[...] now the Australian Skeptics have made a formal complaint against Meryl Dorey and the AVN. You can read the whole complaint here (PDF). Dorey was the woman [...]

[...] may not have heard, the Australian Vaccination Network (an utterly misleading name) is going to be investigated by the New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission for its dissemination of misinformation and outright lies about vaccination.  I don’t have [...]

[...] This conspiracy theory’s presence on the AVN blog raises a big question. Does Meryl Dorey, the group’s lead quack, actually believe this stuff sans aliens, or did she just post something unflattering about vaccines because it has “vaccines,” “fear” and “swine flu” in the title? Considering the content of her other entries, it seems pretty reasonable that she’s ready and willing to fall for it. And there might be new conspiracy theories gracing her blog in the near future. After the public debate stirred by the death of a four week old child who contracted whooping cough and her commentary on the case, Australian skeptics have finally heard all they could hear and launched a formal complaint against the AVN. [...]

Oh Meryl will love this. A martyr for the cause. “Spectre of compulsory vaccination”? a spectre of her own conjuring.

Epic
Win

Dr Rachie, I owe you at least a nice glass of wine on Thursday, for making me smile so broadly.

RE: “Will the AVN be silenced”, para. 5:

“We just try to…inject some balance into the debate…”.

Was that meant to be an attempt at humour or irony by Meryl?

It’s more ironic than she realises. Her “injection of ‘balance’” is more likely to have injurious or even lethal side-effects than the vaccinations she opposes!

Great to see the possibility of her being brought to account.

+1 for Science and Reason

Anyone else get a giggle out of Meryl’s claim that the AVN are trying to “inject” some balance into the debate?

This is very good news.

For some reason I couldn’t see the 5 posts above me when I posted my comment, and what I thought was a highly original and witty observation, wasn’t actually that original after all. On that note, I’m off to write some jokes about Sylvia Browne. Back soon.

To quote

“7.1. Regarding the use of the MMR vaccine in Japan, the AVN says on their website: 9
“ Some countries such as Japan have stopped using the combination vaccine because of the increased risk. “
Response 7.1.1. Japan. First, let us be clear. In April 1993, Japan stopped using the MMR vaccine, (five years before the Wakefield paper10 was published), following unsubstantiated reports that the anti-mumps component might be causing meningitis. 11 This was then an unsubstantiated perceived risk and the Japanese Government commissioned research to see if there was an actual risk. “Perceived Risk” is different to “Actual Risk.” The AVN fails to refer to later research, very widely reported, that showed that in Japan, the number of children with autism continued to rise after the MMR vaccine was replaced with single vaccines. Hideo Honda PhD of the Yokohama Rehabilitation Center concluded that the MMR vaccine cannot have caused autism in the many children with autism spectrum disorders in Japan who were born and grew up in the era when MMR was not available. “The findings are resoundingly negative,” Honda said in his report.12 So, the perceived “increased risk” was found to be baseless, and for the AVN to say that “Some countries such as Japan have stopped using the combination vaccine because of the increased risk “ is selective and deceptive, and completely out of date.”

Fellow skeptics, do I really need to highlight the dodgy, rather unscientific assumption/logic in the statement which concludes “the MMR vaccine cannot have caused autism in the many children with autism spectrum disorders in Japan who were born and grew up in the era when MMR was not available.” The said children were however exposed to monovalent measles vaccine. The safety concerns about live measles vaccine did not begin with Dr Wakefield’s paper in 1998, so it is unscientific and misleading to represent a continuation of an upward trend in autism cases when the MMR was replaced with monovalent measles vaccine, as evidence of MMR’s safety. Wakefield’s paper was ground-breaking for it’s identification and characterisation of unusual chronic intestinal disease temporally associated with MMR vaccination. It was not ground-breaking in terms of raising questions about the safety of a live vaccine which included measles. I’m always amused how this is reported in the media, as I am when it is reported that another study “proves no link between MMR and autism” when it would be more correct to say that “no link was found between MMR and autism”. These 2 statements are of course 2 different things, but we can’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. In the 1970’s, my mother identified what is now described as autistic regression within 2 weeks of my, now deceased, younger brother’s measles vaccine. She also claims that I developed epilepsy, requiring years of medication, within a week of receiving the measles vaccine. Same doctor’s visit, same vaccine, one infant and one significantly older child. One gets mental retardation in spite of previously normal development, one gets epilepsy, other three older siblings apparently unaffected. My brother’s diagnosis was changed to autism many years later. Purely anecdotal, of course. We need a clean, prospective study comparing unvaccinated populations with vaccinated populations. This study would not of course be able to identify which individual vaccines are any safer than another, but it would expose the dramatic difference in chronic disease incidence between the 2 groups. There’s enough of us around who have never vaccinated and never will vaccinate their children to make up the numbers in the unvaccinated group. Bring it on!

Bernice,
While I can sympathise with your family history, it is also true that many men find they have to start shaving soon after the get their driver’s licence.
.
No studies have been done to discount the theory that driving causes the growth of facial hair in men. As such, we should assume a link.

…one day we could end up with a movie like Erin Brokovitch. Who will play Meryl?

Hannibal Lecter?

Not to mention the increase in global warming and the decrease of the number of pirates.

http://www.venganza.org/piratesarecool4.gif

I worry about all of this a quite a bit. We walk such a fine line with freedom of speech. I would be much happier to see a government education initiative directed at teaching the truth. An organisation such as the AVN doesn’t have the resources to fight such a battle and would become increasingly marginalised. The AVN, much like the Bikey gangs (won’t they love that comparison) are orginisations that can cause great harm but prescribing them is starting down a rocky road fraught with dangers to civil liberty.

I think if this does happen it will be a hollow victory, one that does not address the disease merely a symptom. Education is the only lasting solution to this social problem.

@Rory Hart,
I agree wholeheartedly, freedom of speech is a right that everyone has, including Meryl Dorey. She may hold in my opinion false beliefs but she has exactly the same right as I do in expressing those. The only thing that we can do is expose those false beliefs and by providing evidence to support those beliefs, (Thanks to @drrachie for numerous hours of research and blogging) point out and act when she breaks the law. Sometimes small fringe or underground organisations can be more dangerous than larger exposed ones.

Err … Jeff

“Not only that. I’ve noticed something astonishing. Every
morning, just after arising, I fart. Often on a seismic scale.
Not long after, the sun rises!
No-one has conducted any study disproving the link, so I think
it should be accepted by all that my flatulence causes
the sunrise”.

For goodness sake Jeff, this is a serious debate here. Your so-called “sunrise” is an illusion caused by the rotation of the Earth; therefore your flatulence causes the Earth to turn, (and probably the milk also).
Bob

BigBob,

“therefore your flatulence causes the Earth to turn, (and probably the milk also).”

Not to mention more than a few stomachs.

Berince, a quick pubmed search led to this study in Danish kids showing the rates of autism in both vaccinated and unvaccinated kids to be the same:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1124634&tool=pmcentrez

also this study showing an increasing rate of autism dispite a fairly consistent rate of MMR vaccination:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1071423&tool=pmcentrez

Or

Elliot B, These studies do not compare vaccinated and never vaccinated children. I was already aware of the the 1st one (Danish MMR), which, I must say, has been roundly criticised from many quarters. I’m sure you would be able to find these critiques if you were really interested, but if you wish me to post some links let me know. There’s also a Danish Thimerosal one as well from memory. These studies were amongst a flurry of studies commissioned to restore public confidence in vaccination programs, and silence those who dared to raise legitimate questions about vaccine safety. I did read the British MMR study (Kaye et al) which you provided a link to, and found nothing compelling there, just more junk science. Can you honestly argue that study is good science? No doubt, you would have noticed the obvious conflicts of interest.
Competing interests: The Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program is supported in part by grants from AstraZeneca, Berlex Laboratories, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Boots Healthcare International, Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceutical Research Institute, Glaxo Wellcome, Hoffmann-La Roche, Janssen Pharmaceutica Products, R W Johnson Pharmaceutical Research Institute; McNeil Consumer Products, and Novartis Farmaceutica
Let’s compare vaccinated with unvaccinated (never vaccinated) children to look at incidence in both groups regardless of the age at diagnosis which varies amongst practitioners, or the subjective classification of ASD’s into subgroups which also varies amongst practitioners. Let’s look at the numbers of all ASD’s as well as the autoimmune diseases, allergies, asthma, etc. in the 2 populations. I suspect the difference between the 2 groups would be staggering.

Goal posts moved? I rest my case.

Believe it or not, the AVN now have a pro-vax article on their blog…

I has no content beyond a link to an online news article but it sort of “recommends” vaccinating against flu. How things change.

It must have finally clicked that they can’t make the claim to be pro choice while only having negative articles, so they’ve thrown up one token positive article so that when people criticise they can point at this one and go “No, we do give both sides, see!”

Elliot B,
you said
“Can I just point out that’s a terrible example of goal-post moving. You asked for a study that looked at vaccinated vs unvaccinated.”
The so-called unvaccinated group have still been vaccinated but not with the MMR, essentially a comparison of 2 vaccinated groups. In any case, per my reply to Andy D on another thread, “not finding a link” does not equal “proving a link does not exist.”
I haven’t shifted any goal-posts. If you refer to my first post to this blog on “Toni Mccaffery has had enough” you will note my wish to have research conducted comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated populations in terms of developmental disorders, autoimmune diseases, allergies etc.
you said:
“Lastly on a different note, I would just like to laugh at the AVN’s reply, namely their listing of their ‘right to free speach in the constitution of australia’, which no such right is given”
Was this part addressed to me because I have no affiliation with the AVN or any other organisation of this type. I am an independent skeptic, and challenger to the orthodoxy. I know that you would prefer to subscribe to the conspiracy theory that the AVN is brainwashing people, and that anyone who challenges the orthodoxy is evil and unscientific. My personal take on the AVN is that it is preaching to the choir anyway. Why are you so worried about them anyway?

bernice:

There is nothing unethical in comparing disease incidence in vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations who choose to be unvaccinated.

The ones who choose to be unvaccinated are usually not a comparable group to those who are vaccinated. There are often vast differences in financial status, and (especially with the much touted Amish in America) genetics.

Though that has been done in several large epidemiological studies covering several countries, in a couple of continents covering several million children over the past twenty years.

The result: Vaccines have no causal relationship with autism.

You said:

s injecting multiple boluses of thiomersal into infants, as was done up until recently, ethical. You’ve got to be kidding me.

You really don’t know much about Australian medical history, do you? Not only was the correlation between mothers being infected with rubella being connected to disabled children first done in Australia, and so was the reason for doing something about contaminated vaccines. From an “evil” American site:

“In January 1928, in the early stages of an immunization campaign against diphtheria, Dr. Ewing George Thomson, Medical Officer of Health of Bundaberg, began the injection of children with toxin-antitoxin mixture. The material was taken from an India-rubber-capped bottle containing 10 mL of TAM. On the 17th, 20th, 21, and 24th January, Dr. Thomson injected subcutaneously a total of 21 children without ill effect. On the 27th a further 21 children were injected.Of these children .eleven died on the 28th and one on the 29th. (Wilson 1967)”…. snip… From this experience, the Royal Commission recommended that biological products in which the growth of a pathogenic organism is possible should not be issued in containers for repeated use unless there is a sufficient concentration of antiseptic (preservative) to inhibit bacterial growth.

Now here is an interesting thing, Canada and the UK phased out the use of thiomersal over a decade ago. The last pediatric vaccines in the USA to have thiomersal were used up over eight years ago. The removal of thiomersal from pediatric vaccines has had no effect on the increase in the diagnosis of autism. This should be a non-issue. And yet, here you are bringing it up like it should be important.

Of course, this is completely separate from the MMR debate. The MMR in use in the UK since 1992 was the one approved for use in the USA since 1971. Even with the MMR used between 1988 to 1992 with the Urabe strain of mumps, the cases of mumps component causing meningitis was several factor less than the cases caused by the actual diseases. That vaccine has never contained neither thiomersal nor aluminium (which is alum, the stuff that is used in making pickles!).

Speaking of ethics, one mother did do the “it is my right to do what is best for my child” bit. She had been diagnosed with HIV, yet chose to avoid anti-viral medication, and breastfeed her children. Her “it won’t happen to me” bit included a paragraph in her website that her two children were “alive and well”. Which worked until her three year old daughter died. Then she died last last year.

Here is an ethics problem… in the USA there have been issues with vaccine production, so there was a shortage of the vaccine for Haemophilus influenzae type B. This caused many children to be unprotected, and it came back. A child died:

The other three cases — including the death — were in infants whose parents refused to vaccinate them. Parents of two children objected to vaccines; the parents of the third child were waiting to vaccinate until the child was 5 years old.

Wow, waiting to vaccinate really worked for them: NOT!

bernice read this blog post about why the study such as you want cannot be done.
http://photoninthedarkness.com/?p=154

Also I like that you thought my reference to the AVN comment was directed at you, I even stated “on a different note” to try to imply the completely unrelated nature of the comment.

Grendel, I hope you’re not losing sleep over it. Sleep is good for cognition and critical thinking. If you wish to speculate about my motives, beliefs, or affiliations with anti-vaccine organisations, I simply don’t care. If it is important to you and your fellow skeptics(fanatics more like it)to spend huge amounts of time trying to connect me with the AVN or question my skepticism, again, I simply don’t care. Label me what you will! The last time I made a post to you was on another thread, in relation to immunity being dependent on underlying nutritional status, but you haven’t responded. Have you found anything to repudiate that claim? To reiterate, immune response to infectious disease is dependent on nutritional status, regardless of vaccination status. It is incredibly naieve to believe that vaccination can protect against infectious disease in the presence of sub-clinical or frank malnutrition states.

Chris, I am well versed in the history of thiomersal use in vaccines and other medical products. What may have been scientifically defensible in the 1920′s in the context of number of doses, was certainly not defensible up until this decade when thiomersal was phased out of paediatric vaccines. Prior to the phasing out of thiomersal from the paediatric vaccines, and by the age of 6mths, infants routinely received 150 micrograms ethylmercury from thiomersal containing vaccines (HIB 25mcg + DTP25mcg from multidose vials @2,4,6mths of age, source: Brisbane City Council), significantly more than in the 1920′s. American infants received more due to their more aggressive schedule. Why was the thiomersal removed if not for toxicity issues? The widespread use of thiomersal in multiple vaccines for infants with undeveloped blood brain barriers could not be defended on any scientific, medical, ethical or moral grounds. It was criminal negligence of the highest order.
Both of the recent papers below identify the unknown effects of thiomersal, so one can only question why such an unstudied substance is still being used at all in vaccines, let alone in infants in large amounts up until recently.
http://www.jleukbio.org/cgi/reprint/81/2/474.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15808517
(The full article for the 2nd paper is on the net somewhere, I just can’t remember which site I was able to access it from, I’ll keep looking)
Finally, one thing I’ve always wondered is why the scientific community has not developed an anti-microbial with a better risk profile, after all those years of vaccine research. Why is it still in some vaccines such as influenza?

and for me – cut-and-paste always ends in tears – ignore my last two lines!

Interesting choice of reference since it is one that has been trumpeted on anti-vax and mervury-causes-autism sites since it was published, and worse doesn’t suggest what they were all hoping it does. I’m curious – have you read more than the abstract?

I read the entire paper – and have to confess that the statistics and analysis made the thing hard going – and I read these papers regularly (often seeking advice from my colleagues who are better versed in the laboratory end of research than I).

I’m not sure what you are trying to suggest by posting the link – the paper is what it is, but I am not sure what point you are trying to make by citing it?

Bernice – did you ask why that group posted the paper? and the google list I assume you saw would have should you that other than the publishing companies that sell access to this paper the only others that had it available were all Thiomersal-causes-autism crowds – and this didn’t ring any warning bells for you?

In the words of Inigo Montoya – I do not think that word means what you think it means – in this case the ‘word’ being the entire text of the paper. I recommend you contact the authors (listed on the paper) and ask them to explain if the research they report can be used to support the argument you wish to make. This is the usual protocol when you are not certain about the relevance of their work to yours.

Bernice, I’m not going to bother arguing your motivations – only you really know them after all, however your final sentence is just bad science – as I suggested in my last comment I recommend you actually contact the authors and ask their opinion. They are in a much better position to outline to you whether their research supports your point of view.

“Why was the thiomersal removed if not for toxicity issues?”

Why did VHS win the video tape war over the arguably superior beta format?

Politics, marketing, conspiracy and a range of other pressures come to bear on what makes it into the marketplace. If mercury in vaccinations was causing lots of parents to forgo vaccination, the leaving it in serves little purpose.

It’s really not much different to putting a big red tick and the word “lite” on a food product that is neither low in fat nor good for you. It’s all about perception and getting the product accepted.

Grendel & Andy
To quote:
“Today, children receive more total number of vaccinations given
together during the first two years of life, leading to exposure to quantities of mercury that exceeds the safety guidelines through thimerosal in vaccines. There is an increasing concern about association between the exposure to mercury (via vaccination) and the development of neurodevelopmental disorders, especially autism and learning disabilities [3–8]. This has led to thimerosal being withdrawn from pediatric vaccines in the United States starting in 1999 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,1999). Nevertheless, thimerosal is still used in influenza, diphtheria toxoid and acellular pertussis, and tetanus toxoid vaccines. The majority of the studies are directed toward understanding the neurotoxic effect of thimerosal, and few studies deal with its effect on the immune system.”(Agrawal et al)
The authors state that childrens’s exposure to mercury from thiomersal exceeded the safety guidelines. Thiomersal was removed from infant vaccines due to cumulative toxicity from multiple vaccines which in terms of mercury exposure exceeded safety guidelines. This does not support your claim that thiomersal was only removed from the infant schedule due to it’s social and political toxicity.
Elliot, Children are being given the flu vaccine even though it is not on the schedule, believe it or not. Bizarre, I know. It would also appear that the saviour of mankind, the swine flu vaccine will be distributed in multi-dose vials; no prizes for guessing what the preservative will be. So for the children of those hysterical parents who rush out to be injected and have their children injected with the, more experimental than usual, swine flu vaccine, will be injected with a nice bolus of thiomersal as a bonus. It doesn’t matter about a bit of mercury, it’s an emergency!

Bernice – I think you lack the background to understand the paper you cited – I’m calling your bluff on this one. I know this because you start by citing from the introduction which has a vague statement about ‘concern about association between exposure to mercury” etc. Now that doesn’t mean that the CDC is concerned only that they acknowledge that there is a concern (in the general community). That is – they were not concerned about a risk factor, they were concerned about perception.

The paper itself did not at any point examine any link between mercury and neurodevelopmental disorders. It looked solely at the interraction between mercury and one part of the immune response to determine if too much mercury acted as an immunosupressant.

I won’t comment otherwise on the paper, only to say that in my opinion it provides no support whatsoever to your arguement and the authors of the paper can state whatever they like but some of the very papers they cite in their references are contracdictory with their views.

You also seem keen to base your argement on one source alone – this is also not the way science is done. Even worse when you pick a paper like this one that is not even in the same field as the point you are argueing.

Just to be clear – you were citing from:

“Thimerosal induces TH2 responses via influencing cytokine secretion by human dendritic cells”
Anshu Agrawal1, Poonam Kaushal, Sudhanshu Agrawal, Sastry Gollapudi and Sudhir Gupta
Division of Basic and Clinical Immunology, University of California, Irvine, California, USA

This includes a contact – so perhaps you can follow up and ask the author whether their research supports your position.

1 Correspondence: Division of Basic and Clinical Immunology, Med. Sci I C-240, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. E-mail: aagrawal@uci.edu