Brave Sir Meryl Chickens Out

Yes, brave Sir Meryl turned about,
And gallantly she chickened out.
Bravely taking to her feet,
She beat a very brave retreat.
Bravest of the braaaave, Sir Meryl!

[With apologies to Monty Python...]​

Meryl is up to her cowardly tricks once again, but even by her standards this stunt is a clanger!

Back in 2012, Meryl applied for Apprehended Violence Orders (AVOs)​ against 3 people who said mean things about her online.

Her applications were breathtaking in their implausibility. While Meryl lives in the infectious disease nutty fruitcake hippy capital of ​Australia, Bangalow, the 3 individuals supposedly causing Meryl to fear for her life were hundreds of kilometres away.

Dan Buzzard, for example, lives in Perth - hardly a location from which to threaten violence against a nutty conspiracy theorist near Australia's eastern most point.

And the subject of Meryl's most recent rantings, Peter Bowditch, lives over 750 kms away in the Blue Mountains, behind Sydney.

Meryl also pencilled on to the end of her AVO applications a request that her 3 supposed nemeses be prohibited from writing about her online, causing everyone but her most gullible supporters to wonder if perhaps that was the whole reason for the AVO applications.

The opportunity to use the courts to silence 3 of her critics was too tempting for Meryl to be concerned with small details like her total lack of supporting evidence.​ No​, that's hardly an obstacle for someone with Meryl's extreme narcissism, so she pressed on.

Meryl dragged the case out for as long as she could, with no less than 9 reschedules and failures to appear before the courts patience finally ran out and the case was heard. Oops, Meryl's application was thrown out on its absurd and unsubstantiated ear!

Peter was even awarded costs, a rare occurrence in AVO applications and a confirmation that the court viewed Meryl's application as a frivolity.

Fast-forward a few months, and Meryl is seeking someone to debate her face-to-face at an upcoming woo festival. So who does she call on, but that "scary" and "threatening" object of her legal timewasting Peter Bowditch!

In the process, she set up this ridiculous scenario for the benefit of her gullible cult members:​

​

​So Meryl, remind us again why you're so physically afraid of Peter Bowditch that you fear to be in the same room as him again?

Hmm, it actually looks like you're afraid of him for a totally different reason. Perhaps it's actually because he calls you out for your absurd claims and repeatedly highlights the idiocy of your comments about vaccines...

Gotcha, Meryl!​

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’s downfall

This is a little old, but worthy of a wider audience:

The release of the 2011 financial accounts for the AVN causes the treasurer extreme concern about Meryl’s leadership of the organisation…

This video is loaded with in-jokes that regular AVN-watchers will enjoy and the cast is peppered with the usual suspects from the AVN crowd of quacks, charlatans, nutjobs and fruitcakes.

Enjoy Meryl’s downfall!

Meryl’s mendacity mocked by MPs

Awareness of Meryl’s idiocy is at an all time high this week!

After a lengthy campaign against vaccine refusal by scientists, doctors and the media, the cherry on top was this statement in the Australian senate, by senator Richard Di Natale. And what a ripper of a statement it is!

After giving a wonderful summation of Meryl’s stupidity, conspiracy theorist mindset, ongoing propagation of misinformation after being corrected multiple times, persecution of grieving parents and overall callousness, the good senator goes on to call on the AVN to disband. Check it out:

Alas, the AVN gravy train is too lucrative for Meryl to give it up willingly – at last count over $150,000 per year in the AVN accounts without any details of what it was spent on…

Ah Meryl, you’re famous at last! Just not the way you wanted to be famous though…

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!

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 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!

Meryl and the missing vaccine victims

Meryl has been under pressure lately, with several government agencies pursuing her and the media becoming very unsympathetic in their reporting. So what better way to rustle up some support (and the usual drive for cash) than by showcasing a lineup of children “killed or injured by vaccines”? Great idea Meryl, soon the cash will surely be rolling in…

Oops, just one problem though…

Yes that’s right: Australia’s leading antivaccination campaigner and self-described “Australia’s leading expert on vaccination”, could not come up with a single report of vaccine injury in almost 24 hours. [There were zero responses on Twitter either.]

But Meryl frequently states that the real rate of death and injury from vaccines is “ten times higher than the official reports”, and that the she receives many such reports from her cult members marks, well from unnamed parents. And yet despite their reported gratitude for Meryl’s help, none of them responded to help her buy a new iPad the AVN fundraising drive.

Oh dear, Meryl!