Category Archives for "Stupidity"

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.

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 makeup hypocrisy

Not content with with $150,000+ that “disappears” from the AVN accounts each year, Meryl has long had an online business selling makeup to supplement her income as editor of a non-existent magazine.

Oh, but wait a minute gullible AVN cult members! Don’t look too closely…after all, Meryl often insists she shouldn’t be judged by the standards she applies to everyone else…

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Errr, little bit of a conflict with the naturalistic fallacies you usually push, Meryl. Oh dear…

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 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 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!

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 maintains her integrity

Meryl really dislikes personal attacks – she has said so often. She wishes that everyone would “just debate the science” rather than engaging in character attacks. It’s a good thing she has enough integrity to avoid indulging in or encouraging that sort of behaviour herself…

Oh, Meryl!