Meryl misquotes – how unusual

A pervasive trait of anti-vaccination liars (shared by many followers of pseudoscience and pseudomedicine) is to cite or even quote material which can easily be shown to be either false, crazy or even saying something opposite to the quoter's position. Here are some articles from The Millenium Project showing Meryl Dorey from the Australian Vaccination Network committing these acts. The first article is a general comment I made years ago about this phenomenon.

They are being reproduced here as part eleven 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.

Last week I mentioned how someone had been citing some research about Ritalin but the researcher didn't seem to exist, thus casting doubt on the existence of the research. Further investigation has uncovered the paper in question, but it was actually written by someone else (or maybe the same person using a different name) and didn't find what the reporter had said it found. There were no surprises there, as I have found from long experience that alternative medicine supporters can be quite flexible in how they cite research which supports their prejudices. Here are just some of the tricks they get up to in order to deceive people who don't have access to medical libraries and might just be fooled into thinking that because some charlatan says something then that something has some truth to it. At various times I have seen:

You would imagine that if a pharmaceutical company had developed a new and deadly virus they would want to keep it a secret. Apparently in the case of swine flu this is not so. That reliable source of medical information, the Australian Vaccination Network, published the following news item on their blog:

BAXTER LABS FILES PATENT ON H1N1 (SWINE FLU) IN AUGUST 2008-1 YEAR AHEAD OF THE OUTBREAK! We are told that Swine Flu (so-called – the H1N1 virus) which is composed of 2 swine, one avian and one human virus is naturally-occuring. Yet here we have the company that shipped human flu vaccine contaminated with bird flu to 18 countries filing a patent on H1N1 almost a full year before the outbreak started! And, may I add, the outbreak began very close to Baxter's lab in Mexico City – the same lab that has been experimenting with flu vaccines! When is there going to be an independent investigation of this company? When is the government going to test flu vaccines for contamination?

You will note that the claim is that Baxter have invented and patented a new virus. You will also note the specific date of the patent application – August 2008. When I checked the US Patent Office register of patents and patent applications the only thing I could find about Baxter and H1N1 in the last couple of years was a single application in 2009 (not 2008) relating to research into the development of viral vaccines.

The most recent patent issued to Baxter relating to H1N1 is 7,052,701, dated May 30, 2006 – "Inactivated influenza virus vaccine for nasal or oral application". I couldn't find where they had patented the pathogen itself. Perhaps they patented it in Mexico.

I have asked Meryl Dorey of AVN the simple, unambiguous question: "What is the patent number?" As she is certain that Baxter has patented H1N1 she should have no problem providing a speedy and verifiable answer. If she either can't or won't answer then I will have to assume that the story is a fabrication. Wouldn't that be a surprise?

Last week I mentioned that I had asked Meryl Dorey from AVN for the number of the patent she claimed Baxter Healthcare had filed on the swine flu virus. She replied with something like (but not exactly) the patent application number I already knew about. (I loved the way she described it as "so-called – the H1N1 virus". For some reason quacks and their supporters seem to think that putting "so-called" in front of the real name of something has meaning, other than exhibiting the mental inadequacy of the writer. I have seen it many times and it always amuses me.) I sent the following reply to her, but I haven't received an answer yet. (I didn't bother to point out that the virus behind the 1918 flu epidemic was the "so-called" H1N1, which has just been invented.)

It is not a patent of a virus, it is an application for a patent on a method for the manufacture of viral vaccines.

The only mentions of H1N1 (which is also a human flu virus) are in a) discussion of the well-known fact that flu vaccines contain multiple antigens and b) description of how the viruses are inactivated so that the vaccine cannot cause infection.

There are 2816 articles indexed in PubMed with the keyword "H1N1", going back to 1976. Are you suggesting that they are all about the current strain of swine flu?

By the way, I live within 50 kilometres of Baxter's plant at Toongabbie? Should I be worried, seeing as that is the evidence for Baxter being involved in the swine flu outbreak in Mexico?

While I had PubMed out I thought I would answer another AVN claim which was made in the same Baxter bashing thread on the AVN blog. The claim was "[n]o vaccine has ever undergone a true double-blind crossover placebo study". My comment did not make it past the blog moderator (I didn't really expect it would), so it also remains unanswered.

HIV Testing Outside of the Study Among Men Who Have Sex With Men Participating in an HIV Vaccine Efficacy Trial. Gust DA, Wiegand RE, Para M, Chen RT, Bartholow BN. 1: J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr. 2009 Jul 1. [Epub ahead of print]METHODS:: Analyses were restricted to men who have sex with men (MSM) who completed a survey at one or more annual visits in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled efficacy trial of a bivalent rgp 120 vaccine conducted from 1998-2002.

Antibody response to influenza vaccine in coronary artery disease: a substudy of the FLUCAD study. Brydak LB, Romanowska M, Nowak I, Ciszewski A, BiliÅ„ska ZT. 1: Med Sci Monit. 2009 Jul;15(7):PH85-91

MATERIAL/METHODS: This was a substudy of the randomized prospective double-blind placebo-controlled FLUCAD study on influenza vaccination in the secondary prevention of ischemic coronary events in patients with coronary artery disease.

A Dose-Escalation Safety and Immunogenicity Study of Live Attenuated Oral Rotavirus Vaccine 116E in Infants: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Trial. Bhandari N, Sharma P, Taneja S, Kumar T, Rongsen-Chandola T, Appaiahgari MB, Mishra A, Singh S, Vrati S; Rotavirus Vaccine Development Group. 1: J Infect Dis. 2009 Aug 1;200(3):421-429

Methods. The neonatal rotavirus candidate vaccine 116E was tested in a double-blind, placebo-controlled dose-escalation trial in India.

Now you have at least three (out of the 1031 in PubMed found by searching for "vaccine double blind placebo") you can stop saying "No vaccine has ever undergone a true double-blind placebo study", because saying it again would be a lie as you now know the truth.

And the bit about "crossover" trials? Well that is true. There have never been any crossover trials, because such a trial would involve vaccinating half the subjects but not the rest and at some later time vaccinating the previously unvaccinated and unvaccinating the vaccinated. This is obviously impossible and the anti-vaccination liars know that. They hope that the people they lie to don't know.

Yes, those words were used by Meryl Dorey, president of the Australian Vaccination Network, when describing the public perception of her organisation. I rarely agree with Ms Dorey on anything, but this time I think she is absolutely correct. In fact, during the week she published some material on her blog Cody The Religion Hating Dog

endorsing some lunatic who claims that swine flu is just an excuse to get people ready to be vaccinated and the real reason for the vaccines will be actually to insert microchips into everyone so that the Rothschilds, Bilderbergs and the Illuminati can track our every movement before the great cull comes to reduce the world's population to a fraction of what it now is. (The lunatic in question stole the piece verbatim and in its entirety without credit from the web site of noted loon David Icke, famous for his claims that the British Royal Family are all lizards. Ms Dorey therefore not only promotes a truly insane conspiracy theory but endorses theft and plagiarism. Nice work.) Cody The Religion Hating Dog posted a message to the AVN's Facebook page saying that he was already microchipped and it wasn't doing him any harm. He also pointed out that as he is a dog he is allowed to be barking mad but what was Ms Dorey's excuse? He was banned shortly afterwards.

To give you the flavour of the material endorsed by AVN, here is a quote from the web page offered by Ms Dorey as evidence of the conspiracy behind swine flu:

A cabal of interbreeding families is seeking to impose a global fascist dictatorship of total human control.

Those on the inner levels of this structure are collectively known as the 'Illuminati'.

This is how they coordinate between apparently unconnected governments, corporations, media groups etc. The Rothschild and Rockefeller dynasties (the same bloodline) are fundamentally involved in this, as I have long exposed, and they dominate pharmaceutical medicine and government 'health' policy worldwide.

The web controls governments, the pharmaceutical industry, or 'Big Pharma', the World Health Organisation and public heath 'protection' agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States. In short, they control the entire medical system.

The Illuminati cabal established global bodies like the World Heath Organisation, World Bank and World Trade Organisation to transfer power from the many to the few. Their goal is a world government, world central bank, world currency and world army.

The Illuminati plan for the world includes a mass cull of the population and the microchipping of every man, woman and child. Microchips would allow everyone to be tracked 24/7, but it goes much further than that.

Computer technology communicating with the chips has the potential to manipulate people mentally, emotionally and physically. This could be done en masse or individually through the chip's unique transmitter-receiver signal. Killing someone from a distance would be a synch. (sic).

In a major victory for common sense, the AVN closed their Facebook page, removed all discussion and messages, and severely restricted who could post to it. This was done in response to an invasion of sensible people asking sensible questions and providing sensible information about vaccine safety and effectiveness. The sensible people responded to claims that vaccine safety had never been tested by offering the 7,648 papers in PubMed which suggest otherwise, and responded to claims that vaccine efficacy had never been tested by offering the 13,726 papers from the same source which seemed to say different. Needless to say much fun was had with the extremely kooky conspiracy theory mentioned above. The suddenly it was all over. Doors closed, with us on the outside.

"1.Both sides of every health issue should be freely available for anyone who is trying to make a decision".

I have been removed from the AVN's Facebook page, as have many other people, and everything I wrote there has been deleted.

These actions seem to be in direct conflict with the AVN policy reproduced above, and could even be construed as examples of hypocrisy.

You are free to read my web site at any time you like and if you send me comments I will publish them. You are free to join any public mailing list that I manage and post whatever you like to the list and you will not be moderated in any way (unless your messages expose me or anyone else to legal action). You have my permission to follow me on Twitter. You can be a fan or member of any Facebook page or group (or any other online forum) of which I am an administrator and any comments you post there will be left untouched (again unless they expose me or anyone else to legal action).

I have nothing to hide and I am not ashamed of what I say or do. It appears that you can say neither. Prove me wrong.

The idea of AVN claiming that all points of view should be heard blew up my irony meter. Luckily I have a circuit diagram so I can build another one.

There was much rejoicing in anti-vaccination liar circles this week because a court had ordered the US government to stop the practice of mandatory vaccination. The injunction would have had the effect of preventing any mass vaccination campaign in the face of a possible epidemic or biological threat from a terrorist or foreign hostile power, and would presumably have extended to preventing the military from vaccinating servicemen and health authorities from insisting that doctors and nurses were fully vaccinated.

The victory was announced on many anti-vaccination liar web sites, but I became aware of it when the Australian Vaccination Network issued a media release. You can read the full item in glorious colour here, but the first paragraph gives the flavour:

After more than 30 years US District Court issues injunction to stop compulsory vaccination

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 – For Immediate Release:

30 years after compulsory vaccination became US Law: US Court issues an injunction to stop it and to hold the the government and drug companies responsible for reactions.

A Preliminary Injunction to stop mandatory vaccinations has been issued in the United States District Court of New Jersey. This comes after a federal lawsuit opposing forced vaccines was filed in that court by Tim Vawter, pro se attorney, on July 31st with the federal government as defendant. When the judge signs the Preliminary Injunction, it will stop the federal government from forcing anyone in any state to take flu vaccine against their will. It will also prevent a state or local government from forcibly vaccinating anyone, and forbid any person who is not vaccinated from being denied any services or constitutional rights. Vawter's filings included a Complaint, and several pages of evidentiary Exhibits.

You will notice the specific statements – the matter was filed in the United States District Court of New Jersey, it was filed on July 31, and the lawyer was Tim Vawter whose "filings included a Complaint, and several pages of evidentiary Exhibits". What it doesn't say is the name of the judge or the case identification number so I thought I would see what I could find in the US court PACER system, which is a record of all matters before federal courts. I thought that the best way to find it would be to start with the lawyer's name, and here is what PACER told me:

Well, I have to say I was a little surprised to find that no lawyer with the name Tim Vawter had ever appeared in any matter before the United States District Court of New Jersey. Perhaps someone had made a mistake. To clarify matters, I sent the following email to Meryl Dorey at the AVN:

In a media release today you state that the US District Court of New Jersey has issued an injunction stopping vaccination.

A search of the court records for matters filed by any attorney named Vawter produced no results (see attached search results). Please provide a reference for the case so I can read the ruling on an official court site.

I haven't received a reply yet, but the following notice has replaced the story on the infamous Natural News web site: (In May 2010 I found that this page had been removed from the NaturalNews site. The most likely reason is that Mike Adams did not want any evidence left behind that he might have been wrong about something when he he was spreading lies about medicine. Unfortunately, the Web Archive hadn't managed to grab a copy of the backdown before it was deleted.)

Preliminary Injunction to Halt Mandatory Flu Vaccination in the U.S. Has Been Issued (correction) Tuesday, August 11, 2009 by: Former Contributing Writer, citizen journalist

(NaturalNews) Editor's Note: It has come to our attention that the following article is factually incorrect. It was written by a contributing writer, then approved by an in-house editor who did not catch the significant errors in this article. As a result of these significant errors, and due to our commitment to publishing only true and accurate information to the best of our ability, we have made an editorial decision to reject further articles from this author.

NaturalNews deeply regrets this unintentional error, and we are brainstorming new ways to put in place tighter fact-checking oversight so that the same mistake does not happen again in the future. We thank all those who have brought this important matter to our attention, and we pledge to increase our efforts to reject stories that contain factual inaccuracies.

For the record, what was factually incorrect about the story (which we confirmed by phone with a clerk of United States District Court of Trenton, New Jersey) is that no such injunction has been filed. Thus, the entire premise of the story was factually incorrect.

Here at NaturalNews, we strive to bring you accurate, honest information on these topics, and we deeply regret the unintentional publishing of the inaccurate information that previously appeared in this article space.

Do you see that: "no such injunction has been filed". The story was a fabrication. It was made up. It was a lie.

It took me about ten minutes to demonstrate that the story was false. I have sent the following email to Meryl Dorey:

It now turns out that as I expected the story about the US District Court banning mandatory vaccination was a fabrication. You could even call it a lie.

Are you planning to issue a media release apologising to all the media outlets who received your initial distribution for misleading them with something which could have been proved to be incorrect with about ten minutes effort?

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