Meryl Dorey of AVN: Ramblings of an Idiot
February 11th, 2010
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As you probably now know, the Australian Vaccine Network is in its death-throws, as a wave of well deserved bad PR and greater awareness of their lies has hit them a bit too hard. Meryl Dorey, the head of the AVN has posted a long, rambling and absolutely ridiculous article over at “Age of Autism,” a website which is well known for pushing completely false and harmful information about vaccines along with other lies about autism.
Some might say that calling Dorey an idiot is an ad-hom attack, but what else can you possibly call someone who makes the following statements? Assclown perhaps?
This attitude has been sorely tried over the last 17 years. Tried by the media that only wants to protect its advertising revenue regardless of the cost to truth and justice; tried by the medical community whose roots and income are linked with an unshakable, almost religious belief in vaccination and the germ theory;
Yes, that’s right. They just won’t let go of that damn “germ theory.” Germ theory states that infectious disease is caused by pathogenic microbes or “germs” which include bacteria, viruses and occasionally parasitic protozoa or other micro organisms. It was pioneered by researchers like Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch and Joseph Lister in the late 1800’s and today is considered to be about as proven as a fact of science can be. After all, we can see germs under the microscope, culture them, detect them in infected subjects, kill them on surfaces with antiseptic and in the body with antibiotics. It’s not an issue of religion, it’s one of overwhelming and indisputable evidence.
Yes, she is challenging the very notion that germs cause disease. The idiocy of this is absolutely breathtaking. Before germ theory it was not uncommon for surgery to be carried out with no sanitary procedures at all. Doctors didn’t even bother to wash their hands and there were no efforts to disinfect drinking water or remove waste that provides a breeding ground for bacteria.
Some of the alternate explanations for infectious disease, which apparently Dorey would like to re-investigate include the following:
- Punishment from god
- Curses from Satan
- Evil spirits
- Foul smells
- Celestial bodies and their influence
She goes on to state:
and tried by the parents who have been taught to fear the diseases we currently vaccinate against and to blame those who have made informed choices about not vaccinating for outbreaks in the fully vaccinated.
If you really don’t think that infectious disease is something that is legitimately worth fearing, then you have a very poor grasp of history and the realities that still face many parts of the world. There was a time when diseases like cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis, polio and even smallpox could, without warning, show up in a child or adult and condemn them to an excruciating death, while leaving those around them fearful that they may have contracted the disease, sometimes for months afterward, due to the possibility of extended incubation periods. This still happens in all too many places. From slums in South Asia to the Indian countryside to central Africa, the suffering caused by unchecked vaccine-preventable disease remains very much alive.
It does not happen in vaccinated populations. Period. It just plain doesn’t happen.
The answer to that question is in your hands. I am at peace with my decision to stop when I no longer receive the support I need.
HAH! Good. No lying baby killer deserves support. People are not supporting you because you’re a very harmful and generally unethical person
Will we let those who oppose our right to choose; those who label Andrew Wakefield, Simon Murch and John Walker-Smith as unethical;
If Andrew Wakefield is not unethical, I don’t know who is. He was caught red-handed forging data. His research has been reviewed and audited and proven, beyond any doubt to be fabricated. There is, at this point, no reasonable argument that it was not. He subjected children to excruciating tests and procedures such as spinal taps, without ever providing good reason for doing so. He did things as absurdly beyond the normal practices of medicine as asking for blood samples at a child’s birthday party. He never sought approval from ethics boards for his bizarre research.
The images to the right are not meant to be inflammatory or shocking, although they very well may be. These are illustrations to show exactly what Andrew Wakefield did. Though unpleasant, it’s important to understand exactly the kind of unethical activities Wakefield was involved in.
They are from a medical reference and show the procedure of a lumbar puncture, commonly known a a “spinal tap.” It is an invasive procedure which does carry small but significant risk of infection or other complications. The procedure is sometimes necessary as a means of sampling cerebrospinal fluid in cases where an infection such as meningitis is suspected. It is occasionally also used to reduce pressure or to deliver medication, such as chemotherapy.
Spinal taps are notoriously unpleasant. Although local anesthesia is used, they may result in painful back aches and headaches. They also cary the possibility of more serious complications like spinal fluid leakage or, in rare cases, damage to the spinal cord, if the needle is improperly placed.
Wakefield preformed a number of these without any approval from ethics boards. These procedures did not yeild diagnostic or study data of any significance. This can be compared to preforming a full root canal on a healthy tooth – although the procedure is sometimes necessary, putting a healthy person through it borders on sadistic.
Perhaps the great American activist, Fredrick Douglass, said it best. Born a slave, without the benefits of education or wealth, Douglass triumphed against a time where being black was equal to being less than human. A time when few blacks were free – let alone literate. His triumph over his condition and the influence for good he had over others, including his work for justice for the poor, the downtrodden, and women’s suffrage, make him a beacon almost 115 years after his death.
Finally, this statement adds the icing to the cake when it comes to ignorance. Fredrick Douglass did indeed fight the establishment and champion the rights of blacks, women and others. Yet he lived in an era where the pain and suffering imposed by discrimination was eclipsed by that of infectious disease. Indeed, there was hardly a person, black or white who had lost a loved one to infectious disease and who was not aware that they could face death at any time because of it.
The US civil war, which would eventually free the slaves of the South saw far more casualties as a result of infectious disease than due directly to battle trauma. More slaves died of infectious disease than any other cause and during the period of reconstruction, many former slaves would see their attempts to carve out a better life destroyed, when disease robbed them of the ability to work and forced them into abject poverty.
Douglass himself was raised by his grandmother after his mother’s death, when he was only seven. As she was a slave, the exact cause of death has been lost to history, but was most probably infectious disease. He also lost a daughter to infectious disease at ten.
No person of Douglass’s era would ever look on the actions of the AVN with anything but horror and disdain.
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 12:15 am and is filed under Bad Science, History, Not Even Wrong, Obfuscation, Quackery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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February 11th, 2010 at 3:24 am
The key ingredients of a crank is an inordinate attraction to an idea or hypothesis to the point that she won’t abandon it in the face of overwhelming evidence coupled with the arrogance necessary to believe that she is correct and the rest of the world is not. This is probably true no matter what sort of ideas are being abused. However, when medical science is the topic, there are other issues that come into play.
Although vaccine refusers seem motivated to avoid personal risk, they are really acting from a misinformed and a one-sided view of risk. What this really points to is a fear of being responsible. The parent who vaccinates and is one of the few unlucky ones with a kid with adverse effects will have to ask him or herself “it was my fault, if I’d just not given in to the establishment”. If there kid gets the disease instead, well, that’s natural, not their fault, since they didn’t do anything active.
Stripped of the rationalizations, no matter how flimsy, provided by the likes of Meryl Dorey, that is the underlying reason this stupid mieme has had any legs at all.
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February 11th, 2010 at 3:43 am
“almost religious belief in vaccination and the germ theory;”
Jeez. Could a statement be any more idiotic? Yeah, I believe that germs cause disease and that many diseases are the result of germs. I don’t just ‘believe’ it – I’m damn dead sure of it because there aren’t too many things in this world you can be more sure of.
About as religious as my “belief” in gravity.
Even given some of the nuttiest anti-vaxers out there won’t go so far as to claim vaccines just plain don’t work. They so obviously and indisputably do.
If she is so opposed to germ theory then she should have no problem eating food that was prepared by someone who never washes their hands or drinking water full of harmful bacteria.
DV82XL said:
Ah yes, the fallacy that one is more culpable for that which happens as a result of action than of inaction.
Even if we dismiss the whole notion of the herd immunity and all, the specific risk to an individual from NOT being vaccinated, as I understand it, is still higher than the risk of being vaccinated and having an adverse reaction. Being vaccinated does protect the host to the vaccine and there are some diseases which heard immunity is not a factor in. For example, Tetanus – a hell of a way to die, really. Also, even in a well vaccinated society, you can still contract Tuberculosis because the bacteria that causes it can be found outside the human body and grows in the enviornment. Also Hepatitis-B is still around enough to contract that.
From what I have seen, the chances of an unvacinated person dying of an infectious disease, even in a vaccinated society, is still three times higher than dying of an adverse reaction to a vaccine.
DV82XL said:
I don’t always know what to make of these people. I mean are they bad people? Or are they good honest people who are just too malinformed and believe this? I thought about that for a while, but really I think it’s both.
These people are basically liars who believe their own lies. They’re both evil and crazy. They buy into their own self-serving rhetoric and develop a sense of entitlement to the point that their own fantasy makes them justify it all to themselves. I’m sure a psychologist could have a field day with their warped minds.
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February 11th, 2010 at 6:37 am
Q said:
Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt: once observed:
“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing BS requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the BSer, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”
This is exactly what Andrew Wakefield, Simon Murch and John Walker-Smith et. al. are: they are BSers, and that in my book is pure evil, when practiced on this scale. Meryl Dorey and Jenny McCarty are just ignoramuses.
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February 11th, 2010 at 10:48 am
no efforts to disinfect drinking water? No way.
The usage of wine, beer, ale or cider can be traced back to several antic civilizations and was for a long time the primary way of drinking water (until they were gradually replaced first by tea and coffee and later by reliable tap water). There even is a roman text in which Gauls are described as alchoolics because they like to drink the wine pure instead of mixing it water.
All my grandparents came from rural lowly educated environment, one from the south of France, who always drank a mixture of 1 dose of red wine with 3-4 doses of water (or coffee), the other, from the north ouest of the country was preparing every autumn thousands of bottles of “boisson” (a 1° cider prepared by mixing apple juice with watter) and a few hundred bottles of real cider (made from pure apple juice) reserved for the sundays or special occasions and told me young kids were given herbal/leaf infusions, never clear water (or more precisely, no water that has not been very recently boiled). They both told me it was a standard practice whose origin is long forgotten and were clearly aware it was a safety measure.
They all embraced tap water and refrigerators, but admited they never get used to drink tasteless pure water.
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February 11th, 2010 at 12:25 pm
Franck said:
That’s true, and for many centuries beer and wine was used instead of water, but they didn’t really understand why this was safer, only that it was observed that it was. It is still true that waterborne illness killed many. For one thing, adding some wine or cider, was not a powerful enough disinfectant to assure that contaminated water was always safe to drink.
If I remember correctly, one of the reasons that wine or cider or whatever was added to water was that it was believed that altering the taste was what made it safe.
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February 12th, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Maybe the death rate from surgery dropped after surgeons started washing their hands, because they were washing bad Karma off of them. Though one has to be VERY thorough to make sure you get ALL the bad Karma off, otherwise by just diluting the bad Karma it gets MORE POTENT!
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February 16th, 2010 at 1:09 pm
Magic Donuts: you are correct that people thought flavor was what rendered something safe. They were noting a correlation, basically, because *some* flavors are indeed associated with safety (just as some flavors are associated with poison). They had the same thoughts about scents; the modern aromatherapy trend is probably directly descended from this. The famous image of the “quack” actually goes back to legit (or as legit as was available at the time) medicine of the Middle Ages — the doctor would wear a beak-like mask packed with fragrant herbs to ward off the scent of disease. This wasn’t just for aesthetic reasons; they actually thought they would be safe as long as they didn’t smell the bad stuff.
And that comes to one of the alternate theories of disease mentioned in the OP: foul smells. The technical term was “miasmas”, and for a long time, the germ theory warred specifically against the miasma theory of disease transmission. It was reasonable; people noticed since ancient times that stinkiness was often correlated with disease. People who lived in foul smelling swamps were more likely to contract malaria (which literally means “bad air”); draining the swamps relieved the odor and also was followed by a decline in malaria cases. Hey, bad air must really be what makes people sick! Well, no; the swamp just happened to be a breeding ground for mosquitos. The fact that it happened to smell bad was just a coincidence. (Although, one does wonder whether we evolved a dislike for such smells as a crude disease avoidance mechanism. It’s obviously not well enough developed to save us, but the dislike for stinkiness may help enough to make it adaptive.)
This relates to one of the points made in the OP, that sewage treatment was not performed prior to the discovery of pathogens. This is not true. Quite elaborate systems for removal of human waste have existed since antiquity. They just didn’t realize the reason why these were important. Part of it was aesthetic — like most animals, we instinctively dislike our waste and would generally prefer to see it gone. But part of it was disease control. They knew untreated sewage was bad. They didn’t know why; they though it was due to the stink. So more efforts revolved around putting it downwind than putting it downstream, with sometimes unfortunate consequences.
Lastly:
I’m afraid this is not true. Antivaxxers go back quite a long ways — to before Douglass, in fact. Inoculation against smallpox was introduced to the West (from the Ottoman Empire, where it had been practiced for centuries) in 1718, and hopped the Atlantic to the American Colonies within a few years. It became very popular, but there were opponents even in the 18th Century. Voltaire wrote pro-inoculation pieces, chastising the anti-vaxxers of his day for opposing this lifesaving process. And that’s remarkable, considering that what they were opposing (inoculation with actual smallpox, vaccination with cowpox not being invented until 1796) was far more dangerous than what modern anti-vaxxers rail against.
So while most folks of Douglass time would support vaccination, there were those who did not, for various reasons. Some rejected the germ theory, usually in favor of miasmas. (Notably, some modern antivaxxers support the miasma theory, though it has evolved somewhat in the interim to be more about all manner of toxins than odors per se.)
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February 16th, 2010 at 4:38 pm
Calli Arcale said:
Yeah, thanks for correcting a few things there. You’re right about a number of things and one thing that can be noted here is that a theory can be useful and make accurate predictions even though it turns out to be totally wrong.
Bad smells, for example: Smelly decaying organic matter is a breeding ground for bacteria and human waste, which smells, also carries pathogens. Thus the actions that would remove these stinky materials would also reduce disease risks.
That said, some of these ideas could be useful at some times but could also cause harm in others. For example, one of the things that caused a lot of harm was that it was believed people should stay indoors with all the windows closed and shaded etc when they had something like the plague. The reason was that it would keep the “bad air” from getting in and making them sicker. Actually, this was horrible because it meant they got no fresh air and were left in a damp, dank enviornment where festering sores couldn’t heal and bacteria could easily grow.
Another idea was that bathing was unhealthy. It was thought that somehow bathing caused disease. Of course, this is not true. What they were observing was that those who bathed in contaminated water near cities or something got sick. Simple water borne illness. However, bathing in clean water, water which has been boiled or water which is from a clean spring away from a city is actually good for health. Poor hygiene increases the risk of infection.
When it comes to water: in many cultures it was believed that water was bad if it was left “stagnant” for too long and running water was considered “fresh.” Of course, water can stay in one place in a bottle for an infinite period of time if it’s sterile to begin with. What was observed is that if you keep water in one place and it’s not entirely sealed or something, then it can become a breeding ground for bacteria and it grows more and more foul.
It was thought that something like wine could “freshen” the water and restore it to a fresh, non-stagnant state. It worked okay in many cases, but it was not at all fool proof. The alcohol content of wine is up to 15%, so adding a splash of wine to some infected water does add some alcohol, but at that concentration and given the potency of alcohol as an antiseptic, it’s not going to be anywhere near 100% effective in killing everything. Certain strains of bacteria be reduced, but a little alcohol is not, by modern standards a way of making water safe.
Regarding sewage:
Yes, clearly many in centuries past realized it was dangerous and needed to be gotten rid of. However, I’d argue that not all appreciated just how important this was. Witness that in places like London, it was common to throw chamber pots into the street well into the 18th century.
The other problem was that being unaware of bacteria, they had no idea what made sewage unsafe and what could be done to remedy this. There wasn’t really “sewage treatment” so much as there was an effort to just get the sewage away from a city and usually that meant flushing out to sea or downstream on a river.
If you have a sewage system that flushes the sewage out away from a city, that’s certainly an improvement, but it doesn’t always work out that way. Communities down river can get hit for one thing, but even coastal cities are pretty limited if they’re on a slow-moving tidal river. Something like the Themes for example – that’s not going to flush out much. London had a big problem because unless you pipe the sewage miles out into open water, it’s just going to come back with the tide.
Just trying to get rid of sewage is of limited effectiveness. What needs to be done is treatment. Before germ theory we were pretty much flying blind on that one. Today sewage goes through stages of treatment which remove most of the sludge and then use “good” bacteria to digest and compost much of the material to reduce potential pathogens. The water goes through a series of steps which include treatment with things like chlorine and ozone.
I’d argue that something like mismania theory can indeed be helpful from time to time, but being fundamentally wrong, it can also lead you in the wrong direction. Foul smells are often associated with disease causing material, but not always. Adding some wine to water, might kill some pathogens, but it’s only partially effective. Removing sewage from a city might be somewhat helpful, but if you don’t disinfect it, you’re not doing the whole job. Free flowing running water may tend to be lower in contamination in general, but that’s definitely not a hard and fast rule.
We can’t rely on such hit-or-miss methods.
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February 17th, 2010 at 7:10 am
I’ve worked in water and wastewater treament and at labs. The whole point of treatment is indeed based on physical, chemical, and biological theories. The heavy solids such as sand/rocks have to be removed first, then you have to go between iterations of aeriation/settling/clarifying processes to get the nutrients separated from the majority of the water. Water treatment is a whole another ballgame, but the science behind it is the same. Both water and wastewater treatment plants need some kind of disinfectant such as Chlorine or Ozone or UV light and often combine them for effectiveness. I always thought it was cool that the US Navy uses vacuum tubes to generate radiation to kill bacteria in their drinking water. It has to be one of the most compact ways to disinfect a large amount of water if they’re using it on a submarine.
Some popular theories on autism seem to be related to either the age of the parent or interactions with chemicals in the environment. “Chemicals in the environment” tends to imply chronic exposure to a toxin such as how lead can cause brain problems. It doesn’t generally mean “oh he took Aspirin once and just happened to get cancer three months later – Aspirin must be what gave him cancer, OMG!”
The sad thing is that no one has determined the exact reasons people get autism, unlike with systemic lead poisoning leading to retardation. There is no easy “fragile X” syndrome’s cause which is screenable. There are no extra copies of chromosomes to detect. It simply hits seemingly normal couple’s children, although there does seem to be increased odds in a family if an earlier child or relative has it. I had some signs of autism as a child but luckily for me, never to the extent of some of my friends in school.
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February 17th, 2010 at 3:19 pm
Psst. It’s ‘death throes’.
Great post. Keep up the good work.
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February 17th, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Let’s be clear on what a theory actually is and what it isn’t (but is commonly thought to be). A good resource that I have read can be found here: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~kristal/DARWIN.pdf
Essentially, although we say the word “theory” to mean “my idea of how things go,” that’s really a hypothesis. Germ “theory” is not someone’s idea of how things go. It’s just not perfect, and therefore not called a law, like we might call gravity, but a scientific theory has to have a good amount of proof behind it before it gets such a title. Can theories be proven wrong? Sure, but you need to have pretty solid proof to do it (just like many skeptics would require damn good evidence before accepting that ESP exists).
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February 18th, 2010 at 11:46 am
drbuzz0 said:
Strictly speaking, this wasn’t so much because they didn’t understand that sewage was bad. It was a combination of the rapid and largely unplanned growth of London and various economic factors that made it impossible for many families to afford the services of a nightsoil man to clean out their cesspits. For instance, nightsoil men had to get rid of the waste somehow, and traditionally this was by sale to tanneries and farms. As London grew, these markets moved farther and farther away from the heart of the city, even as the quantity of nightsoil grew, and predictably, the nightsoil men began dumping it into the storm sewers, which drained directly to the Thames, and had to raise their fees because they couldn’t make as much money selling the waste, which meant that more households could not have their cesspits emptied and had to either start tossing the stuff out into the street or simply letting their cesspits overflow into the storm sewers. (At this time, the idea of a sanitary sewer was virtually unheard of; there was really only one kind of sewer, and indeed many cities built in this time frame still combine the sanitary and storm sewers to this day. It is, after all, very expensive to separate them if it wasn’t done at the outset.) The government really only took serious action after the Great Stink started to actually inconvenience Parliament itself.
There is a similar situation in overpopulated parts of Asia, where the authorities certainly understand the importance of sewage treatment (and, unlike Victorian England, understand *why* it is important) but can’t seem to bring themselves to actually do anything about it. Only part of this is down to money; another part is that the people who make the rules are generally not the ones adversely affected by a lack of proper sewage management, and this makes them less interested in solving the problem.
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February 22nd, 2010 at 11:33 pm
The basic core of the problem is that we don’t if there are any serious long term deleterious effects of vaccinations. Our technology has advanced very quickly in our lifespans and we don’t know all of the long term effects of the medical treatments. We do know that vaccinations prevent severe diseases that where they are not administered kill large numbers of people. However we have not been using these treatments for long enough to know the long term effects. It will take several more generations to determine any linkages if any can be determined.
When sound scientific knowledge is not yet available, superstition and crackpot theories fill the gap. No matter how ridiculous the statement, there are always people dumb enough to believe it. Chiropracty, Aromatherapy, Aura Healing, and most of the products hocked in infomercials are all great examples of this stupidity.
Autism has been the favorite of the anti-vaccine group because it is unknown. We do not know what causes the disease. They can make outrageous claims about the disease and people don’t know enough to discern the lies. We also do not know the actual number of children affected by the disease. 20 years ago I’d never heard of the disease and now everybody knows a few people with it. The real number of cases is hidden behind the doctors following the current fad. A few years ago everybody had ADD. Now I don’t know many people with it anymore. Strange how that happened.
I think I ought to start a rumor that autism is caused by a combination of Twinkies and Pez. If either of the parents have eaten both of these within the 10 years of having a child the risk of autism increases by 50%.
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