This article is written from a personal viewpoint and all statements made are either correct at the time of publication or an expression of opinion.

This is another article exposing an enemy who has done nothing to me personally. The Australian Vaccination-Risks Network (formerly known as the Australian Vaccination Network and the Australian Vaccination-Skeptics Network) is an organisation based in Bangalow in the Summerland region of New South Wales, owned by Meryl Dorey – an ex-pat American who frankly should go back there!

The AVN first came to my attention in March 2009 when four week old Dana McAffrey died from Pertussis (AKA Whooping Cough). Little Dana never stood a chance, but when the death was reported in the local media, Dorey demanded that the local Director of Public Health provide the little girl’s medical records – refusing to believe that it was Whooping Cough that killed her. She didn’t get the information (and quite rightly) and the Director correctly notified Dana’s parents of the occurrence. That was just the start, as supporters of the AVN started to harass the McAffrey’s

A group called “Stop the AVN” was formed as a result of Dorey’s appearance on Sunday Night – an episode that I saw, where one of the AVN supporters angered me by asking a doctor how much the pharmaceutical companies paid him to defend vaccines – a common trick by anti vaxxers that bluntly should be met with strong legal action in my opinion. I should add that I noticed a letter from the Chief Medical Officer from 2011 sometime (while I was getting my ears treated) that noted that there had been seven recorded deaths of Whooping Cough between 2008 and 2011 in infants under the age of three months. That number would have included little Dana.

Being anti-vaccine is bad enough – but what really got my goat was the fact that the AVN believe that vaccines cause Autism. That’s the core reason why they are an enemy, because as we all know this is completely untrue. I was unable to get many details until October 2012, when the ABC’s Media Watch jumped on WIN News in Wollongong for giving the AVN a voice. That was when Stop the AVN came to my attention and I finally got around to looking at the AVN website. That was it – I knew an enemy when I saw one.

Here are some of the quotes from the website;

All whole cell DTP vaccines contain mercury in the form of thiomersal. Mercury is one of the most toxic (poisonous) substances known to man and has been linked with forms of brain damage including Autism.

Thiomersal has been removed from all vaccines in Australia so this is false for a start. It also mis-identifies the mercury in thiomersal as quicksilver and not ethyl mercury. To back it up, the AVN quotes a report from a website called Vaccine Injury based in Germany claiming a study at Swinburne University. The study relied on eight subjects, which is hardly a study to rely upon, and focused on one subject where it was claimed that mercury was found. I don’t believe that for one second given that there was no note of any adverse reaction in the subject (and if there was quicksilver present there would have been without a doubt).

Even more alarming is the huge increase in reports of autism and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, with devastating, life-long impacts. Much of this could be due to overdiagnosis (now rewarded by numerous government subsidies). The change in behavior that many parents observe related to vaccines could be coincidental, or it might reflect a desperate need to explain a disastrous occurrence. Nonetheless, the implications are so grave that immediate investigation is needed. Measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis B, and the whole panoply of childhood diseases are a far less serious threat than having a large fraction (say 10%) of a generation afflicted with learning disability and/or uncontrollable aggressive behavior because of an impassioned crusade for universal vaccination.

This is disgusting because it promotes Autism and the other conditions as worse than those diseases, when it’s not because those diseases kill. One only has to look at the Jenny McCarthy Body Count for the truth of that – as at October 6, 2012, it was 1016 deaths over five years and four months and almost 107 thousand illnesses. These numbers are from within the United States, so goodness knows what sort of damage the AVN has done in Australia!

The AVN has a page dedicated to Autism and seeks to support Andrew Wakefield – who of course was stripped of his license to practice medicine in the United Kingdom. They also try to link Autism to Encephalitis dating back to before thiomersal, which makes absolutely no sense at all and has no back up. Autism goes back even further than that as I have proven with my article on the Wild Boy of Averyon, let alone the work of Emil Kraepelin!

The New South Wales HCCC (Health Care Complaints Commission) had a run in with the AVN and after they were ignored over a disclaimer that the AVN should have had on their site, a public warning was issued. Unfortunately the AVN had a victory in the Supreme Court of NSW ruling that such an instruction was outside the HCCC’s jurisdiction. This was a loophole in the governing legislation that reportedly the state government is working to close. Meanwhile, Fair Trading in New South Wales is also onto them about the lack of financial reporting (the AVN claims to be a charity and it has to issue financial reports and have AGM’s – and they haven’t as the 2011 report is yet to be filed).

On October 24, 2012, I wrote an email and sent it to the co-ordinator of immunisation within the Federal Department of Health – expressing my concerns about these lies. I made the request that they force the shut down of the AVN website on the grounds that the website presents false information about vaccines and it is not qualified to present any information on the subject. I also asked them to provide a section on their website that warns against the same false information that appears on websites that are not Australian. I should have suggested that they organise the blocking of those websites from Australian ISP’s, but as I think of it now it would have been better to contact the server host and request that the site be blocked at their end. I believe (but I haven’t been able to confirm it) that giving any form of medical advice without qualifications is an offence.

On November 26, 2012, the Australian Academy of Science put out a booklet promoting immunisation and answering all of the myths. They noted that immunisation rates in percentage terms had dropped, but Dorey claimed that this was because there were more vaccines – a basic fail in maths. She claimed that there wasn’t an issue with vaccination rates – yet in the last ten years recorded objections have skyrocketed. Not to mention the fact that vaccination rates in her area have always been down on the rest of Australia. She can say all she wants – she is an anti vaxxer. This was proven in idiotic terms early in 2015 when she compared those who criticised “critics of anti vaccine pseudo science” to those who perpetrated the Paris terrorist attack on a newspaper office.

In another attack of idiotics in the name of the organisation in late 2017, Dorey challenged then Victorian Health Minister Jill Hennessy to take the accepted four year schedule for children from birth to four years old, and if the Minister suffered no ill effects Dorey would quit being an anti vaxxer. She failed because anyone who actually understands knows that once you are protected (as the Minister is) excess vaccines are actually risky. Naturally – due to the anti vaxxers penchant for twisting things, the Minister ignored the challenge.

I make my own contribution here – stating that the AVN is an enemy of the Autistic Community and it is lying about the origins of Autism. Meryl Dorey is not a doctor and should not be making any comment whatsoever about vaccine safety. She should be deported and the AVN should be closed as a public health threat. Delightfully, the AVN were ordered on the evening of December 14, 2012, to change their name within two months – or be shut down. Over the weekend of December 15 and 16, the website was taken down – not forced down as Dorey has attempted to explain. It returned and they got a reprieve due to an appeal. The appeal was heard in mid June 2013 and a final decision was handed down on November 25, 2013 – confirming the decision as correct. There was no appeal and they changed the name in March 2014 adding “Skeptics” but retaining the AVN initials on their website. More recently they changed again to their current name.

Most recently, the AVN has been running what is called the Vaxxed Bus in Australia. It was banned from a caravan park in Caloundra, and subsequently banned from the City of Newcastle, the City of Sydney and the City of the Blue Mountains. This bus should be yanked off the road, and the tapes of the stories told wiped and the people who told them be instructed to submit their stories for a proper investigation by health authorities. It is my intention if I ever get the chance to ensure that this group is shut down for hate speech against the Autistic community.

The floods in northern New South Wales in March 2022 wrecked the bus but they have anew one lined up apparently. Meanwhile, they have taken the secretary of the Department of Health to the Federal Court of Australia in order to try and get the provisional approval of all COVID-19 vaccines withdrawn – an act that in my opinion is a crime against humanity and should be punished same.

PHIL GLUYAS