen to get these forms signed is due to a government payment called Maternity Immunisation Allowance which is a payment intended for parents who have “Fully Immunised” their children. Except there is a loophole whereby so called “Conscientious Objectors” can still claim the payment even if they can’t be bothered to get their children vaccinated.

The Conscientious Objector Form is all about money. Anti-vaxxers simply want payment for something they haven’t done and are willing to abuse anyone that gets in the way of their undeserved payment. So it comes as no surprise that The Australian Vaccination Network has begun circulating the document to it’s supporters.

Download the original document here.

So Meryl Dorey (As identified by the initials MD) defines abuse as any doctor who disagrees with her on medicine. Despite the fact that she holds no medical training or qualifications herself.

But it gets better. The Australian Vaccination Network also had this to say about medical professionals

Doctors want to be given absolute rights to do and say whatever they wish simply because they are doctors. They want to be respected as a result of their 8 years of pharmaceutically-provided education, yet they do not want to accept responsibility for the fact that people are leaving them in droves for more effective, safer and gentler natural therapies which have been around for hundreds or thousands of years longer than drug-based medicine. People are not stupid – they know what words and what does not and they are tired of being killed and maimed in the name of pharmaceutical profits.

Please read the comments below from the page of the Australian Doctor Weekly regarding why doctors should not sign conscientious objection forms and why parents should lose all of their rights. These are the people our politicians are listening to. These are the true terrorists in our society. Freedom of choice is NOT free. It must be fought for and it must be defended. If we are not prepared to do what is necessary to protect our children, then truly we HAVE lost our way as citizens of a democratic nation. –Australian Vaccination Network

Yes the AVN really is upset that the government listens to people with medical qualifications and expertise. Rather than a bunch of crackpot lunatics.

Well it didn’t take long for the nations leading anti-vaccination organisation to run into more trouble with the authorities. Now the Australian Vaccination Network is being investigated for consumer fraud as a result of their dodgy financial reports.

Jane Hansen, The Sunday Telegraph

I wrote the following letter to the AVN in January to ask about the questionable finances regarding the Magazine Subscriptions.

I never received any response from the AVN, but I do happen to know that past president Meryl Dorey was very unhappy about this letter. I expect she’ll be even less happy now that Fair Trading is asking the same questions.

A detailed look at the AVN’s magazine scam can be found at Diluted Thinking.

While Ken McLeod’s document: Meryl Dorey’s Trouble with Finance is an excellent introduction to the shifty financial reporting of the AVN.

I expect to see a lot more bad news for the AVN just around the corner. Stay Tuned….

One of the tactics that’s employed by the Australian Vaccination Network is to impersonate their opponents. It’s childish certainly, but we have come to expect such pathetic tactics from this organisation.  Misrepresentation and deception are the tools of choice for pathological liars so it came as no surprise that Meryl Dorey, who was president of the AVN at that time set up a website to impersonate Australian Skeptics Inc.

It is a poor impersonation and the intended deception is clear for all to see. The fake website in question is: AustralianSceptics.com and the whois record shows that it belongs to the AVN, plus it’s common knowledge that they own this site.

So back in May 2012 I wrote to the New South Wales Department of Fair Trading to notify them that the AVN was in violation of the ASSOCIATIONS INCORPORATION ACT 2009 (NSW) by refusing to identify that this website belonged to them.

I am writing to inform you that The Australian Vaccination Network Inc has recently established a new website at http://australiansceptics.com with the title “The REAL Australian Sceptics”, this is a deliberate attempt to mislead and deceive the public by purposefully using a confusingly similar name to Australian Skeptics Inc.

Despite the requirement under Section 41 of the ASSOCIATIONS INCORPORATION ACT 2009 (NSW) which states “An association must not issue any letter, statement, invoice, notice, publication, order for goods or services or receipt in connection with its activities unless the association’s name appears in legible characters on the document.”. The Australian Vaccination Network Inc has not included their name anywhere on the publication at  http://australiansceptics.com. This publication is being promoted on their official Facebook and Twitter accounts, and the domain name australiansceptics.com is registered to “Australian Vaccination Network” there is no doubt that this publication belongs to them.

Best Regards,

~Dan Buzzard

PO Box 72

Northbridge 6865

While I did receive a response from Fair Trading to say they would write to the AVN I never had the opportunity to see the correspondence that took place between the AVN and Fair Trading; until now.

The group Stop the Australian Vaccination Network was able to obtain copies of the correspondence between the Department of Fair Trading and the Australian Vaccination Network and sure enough on page 84 is a copy of the letter that Fair Trading sent to Meryl Dorey regarding my complaint the 11^th May 2012.

Then on page 89 I found the blatant lie that Meryl Dorey told to fair trading in order to avoid complying with the law.

Simply linking to another website is not the same as hosting it. If it were then it would mean the entire internet consists of a single website.  I am disappointed that Fair Trading chose to ignore the law breaking activities of the AVN and accept such an obvious lie. I will be following up on my original complaint as a result.

The correspondence released by fair trading is available here: AVN Trouble with Fair Trading (14 MB)

It’s a big file to go through and I expect I’ll beable to dig up a lot more dirt from it over the coming weeks.

On Tuesday the Australian Vaccination Network sent out an email full of their usual rubbish. Except there was one thing that caught my eye. About one third of the way down is the subtitle “Civil Liberties Organisation approves of Discrimination!” what I found was very amusing. It would appear that a member of the AVN has contacted Civil Liberties Australia regarding their stance on vaccination.

Thr CLA has responded:

Dear DM

We support vaccination, as it is a right of the child.

Note, the child. The child has a separate right from that of the parent.

Parents can believe anything they like, but we believe children have the right to the best chance at health.

This is a formal right under international agreement. the Convention on the Right of the Child.

You can make any choice you like…that’s your right. You can insist on your right to say ‘no’ as a new parent, but it could be your child who suffers the consequences.

Or another child: see the example in our policy document, or see the vision of the baby whooping in Sunday night’s documentary on SBS http://www.sbs.com.au  under Video Highlights, “Jabbed: Love, Fear and Vaccines” (you only need to watch a few minutes, the child comes at the start of the program). The child was whooping because an unvaccinated children had passed on the disease to the baby before the baby was old enough to be vaccinated.

If you choose to not vaccinate your children, we believe you are taking away their right to their best chance at health.

Your choice.

FROM OUR POLICY DOCUMENT:

The child has a right to health, independent of the right of a parent to adopt measures for her or his child that accord with the parent’s view

CLA believes that a child has a right to immediate vaccination in the face of an imminent and preventable illness (for example, Hep B for children born to mothers who have the disease) and has a right to a ‘best chance’ at life, which would support the well-tested schedule of childhood vaccinations.

Parents have a responsibility to act in the ‘best interests’ of the child (this is a formal responsibility on a parent under the Convention on Rights of the Child).

CLA’s position allows children (and their parents) to make their own decision on some types of vaccines, especially those that come later in life, such as the HPV[1] vaccine (which isn’t life saving in the same way Hep B, tetanus or whooping cough vaccines can be). It also allows parents a way to opt-out of ‘new’ and less-tested vaccines such as seasonal influenza.

Cheers,

Bill Rowlings

-Civil Liberties Australia

The idea that an anti-vaxxer would contact a human rights organisation is just beyond laughable. People who don’t vaccinate are contributing to a lower heard immunity and placing other members of the community at risk. Vaccination is a human rights issue and should be mandatory, with the only exception being medical reasons. Even adults should be required to be vaccinated if they wish to take part in society.

There is no “right” to lower heard immunity put others at risk of potentially fatal diseases for the same reason there is no “right” to drink and drive.

Godwins law states that:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

Clowns like Meryl Dorey who posses an over inflated persecution complex are particularly prone to mentioning Hitler and Nazis when talking about their opponents. This morning Dorey likened the activities of the NSW government to the holocaust.

On first reading of this bill, it is easy to see how little thought has gone into it. Calling it a knee-jerk reaction would be putting it mildly. This is legislation driven by a sector of the media with close ties to vaccine manufacturers and run on the back of a hate-filled vilification campaign which Australia has never seen the likes of before. This campaign has gone beyond all reasonable boundaries expected in a civilised society. Comparisons can be drawn between the current situation in Australia and historical social conflicts such as the McCarthy Era in the US and Hitler’s vilification of the Jews during the 1930s and 1940s. At least with these issues, there was plenty of public debate going on. Today, there is censorship and suppression of any discussion which is not in line with government and medical opinion on the subject. Should this blatant discrimination continue, history and the world will not judge Australia well.

–Meryl Dorey

She was quickly taken to task by a commenter on her own blog. But as usual she fails to see just how wrong she is. Much like the time she compared vaccinations to Child Rape.

The Rabbi is right! Meryl Dorey is out of touch with reality, warped and dangerous. Her own actions condemn her more than any of her critics can. No reasonable person could possibly compare health care legislation to the genocide of 6 million people.

The New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission has launched a new investigation into the Australian Vaccination Network.

The New South Wales Health Minister, Jillian Skinner, has told State Parliament the Health Care Complaints Commission is launching an investigation into the anti-immunisation group, the Australian Vaccination Network.

The announcement came after the Opposition raised concerns that the AVN was using its Facebook page to encourage parents to join up to a religion, in order to avoid new State Government vaccination laws. –ABC News

Yes the Australian Vaccination Network really is trying to promote a new religion in order to flout the law.

Anti-vaxxers are nothing if not creative when it comes to dodging the law. I’m confident that our lawmakers will soon find a remedy to patch this unscrupulous attempt to circumvent the law. This is not the first time the HCCC has investigated the AVN.

The Australian Vaccination Network is in the news again for trying to bully a family whose daughter died of whooping cough. Four years ago Dana McCaffery died from Whooping Cough, she was born into the midst of a Whooping Cough epidemic and was too young to be vaccinated.

What followed was an unrelenting campaign of abuse and harassment aimed at Dana’s family. Meryl Dorey the president of the Australian Vaccination Network at that time took it upon herself to intervene by writing on her organisations website.

When this little girl’s death was announced, the media were reporting several things that made me question that this baby had actually died of whooping cough. I contacted the head of the public health unit and asked if this case of pertussis (whooping cough) had been laboratory diagnosed. -Mery Dorey, 2009

Meryl Dorey likes to bill herself as an expert on vaccination. Though in reality she has no medical training, and no research experience. Although she may sometimes claim to have been “Researching this issue for the last 20 years” the reality is that she simply cheats and scams parents into believing her lies. Fortunately Dorey was denied the information that she had no right to ask for in the first place.

At last Dorey is finally getting the recognition she deserves with a story in the Daily Telegraph..

The McCafferys are today breaking their silence on the cyber bullying,the anonymous letters and the cruelty of some members of the anti-vaccination movement.

The couple has been accused of being on the payroll of drug companies; they have had their daughter’s death questioned and mocked; they have even been told to “harden the f . . . up” by an opponent of vaccination.

“The venom directed at us has just been torture and it’s been frightening, abhorrent and insensitive in the extreme,” says Toni, who has not had the strength to talk about this until now.

The invasion of the McCafferys’ grief started the day before they buried their baby girl. Meryl Dorey, who heads up the Bangalow-based Australian Vaccination Network, rang the head of the North Coast Area Health Service, Paul Corben, to demand Dana McCaffery’s autopsy reports. –The Daily Telegraph

Judy Wilyman, a student at the University of Wollongong has even accused the McCaffreys’ of being on the pay roll of major pharmaceutical companies. But the McCaffreys’ aren’t the only family to be targeted by Meryl Dorey and her followers.

In 2009, Terrigal father of four Chris Kokegei turned off his seven-year-old son Michael’s life support system three days after the little boy caught chicken pox. “It’s just pain, the pain, it is so awful,” he says.

Like the McCafferys, he went public to raise awareness about vaccination. In 2010 he did three television interviews and he left his phone number with each network for other parents to get in touch.

Soon after, he received a call from a woman who claimed she was from the AVN. He does not recall her name.

She accused him of doing the community a disservice, saying he should not be promoting immunisation.

“Then she went on saying my son was obviously weak and the weakest of the herd are not meant to survive, I should just get over it,” he says. –The Daily Telegraph

Cecily Johnson lost her 12 year old daughter to measles in 1995. Her daughter Laine had previously contracted measels at the age of 10 months, but survived. But a deadly side effect was lying in wait and eventually claimed her life years later.

Cecily Johnson wanted to warn others of the danger posed by measles and attended some of the AVNs “information” sessions. Meryl Dorey eventually threatened her with an Apprehended Violence Order as a means of silencing her.

When questioned by the media Ms Dorey denies having ever heard of Cecily Johnson. However Ms Johnson is mentioned several times on Ms Doreys’ blog. If you going to lie and say that you’ve never heard of someone, perhaps you should check your own website first.

I don’t expect the AVN to change it’s abusive tactics anytime soon.