The Australian Vaccination Network, which opposes compulsory vaccination, is likely to close at the end of February, according to a blog post on their website.
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David Jackmanson
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4ZzZFM NEWS 
Rachael Dunlop is a 2006 PhD alumnus of the Sydney University Medical School.
http://www.medfac.usyd.edu.au/our-alumni/viewuserdetail.php?id=20769
As such, she is properly referred to as Dr. Rachael Dunlop.
The honorific Dr. does not necessarily denote a Medical Doctor but does recognise Dunlop’s 8 years of education and attainment of a PhD in Medicine.
Further, you could at least spell her given name correctly.
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Thanks to 4ZZZ for correcting the identification of Dr Dunlop to include her honorific.
Now, can you please explain why you quote Dorey’s emotionally charged and factually incorrect statement at length? And especially with no reply from Dr Dunlop?
Meryl Dorey states that she has never been made aware of the local vaccination rates for the Byron Shire? That is demonstrably untrue, and Dorey knows it. She was found, by an ABC radio internal investigation, to have provided information to a presenter which was intended to mislead. It was the same conflation of statistics that she was attempting here. She was made aware of the findings of the investigation. She has referred to that investigation since. She is not being honest in her dealings with the public.
This is why the AVN will close. They are deceptive and provide misinformation that they have been shown, repeatedly, is questionable at best. I repeat, at best.
Thank you for highlighting her dishonesty once again.
Brian,
Because (as the journalist who prepared this story), I think it’s in the public interest for Ms Dorey’s opinions to be available. When Ms Dorey’s opinions are available, people can begin to make informed judgments on her advice.
David, her opinions ARE available in the AVN group you link to on Yahoo. She gives no advice per se in this wildly emotional appeal nor does she support her position with any facts.
In the text of this story, you characterise Dr Dunlop as being a ‘critic’ and paraphrase her for one sentence. Your direct quotation of Dorey doubles the length of the entire piece!
Dorey has made a career out of fact-free (or just plain factually incorrect, as reasonablehank points out) emotional appeals like this on you have quoted, which far too many news outlets run as fact and without adequate balance.
The truth of the matter is that there’s no scientific evidence to support anti-vaccination scare campaigns. The harms of vaccine-preventable disease far outweigh the known side effects of any vaccine. There has been a marked reduction in vaccination rates in Australia which are directly attributable to factually incorrect emotional appeals such as you have quoted- at length- from Dorey. The reduction in vaccination rates has lowered ‘herd immunity’ and increased the incidence of preventable disease. In particular, low rates of vaccination against whooping cough in the Northern Rivers area of NSW are directly attributable in the death of infant Dana McCaffery almost exactly one year ago. Dana was herself too young to be vaccinated, but if more children and adults had been vaccinated in her Northern Rivers area, Dana may well be alive today.
Dorey’s ‘resignation’ and mooting of closure of the AVN comes terribly coincidentally with the UK’s General Medical Council’s finding last week that Dr Andrew Wakefield acted unethically in obtaining data for his 1998 paper in which he errantly asserted the MMR vaccination was associated with autism. Further, The Lancet made worldwide headlines 3 days ago with the retraction of Wakefield’s MMR/autism paper as false. Wakefield’s assertions have been Dorey’s stock in trade since 1998.
Sometimes, there’s not two sides to a story. ‘Balance’ may mean pointing out that one side is simply wrong.
Brian, Ms Dorey’s words are *not* available on the Yahoo Group. The group’s messages are not available to non-members, and membership must be approved by a moderator.
The only reason a screenshot of Ms Dorey’s words is available is because I bothered to dig around and ask for it (and bothered to upload it to my own Flickr account, after verifying with Ms Dorey that the words are in fact her own).
I find it interesting that while you clearly note that Ms Dorey’s words are a “wildly emotional appeal”, you seem to assume that other people will not see her words as such and draw their own conclusions. Do you think other people are more stupid than you, and they cannot be trusted with such statements?
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