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…

More Mendacity from Meryl

Meryl does have trouble keeping her lies straight…oops, this is getting embarrassing!

Now she got herself into trouble a few years back when she called a regional Director of Public Health, based at her local hospital, and demanded the medical records of an infant who had recently died of whooping cough. Meryl didn’t believe the stated cause of death and has been referring to the “child who supposedly died of whooping cough” ever since. It’s important to Meryl that she downplay the severity of infectious diseases, otherwise her gullible followers are less likely to pay her to scare them about the evils of vaccination.

Meryl has also harassed the parents of that same infant repeatedly, claiming they’re part of an organised conspiracy to suppress the truth about vaccination, etc etc. Her callousness in harassing even grieving parents has no bounds and public disgust at her behaviour is one of the main reasons why Stop the AVN was formed.

Here is Meryl up to her old tricks again: telling her followers to contact the parents of children who recently died of SIDS and ask if they were vaccinated. Except now she knows that’s likely to get her into more trouble, so she denies doing so when called on it.

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Oops, Meryl – you incriminated yourself there. Not so smart, eh?

For an encore, Meryl got on her high horse about people opposing her even though she isn’t vilifying or attacking anyone – forgetting that she’d just done exactly that to Paul Offit a short time earlier on her Facebook page:

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Meryl, you know that every time you do this stuff you are going to be caught out, right? Too many people are watching for you to get away with it. Maybe it’s time to retire? If not from pushing antivax conspiracy theories, at least retire from being an asshole.

Meryl and the murderers & rapists

It’s tough being Meryl…lying is easy but remembering which lies you’ve told and dodging responsibility when those lies come back to haunt you is much harder work. Even when you’re government-certified as a liar, it just doesn’t get any easier.

Meryl must be under a lot of stress at the moment, because she can’t even seem to remember what she’s lied about long enough to type a whole paragraph:

To paraphrase: “I never said that doctors are murderers….I stand by what I said – those doctors were murderers”. And also: “I never said that doctors are rapists…but when a doctor injects a vaccine into a child that’s rape with full penetration”.

Hysterical much, 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 fights censorship

Meryl was somewhat upset to learn that her lie-filled radio interview was no longer going to run on the inflight audio on American Airlines. She ranted, “Censorship is NEVER acceptable!”.

How ironic then, that she has banned hundreds of people from the AVN Facebook page for politely, respectfully pointing out one of Meryl’s many lies factual errors.

And then, a short time later, Meryl decides that she needs to make her hypocrisy even more obvious because there are still a few people left who haven’t noticed it yet. So she posted this:

Oh, 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!