Category Archives for "Conspiracy theories"

May 31, 2014

Meryl: A Guide For Journalists

After Meryl's recent outing at the Queensland Woo Festival, where she lied about all the usual vaccination topics including Shaken Baby Syndrome, decent people everywhere are again appalled at her bad behaviour and also disappointed that credulous, poorly-researched journalists continue to give her media coverage.

It's not many journalists these days, of course. Most of the industry have seen enough of her and learned their lesson. But still, every now and then she slips through and gets a story - which should never happen at this late stage.

To address the problem, the enviously talented Shelley Stocken produced this perfect and funny quick-reference guide to Meryl for the media. Enjoy and then check out her blog; there's a lot more good stuff where this came from!

Disease, False Balance and Meryl Dorey - a Guide for Media

Because her opinion isn't news.

For the benefit of media who think it's worth consulting anti-vaccine lobbyists for "their side" when writing about the serious issue of immunisation, I'd like to suggest a few points, if I may:

  1. Right now in Australia we're battling outbreaks of measles and whooping cough.​
  2. Evidence has shown that creating false balance by providing anti-vaccine speakers (who have opinions based on opinions) a platform alongside medical experts (who have opinions based on evidence), makes people give more credence to the anti-vaccine view than if it was presented in isolation.
  3. As I see it, if you include an anti-vaccine lobbyist alongside an expert in a story about vaccination, you are hindering the success of public health initiatives and contributing to the spread of vaccine-preventable diseases.
  4. This:
Who says epidemiologists know nothing of disease?
Who says having eyes to read stuff with trumps medical degrees?
Who says science texts are pharma’s agitprop depository?
Who says doctors murder babies? Yes, it’s (tut, sigh) Meryl Dorey.

Who says people who shake babies aren’t to blame for fractured ribs?
Who says Sudden Infant Death is just a garbage load of fibs?
Who says death from Whooping Cough is just some mother’s made-up story?
Who says measles is a gift? That’s right, it’s (head-desk) Meryl Dorey.

Who says AIDS might not be real because she’s not seen HIV?
Who says foetuses are sold and turned to vaccines secretly?
Who says polio’s still rife, but in a different category?
Who says vaccines cause autism? Same old (face palm) Meryl Dorey.

Who says Meryl Dorey’s incorrect? My state’s HCCC.
Who says Meryl’s claims are bulldust? People at the ABC.
Who says Meryl is misleading? Why, the Office of Fair Trading.
So don’t put her in your story, ‘less your story needs degrading.
October 2, 2012

Meryl and the false balance bulldust

Oops! Meryl copped another spanking on national TV – even more blunt & directly than the last time.

So what’s Meryl done this time? Short summary of events:

Regional TV program WIN News Illawarra indulged in some very sloppy journalism by inviting Meryl to comment on a measles outbreak. Meryl reflexively pushed her usual line of scientifically discredited vaccine-Autism link crud and self-described as a “pro choice” advocate. Numerous people contacted WIN News to point out their error; WIN ignored most messages and acted like an antivaxxer themselves by deleting others off their Facebook page. As a consequence, national media watchdog TV show Mediawatch ran a story on the incident, describing Meryl’s organisation in perfectly-worded terms:

“But Meryl Dorey’s deceptively -named Australian Vaccination Network is in fact an obsessively anti-vaccination pressure group that’s immunised itself against the effect of scientific evidence.”

“Dorey’s claim about the medical literature linking vaccination and autism is pure, unadulterated baloney.”

“Medical practitioners – choice groups. One opinion as valid as the other. It’s a classic example of what many – especially despairing scientists – call ‘false balance’ in the media.

[…]

To put it bluntly, there’s evidence, and there’s bulldust. It’s a journalist’s job to distinguish between them, not to sit on the fence and bleat ‘balance’. Especially when people’s health is at risk.”

The video and the full story can be viewed here.

Oops, Meryl! We know you crave publicity you attention-whore, but this isn’t helping!

National negative publicity like this will ensure it’s a long time indeed before you get another credulous interviewer inviting you to say whatever you want in mainstream media. Which is a good thing, because frankly you deserve to languish in obscurity…with, say, an audience of the dozen tinfoil hat wearers who listen to Fairdinkum Radio.

In fact, why not cut out the middleman and just invite your fellow nutters over to your house to listen firsthand to your next spittle-flecked diatribe? Why not fling open the trapdoor and entertain them in the room under your kitchen floor? Macadamia toast slathered liberally with Macadamia butter and a hot cup of Macadamia tea for everyone!

Oh, Meryl!

June 24, 2012

Meryl bites that hand that healed her, rabies results

One might have expected Meryl’s recent stay in hospital and surgery to have softened her rabid criticism of doctors and science-based medicine. If nothing else, most people would want to avoid the obvious hypocrisy of claiming medicine:

  • is ineffective
  • is all a giant hoax, scam and/or con
  • does more harm than good
  • is in fact a giant conspiracy by money-grubbing doctors doing the bidding of reptilian shapeshifting aliens
  • is rendered completely unnecessary by the ready availability of magic water, vitamin C, illegal acidic ointment, rainbows and happy thoughts as alternative treatments for disease and “whatever ails ya” (as the old-time patent medicine salesmen used to say)

…even while she’s still recuperating from surgery in a hospital.

But we know from past experience that Meryl has no problem at all with being a hypocrite and having the facts against her doesn’t give her the slightest pause for thought. So no one should have been surprised when she grunted out her latest warm & steaming pile of conspiracy:

Really, Meryl? Your entire family, for generations, has been killed off by doctors? I don’t suppose you have the slightest shred of evidence to back up that claim? Didn’t think so.

Things do work differently in Merylworld…we already know that like most rabid antivaxers she confuses correlation with causation.

She’s also hopeless with maths, so much so that she’s had a logical fallacy named after her: the Doreyan fallacy assumes that any percentage lower than 100% is equal to 0%. So a vaccine that is measured at 85% effectiveness becomes, in Meryl’s view, “completely ineffective” and the same as not vaccinating at all.

(Wow, the casinos must love it when Meryl drops in play…perhaps that’s why the AVN rakes in $280,000 per year for magazines they promise but don’t publish and Meryl still begs for cash every week?)

So perhaps that explains why Meryl attributes every death, everywhere to evil doctors?

We’ve seen a hint of her paranoia when ranting about the person who, “…went into hospital healthy…” (she only had lung cancer after all, perfectly healthy!) and was dead only a few weeks later. Of course it wasn’t the lung cancer that killed her, it was the evil doctors who were only pretending to try and save her! Riiiiggghhht…

Meryl does mental gymnastics to be able to blame her favourite scapegoat every time someone dies, but at least she is so clumsy about it that everyone sees what she’s doing.

Meryl is such a dummy, she’s as thick as two planks and makes no attempt to hide it. She’s been described as “The Pauline Hanson of antivaccination” which is fairly apt, like Ms Hanson she is in the twilight of her career but still as funny as hell. Oh, Meryl!

May 4, 2012

Meryl errs on Ebola

If nothing else, Meryl approaches her antivaccination crusade with total commitment. She’s taken her irrational antivax beliefs all the way to their furthest possible conclusion and come out of the closet as an AIDS denialist specifically and more generally as germ theory denialist.

Even by Meryl’s whacky, crackpot standards this is an amusing blooper though:

Yes, you read that right: Meryl attributes the symptoms of Ebola not to infection with the Ebola virus, but rather to a side effect of vaccination.

Ha ha, go Meryl!

April 29, 2012

Meryl thinks wacky conspiracy theory “makes sense, Alf”

Meryl has never met a vaccine-related conspiracy theory she didn’t like, or even one she didn’t endorse wholeheartedly. Even so, this one is an absolute cracker by any standard:

Perhaps you think that’s just too far “out there” even for Meryl? That even she couldn’t buy into such a nutty, crazy conspiracy theory? Think again:

Whoa, Meryl!

December 28, 2011

Meryl’s accurate introduction

Hilariously original blogger Shelley Stocken has proposed that whenever Meryl makes one of her increasingly infrequent public appearances, her host should introduce her to the audience with a great deal more honesty and accuracy than Meryl herself utters when she speaks. Something like this would do nicely:

Ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys, please welcome to the stage,
The best-known anti-vaccination fibber of our age.
A practitioner of obfuscation, fear and superstition,
Who’s been called out by the New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission,
And the AMA, the ABC, OLGR and more.
She sells non-existent magazine subscriptions in her store.
Folks, the woman who’s about to speak to you in this pavilion
Doesn’t know what “research” means, nor “my mistake” nor “parts per billion”.
She doesn’t know ‘morbidity’ from ‘people being dead’;
And her only real credential is the brain inside her head;
A brain that pleads the Fifth when large donations disappear;
And that thinks “medical journal” means the same as “New Idea”
One that wanes when faced with facts, but faced with Natural News it waxes;
A brain that thinks that homeopathy is prophylaxis.
She’s an expert in the field of Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc;
You can bet the farm that everything she says today’s a crock.
It’s my pleasure to present, in all her dazed, downtrodden glory,
The queen of the conspiracy – I give you Meryl Dorey.
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