Meryl’s medical music

Meryl gets little credit for her tireless work as an environmentalist, perhaps because she’s opted to forgo the popular and trendy activities of protecting animals and plants to instead focus on protecting diseases.

It’s an issue that gets little publicity, but someone has to do it and so Meryl has taken up the banner on behalf of endangered diseases everywhere. Without Meryl’s good work, innocent diseases like Polio, Measles, Rubella and Meningitis could become extinct.

All good environmentalists worry about the destruction of habitats through human activities, and the loss of Amazon rainforest as a home for all manner of animals through logging is no more important an issue than the loss of human bodies as a home for diseases through vaccination.

Who will speak for the diseases? Who will protect THEM from dying out? Meryl will!

Meryl is a friend to all diseases, advocating tirelessly on their behalf. She works to correct misconceptions that diseases can injure or kill, explaining instead that they are mild or harmless – even a “gift from a goddess” in the case of Measles. But above all else, Meryl works to protect diseases from harm and ensure they continue to have plenty of human bodies available in which to live and breed.

Vaccination destroys the habitat of Meryl’s favourite diseases, so she opposes it relentlessly. The disappearance of Smallpox was a catastrophic event for the pro-disease community, one which rocked them to the core and brought home just how much we are at risk of losing these diseases from our world forever. Sickness promoters like Meryl swung into action, determined to preserve the diversity of illnesses circulating in our world.

Without Meryl’s efforts, diseases like whooping cough would be contained to small pockets of hippies around the country and Measles would be on the verge of disappearing, like Polio is. Fortunately with Meryl’s help, diseases that were once on the brink of extinction are now coming back strongly. Numbers are growing, populations are becoming self-sustaining as increasing numbers of parents are offering up their children’s bodies as breeding grounds for Meryl’s illnesses. Yes, Meryl is doing a fine job for her cause.

Alas, Meryl gets little respect for her tireless work and we think that $280,000 per year is a grossly inadequate reward for protecting and spreading disease so effectively. So as a small gesture of appreciation, the team over at RtAVM have gifted Meryl a selection of music for her iPod. The songs have been carefully chosen to represent Meryl’s passion and good work in the service of protecting diseases from harm. Here’s her musical top 20:

1. All the Shingle Ladies
2. Rubella Tuesday
3. It’s Raining Meningitis
4. It had TB you
5. My Rubella (ella, ella, ella)
6. I come with the warts down under
7. I like big Mumps and I cannot lie…
8. Polio killed the Radio Star
9. Knowing Measles knowing Flu
10. I don’t wanna HiB without you…
11. M-M-M-My Sha-Rotavirus
12. Stuck in the middle with Flu
13. My Mumps, My Lovely Lady Mumps
14. HPV, easy as 123
15. Girls just wanna have Mumps
16. She blinded me with pseudo-science
17. Just the Tetanus (We can make it if we try)
18. Salk on by
19. Take a chance of Measles
20. Ain’t no stopping Tetanus now

Enjoy, Meryl!

Meryl gets it wrong, yet again

A typical day at the AVN Facebook page: starry-eyed acolyte drops by to ask a question of Meryl, self-proclaimed leading vaccination expert in Australia, with some 20 years of “experience”. So far so good, except…oops!

Oh dear, Meryl is schooled in vaccination by a nobody. Again!

Meryl, this is happening so often now it’s getting embarrassing. You’d better do something about it, ASAP! And I don’t mean your usual trick of deleting the whole comment thread, banning everyone involved from the AVN page and pretending it never happened. No, I was thinking of something more like…retiring to save yourself further embarrassment.

Bye Meryl!

Meryl demands respect

One of Meryl’s frequent complaints is that those nasty skeptics are so terribly disrespectful to her.

Now the first problem is that Meryl’s extremely thin-skinned and she considers even politely pointing out the factual errors in her claims to be disrespectful or worse. (The only polite behaviour is complete and unquestioning agreement with whatever The Dear Leader says). Identifying errors certainly warrants deletion of the post and banning the person from any forum that Meryl controls, despite her regular bleating about free speech and censorship, as hundreds of people have discovered.

But more than that, Meryl bemoans the fact that nasty skeptics call her names! Oh dear, how dreadful. Lying in order to persuade people not to vaccinate and causing the deaths of innocent children by doing so is a triviality, but insulting the cult leader herself – that’s serious!

Well, maybe Meryl has a point. Maybe name-calling does lower the tone of the debate, maybe we should be diligent about treating each other with politeness and respect at all times. I think that’s all that Meryl is asking for, is that right Meryl?

Oops! Not very respectful, Meryl.

What does Meryl do whenever she’s caught out saying something truly stupid or otherwise embarrassing? Well, it happens all the time so no need to wonder: she denies and tries to avoid responsibility for her actions. And true to form that’s what Meryl did here, too:

Ha ha, yes “words that I may or may not have said” is destined to go down as another classic Meryl quote and evasion tactic, alongside “Did I say that? I don’t believe I did“, her (failed) attempt on national television to evade responsibility for a particularly callous comment about the parents of a child who died from whooping cough.

Poor Meryl, this evasion attempt failed too because someone took the trouble to document all of her comments and spell them out in this blog post: On the convenience of forgetfulness…The Dorey Dilemma.

Wow Meryl, it turns out you really did say all those words. And no, it looks like you weren’t taken out of context at all.

Caught out telling pork pies yet again! Oh, Meryl…

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!

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:

Meryl the government-certified liar

In 2010, Meryl earned a unique distinction for her organisation: after a lengthy investigation it was found to publish antivaccination misinformation. In other words, Meryl was government-certified as a liar.

Well done, Meryl! All antivaccinationists lie, but no one else has lied as publicly, obviously and callously as you – sufficient to receive this unique recognition.

Oh, Meryl!

Meryl and the press release that flopped

Everyone makes a mistake now and then, occasionally gets a fact or two wrong and usually corrects themselves when it’s pointed out. But only Meryl can demonstrate such a true mastery of mistakes that it is breathtaking to watch her in action. She truly is a Warrior of Wrong, the Emperess of Error!

Meryl’s ill-fated recent trip to Perth caused her a litany of woes, not least of which was triggering a government investigation of the AVN and significant publicity of same. Meryl decided to counter the onslaught of bad press the only way she knows how: by lying some more. Meryl put out a press release claiming there was no investigation into the AVN and alleging that the journalist who wrote the story also submitted the complaint.

A month later the results are well and truly in:

• The investigation into the AVN is still under way
• The complaint which triggered the investigation was not filed by the journalist, but by a member of the public.
• There was no ethical breach by the journalist

Meryl Dorey managed to get every single fact in her press release wrong. That’s all of them. That type of form, that level of consistent & flawless mastery is only ever shown by the truly gifted who’ve also spent many long years practicing their craft. Yes, she’s the Queen of Cock-Ups, the Baroness of Bloopers, the Master of Misjudgment, the General of Goofs, the Duchess of Dumb, the Sovereign of Stuff-Ups…I could do this all day, but you get the idea.

Oh, Meryl!

Meryl’s alphabet

If you’re new to the unique and ever-amusing freak show that is Meryl Dorey, here is a handy quick-reference guide:

Meryl and the Jesus Complex

Enjoy this collection of some of Meryl’s nuttiest and most delusionally grandiose moments.

Meryl and the patent that wasn’t (or was it?)

Meryl is nothing if not loyal to her antivax heroes, even after they’re been found guilty of fraud, falsifying their research, breaching ethics rules and stripped of their medical licence.

She was very defensive when Alex pointed out Wakefield’s obvious conflict of interest on the AVN Facebook page, banning him for this comment:

Fortunately for Meryl she had banned everyone who might challenge her claim from the AVN page. Otherwise, someone would have posted this embarrassing image there:

[Click to enlarge]

Oops….Oh, Meryl!