Things that used to be on a blog.

Meryl Dorey condones child abuse

September 13, 2013

In November 2011 a naturopath posted this message to the Australian Vaccination Network's Facebook page:

A friend of mine was so outraged by this clear case of child abuse that he contacted the child protection authorities in the state where the naturopath plied her trade. Unfortunately, he fell into a buck-passing bureaucratic maze. You can see the story here.  To nobody's surprise, Meryl Dorey of the AVN rushed to the support of the abuser, as I reported the following month in The Millenium Project.

It is being reproduced here as part eight of a series about lies told by the Australian Vaccination Network running each day until September 18, the date set down for the District Court to hear Meryl Dorey's appeal against the dismissal of her frivolous and vexatious application for an Apprehended Violence Order against me.

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That child abuse thing (11/2/2012)
[Link to original article]

Back in January I mentioned a case of child abuse, where a naturopath boasted about exposing her child to chicken pox. Here is how the story was reported in the local paper, the Cambridge Post.

This did not please the anti-vaccinators, and here is what Meryl Dorey erstwhile (and perhaps still current) president of the Australian Vaccination Network had to say in a letter to the paper.

I love the headline: "Anti-vaxers reply on chickenpox". At least the paper is under no illusion about Ms Dorey's position.

Let's just give that letter the yellow marker treatment, shall we. My comments are in italics:

Stop the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) reported a WA mother to Child Protection Services (CPS) for doing what our mothers and grandmothers did – exposing her child to a benign disease of childhood so they would get natural immunity - a benefit vaccines cannot provide.

• The report was made by Ken McLeod, not SAVN.
• My mother and grandmothers were never stupid enough to expose us to disease.
• The "benign" disease kills children every day. I'm sure the families of the 100 people who died each year in the US prior to a vaccine becoming available thought that "benign" was a good description.
• Vaccines can certainly provide immunity, even if it's not "natural".

But the response of CPS and the government is the real concern.

Instead of laughing it off the government used this poor woman's situation to try to once again attack the AVN, a public health safety watchdog that has provided medically sourced information to Australian parents for more than 18 years.

• The government did in fact "laugh it off" – they did nothing about this quite clear case of child abuse. Unfortunately.
• Any relationship between the AVN and public health is negative – they want children to be sick.
• The "information" is sourced from medical specialists like the disgraced Andrew Wakefield, total loon Harold Buttram, the Geiers, who have been declared persona non grata as expert witnesses (and who give castration chemicals to children), and other people who have either forgotten their medical training or who paid someone else to sit the exams for them.

It is because of the AVN that families can still access all government payments and send their children to school, pre-school and child-care centres whether they are vaccinated or not.

• No, it wasn't "because of the AVN.
• And isn't the rest of it a disgrace? People can claim benefits to which they are not entitled and send their pox-ridden spawn to schools and kindergartens to infect other people's kids. This is not something I would be proud of, but as you can see there is no yellow – this vileness is the truth.

According to the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System, since the vaccine was introduced in Australia, the rates of chicken pox have been steadily increasing.

• First, The vaccine was introduced in 2003 and chicken pox has only been reportable since 2006. Here are the results:

• Notice the huge increase, mostly due to doctors now being familiar with what the disease looks like. I had chicken pox as an adult and it was the first adult case my doctor had ever knowingly seen. Also note the steady increase between 2008 and 2010.
• It would be expected that a newly-introduced surveillance system would show an increase in reported cases over time as doctors became familiar with what the disease looked like. By the way, there was one case in 2003 and 5 in 1997 (the two years prior to 2006 with reported cases), but to include those in the graph would cause my old stats teacher to come to my house with a machete.

If child protection can be called in because this mother tried to protect her child through natural immunity, what is next?

• Child protection wasn't "called in". A clear case of child abuse was reported to CPS, they flick-passed it to Health who then washed their hands of it. And as for "what is next?" Perhaps parents "protecting" their children from sexually transmitted diseases by exposing them to adults with syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia. Then see what CPS does, and it won't be "Oh, that's OK". And the mother didn't try to "protect her child through natural immunity", she placed the child in a health (and possibly life) threatening position. I suppose if I pointed out again that the mother is a naturopath and therefore devoid of any medical knowledge I would be accused of ad hominem, but facts are facts.