Why our deep-seated commitment to investigating Meryl Dorey?

Why do we spend so much time holding Meryl Dorey and her Anti Vaccination Network cabal to account?

It’s because she used to be a go-to for the media to get the other side of the immunisation non-debate. She used to be held up as a font of wisdom on all things immunological. It didn’t matter that she had absolutely no qualifications, nor any deep understanding of that on which she would regularly pontificate. It didn’t matter that she would regularly make false claims which, if disseminated more widely, would see a decline in immunisation rates. Her callousness was unbridled. Her dishonesty ran amok. If her advice was acted upon by the whole community you could bet that every suburb would have a mound of dead babies. And she would have her glory.

Stop the Australian (anti) Vaccination Network changed all that, in five short years.

The AVN’s name is mud. Dorey is seen for the callous liar she is. Her tactics of intimidation are seen for what they are: the death-rattles of a conspiracy driven narcissistic ideologue, lacking compassion and decency, driven by self-glorification: the kindly aunt (as she has been unfortunately called), with a hunger for the death of others’ babies. It’s the logical conclusion. It didn’t start out like that. It never does.

I prefaced this because today Dorey has proven again why she needs to be publicly excoriated.

Today Dorey sent out a call-to-arms to her followers on the AVN Yahoo! Group. The Yahoo! Group is a private group of around one hundred members. A copy of the message was obtained. In it, Dorey requests her followers send letters (the bizarre concoction can be viewed in part here, written by our favourite Otter), and send photos of “injured and killed” children, to the Courier Mail (Dan Buzzard also covered this a few hours ago, here).

This is Dan’s post in full:

Okay, that’s bad enough.

Here is the full Yahoo! Group screed in which Dorey again sails close to the wind of defaming the Australian Medical Association, and certainly defames the Courier Mail, calling them “corrupt”:

Being a very clever ideologue, Dorey left out some of the defamatory material when she posted the same to Facebook.

Another thing she changed? Notice she has removed the word “killed” from the request for photos?

So please resend your letters to the address above. And if you have a healthy, unvaccinated child, include pictures of them. The same if you have a child who was injured by vaccines.

Later on Dorey again posts to Facebook with a recording she made of a phone call she took from a Courier Mail staff member. The recording was clearly done for the purposes of intimidation and grandstanding. Part of the phone call is missing. We only have Dorey’s word for the exact wording of the conversation before she started recording:

Her words were (because she asked this at the very beginning of the conversation before I started recording) what I hoped to accomplish by asking people to send her pictures of dead babies. I explained that I hadn’t asked people to do that – simply to send the letters they had already written to the Ministers and to also include, if they felt like it, pictures of their healthy, unvaccinated children or their children who had been injured by vaccines.

So, Dorey clearly lied. She may not have specifically said “babies”, but, we know from her Yahoo! post that she clearly requested people send photos of “killed” children to the paper.

But Dorey was far from finished. It gets worse.

Dorey found Dan Buzzard’s post. She accused Dan of altering her text. She lied to her Facebook followers, and blamed someone else:

Now, all you have to do is read what I actually wrote in the post below – I will copy and paste it here – and you will see that Buzzar – I mean Vulture – kindly added the words “or killed’ to what I’d written.

But that’s not the worst Dorey has done today. Two screenshots up you would have seen that Dorey dog-whistled to her followers what is really getting in her craw:

I then asked her what the newspaper hoped to accomplish by publishing a story and photo about a child who had died from whooping cough! Strangely enough, she had no answer.

Dorey was gearing up to attack the McCaffery Family, again. We could see it coming, and we weren’t sure if she could muster up enough hatred; but, she did it. Dorey has been vilifying the McCaffery Family ever since Dana passed away. We are dealing with a monster. The McCafferys have requested  several times that Dorey and her thugs refrain from mentioning them or their little girl for years. From June 2012:

Meryl Dorey, you have been asked time after time not to mention our daughter Dana on your website. The recent article by Judy Wilyman is false, dangerous, misleading and disrespectful. She has no expertise in the area of vaccines and has not asked, nor does she have, our permission to discuss our daughter’s death.

Let’s be clear, Dana’s death to whooping cough and the issues related to it, are not anecdotal. How can you and Ms Wilyman be so callous?

Dana died from whooping cough, a vaccine preventable disease. And we mourn her death every day. You and your friends add torture to our pain.

Ms Dorey, you and your group simply do not know us and we ask you to stop discussing Dana’s death. Her tragic death is not something that you can toy with to promote your misleading ideology.

Once again, you and Ms Wilyman are not friends of ours, or medical doctors and know nothing about Dana’s life or death.

BTW< Both of you, do not take this post as an invite to respond in any way. Leave us and our little girl alone!

David McCaffery

Thugs don’t listen.

Only minutes ago David McCaffery was forced to make another public statement requesting Dorey and her thugs leave them alone, and cease amplifying their pain by continuing to mention Dana:

This is why we take on the thugs. This is why we take on the dishonest bullies. Our community deserves better than having a family lose a baby, then, be vilified by a jealous sociopath intent on injecting as much venom into them for the rest of their days as the community will allow.

The McCafferys are hurting all over again.

It needs to end. Now.

We will get there.

Update April 14 2014

Never one to know when to start telling the truth and introspect, Dorey continued her campaign of spite, today, after the Courier Mail included a short article on her call-to-arms: