A Drunken Madman

This comment was left on my YouTube channel after an exchange on "That Meryl!" Episode 12.

VaccinationAustralia is believed to be the YouTube account of George Mamouzellos, a self-absorbed antivax DJ currently resident in Darwin, NT. George is a vocal, though not very articulate, supporter of Meryl Dorey and the AVN. This little rant emerged after George was banned from the "That Meryl!" channel for abusive comments. I don't think I'll be hitting "approve", but I thought my readers might like to see it.

George appears to have graduated from merely lying about his qualifications* to stalking, abuse, xenophobia and libel. He's not very good at it, else he might realise that my girlfriend is in fact an Australian citizen, and that I'm a permanent resident with all the rights attendant thereto. He also appears to have issues with self-control, as the exchange with Peter Bowditch linked above suggests. You can read a little more about George here.

This is what antivaxxers have to offer. This is the face of the new antivax generation. Apparently.

If they discredit themselves this thoroughly, what's left for us to do?

 

* To be a "qualified pharmacist", you must be registered with the pharmacy board in your state. Mamouzellos is not registered anywhere in Australia, and the pharmacy boards I enquired with about his "qualifications" made it clear that he's unlikely to be allowed registration any time soon.

I've just published the talk I delivered to the Sydney Atheists on Online Activism to Slideshare. It doesn't work perfectly, since some of the slides were animated, but the overview looks something like this: 

 

If all goes to plan, this will also be presented as a podcast from Sydney Atheists, so you can listen to me ramble as you read the slides.

If you'd like a talk like this delivered at your skeptical, atheist, humanist or freethinkers group, please let me know. I'm also working up a more specific "Skeptical Social Media" talk and can present more specific case studies on some of the campaigns I've been around, including Stop The AVN, #VoteRachie and Chanology. Also, if you've done something interesting online around the skeptical activism subject, please drop me some info and I can mention you in the talks. If you're off on the other side of the world and would like to deliver something based on these slides, likewise let me know and I can help out.

I'll be delivering version 2.0 of this presentation at the Western Sydney Freethinkers September meeting in Penrith, NSW (Sunday 19th at 2pm, Penrith School of Arts*), so please pop in and give me some feedback. It'll be a variation of this one as I incorporate more of the interesting, solid stuff and less of the boring, rambling inaccurate stuff.

I'm hoping to get a few other groups to invite me along in the coming months, if they can stand the sight of my scruffy, stubble-laden countenance and put up with my disorganised, inebriated ways, so watch this space.

*the web calendar says Penrith RSL, please check the blog for the final venue

Every so often I walk from my house to the local shopping strip, and when I do I usually go past the local chiropractic centre. And they have posters in their windows which make grandiose claims for chiroquacktic chiropractic manipulation that are just not borne out by any valid science. They claim to cure asthma, childhood colic, bedwetting and allergies... just by mangling your neck around the place. There is just no evidence for these claims. None.

They also claim that chiropractic is "250 times safer than anti-inflamatories". Whatever the fuck that's meant to mean, I can say this: staying in your house is safer than crossing the street, but it won't get your ass to the supermarket. And of course, chiropractic is not safe at all. Look up "cervical artery dissection" on pubmed one day. You'll be surprised. You might also want to check for amebiasis outbreaks, since many chiropractors question germ theory and fail to apply good sterile technique. Or clean the graffiti off their buildings.

Anyway, this fucking annoys me.

So, inspired by the awesome Bastard Sheep, I'm starting a small but fun campaign on FourSquare. Just to get warmed up.

Please, if you're on FourSquare, join me. Tip your local chiropractor with the text "Happily promotes bogus treatments. Avoid", and tag them with the word "quackery". Rinse, repeat. Later, we'll move on to the homeopaths, the naturopaths, the tarot card readers, the 'psychics' the reiki practitioners, the ayurvedic loons, the antivaccination nuts, the 'natural health' colleges that pump them into the community and your local Gloria Jeans.

Good luck, and feel free to friend me up on Foursquare.

Now, go forth and start tagging. Remember: "Happily promotes bogus treatments. Avoid" and "quackery"

 

Quick update 10-Aug-2010: need ammunition against chiropractors? Start with the skepticator search for "chiropractic"

Australian Vaccination Network.

Yes, that's a link to the only page that currently matters where this organisation is concerned.

You may also want to investigate

http://www.stopantivaxnetwork.com/

http://www.facebook.com/stopavn/

http://www.antivaxxers.com/

http://stopmeryldorey.com/

 

 

 What we're looking at here is someone who's in denial*. Here's what the actual OLGR notification consists of, via the ever-useful AVN Wikipedia Article

On 4 August 2010, the OLGR announced that their audit of the AVN had "detected a number of breaches of charity fund-raising laws", including:

• Fundraising without authority;
• Unauthorised expenditure;
• Failure to keep proper records of income and expenditure;
• Possible breaches of the Charitable Trust Act, 1993, which would be referred to the Department of Justice and the Attorney General.

The AVN was given 28 days to respond to the findings. President Meryl Dorey declined to comment on the issue.^[94]

 Meryl,. it's important we get something clear here.

You do not get referred to the DoJ and the AGD for mere mistakes. Minor errors do not justify a report by ABC Lateline, and minor errors do not produce press coverage like this, from the SMH.

Even after all this time, Meryl, you're lying to the public. You'd have thought all the pressure you've come under - from Stop The AVN, from the HCCC, from OLGR, from the media - would have maybe given you a hint.

 Stop playing the victim. This is your fault. You could have folded a long time ago, but you opted to go all in. It's going to go all the way, but please, at least be honest with your poor deluded followers, please?

 

*like we didn't know that already.

As regular readers will know, my focus right now is on the Australian Vaccination Network, an anti-vaccination group from Northern NSW whose president, Meryl Dorey, consistently claims that she is not anti-vaccination, but is merely pro-choice.

Well, courtesy of a friend of mine on the Stop The AVN Facebook Group, here's something to chew over

I should have done this weeks ago...

 

Soundtrack: Yakkity Sax on Banjulele and Kazoo, played by yours truly. Video from ABC Lateline's report on the AVN.

I was just mulling over Meryl Dorey's pleas of "We're not anti-vaccination" in the light of this anti-vaccination t-shirt design, and I thought to myself "well, I'm sure I can help!"

So I did

We start out collection with this beautiful number from our winter range. Worn off the shoulder it's sure to make you the belle of the ball!

 Feeling flighty? How's about this little cracker?

Or perhaps madam would like something a little more understated for her choice in vaccine-related couture

 

 This next item is modelled by Fifi, our resident entomophobe. Do stop screaming, Fifi dahling!

 I don't know about you, but I hope more people "see the light". Ah ha ha.

 

You'll love this next item from our range. Just be careful you don't pop out.

If you're feeling playful, this next item may be for you!

 

Now, I know there's always a small amount of what we'd term "nerdiness" around, and how better to show your inner nerd than with a t-shirt that really shouts your mathematical credentials from the rooftops?

And finally, some important advice from Louis Creed and Gage

Short attention span? Skip to the bottom for a version of this post designed specifically for you!

Look, it's like this. I'm worried that this blog is turning into a single-issue publication, I really am. But demolishing the continued utter fail of the AVN is just too easy. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. No, scrub that. It's like dropping a grenade into a barrel of fish and running away very fast.

Above is a screenshot, courtesy of my good friend Peter, from the AVN's Facebook page. This is Meryl Dorey posting a story she's found that she thinks supports her point of view.

Sigh

Does it support Meryl's point of view?

Sure, if you skim-read it and go no further. However there are a few little problems with it.

Firstly, you'll notice it comes from a site called sify.com, which you may not be familiar with. I certainly wasn't familiar with it, so I checked it out. It turns out to be a news portal based in India, run by an IT/ISP company, SifyCorp. Here's the thing, though.

1. Have you seen the size of their astrology section?
2. India is a country in which Homeopaths are legally allowed to call themselves "doctor", and practice their witchcraft with the luxury of heavy government funding and the backing of a large, credulous establishment.

OK, so the source isn't exactly unimpeachable, so let's look at the text of the article:

New Delhi: The pentavalent or the five-in-one vaccine that has been recommended in India by the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization actually killed children in Sri Lanka and Bhutan, warns an article in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

Really? The BMJ says that the vaccine actually killed children? That dosn't sound like the BMJ. I'm sure they'd couch it in more considered terms.

Let's continue

The report by a group, including paediatricians, professors, health activists and a former Indian health secretary, cautions against the introduction of the five-in-one vaccine that combines antigens against five diseases - diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus (DPT), hepatitis B and Haemophilus Influenzae type B (HIB) - in a single shot.

Hmmm. A "report" by a group including "health activists"? Isn't Meryl Dorey calling herself a "health activist" these days? And a former health secretary of the country that allows homeopaths to call themselves doctors? Alarm bells are ringing everywhere. I need to see this article.

'Our article describes how the World Health Organisation (WHO), in an elaborate cover-up, changed its own criteria for classifying adverse effects to say the vaccine was not responsible for the deaths in Sri Lanka,' Jacob Puliyel, head of paediatrics at St Stephen's Hospital in Delhi and key author, told IANS.

Former union health secretary K.B. Saxena, professors of community health in Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi Debabar Banerji, Imrana Qadeer and Ritu Priya, co-conveners of All India Drug Action Network Mira Shiva and Gopal Dabade and former adviser in finance ministry N.J. Kurian are the other authors of the report.

Whoah! Now there's a cover up? Reported in a BMJ article? How come I didn't know about this? Whe did the BMJ become conspiracy whistle-blowers? I NEED TO SEE THIS!

So I googled up the BMJ "article".

And guess what I found?

This

No, seriously, that's the "UK Report" that the Sify.com article cites. Check the author list. Check the text. It's the one.

And it's not a "report". It's not an "article". It's a "rapid response", basically a Letter To The Editor written in response to an article, in this case, an article entitled "Antivaccine lobby resists introduction of Hib vaccine in India", found here.

I don't have full journal access, but I can easily glean this from the rapid response:

It seems the article explained, in part, how a group of  doctors are up in arms over the Hib rollout. They've highlighted the way three out of five deaths in a vaccine study were reported, and have taken the issue to court in India to block the vaccine rollout. The reason cited in the response is as much economic as it is epidemiological, but does contain some unfortunate phraseology which does give the impression of antivax leanings ("the useless vaccines the rich may be taking"), though the letter writers aren't happy about the label. 

Three of the deaths in the study population were reported, it seems, as "unlikely" to be related to the vaccine. But the doctors and activists are up in arms over a devation from "normal" WHO reporting standards, and they think those three deaths should be upgraded from "unlikely". Here's a passage from the rapid response:

The standard WHO classification of AEFI is best understood in the form of an algorithm. The first question is whether the adverse events have a plausible time relationship to vaccine administration. All such reactions are classified in one of three categories: ‘Very likely/Certain’, ‘Probable’ or ‘Possible’.

If the time of the adverse event and the time of vaccine administration make a causal connection improbable, it is classified as ‘Unlikely to be related’. If the time of the event and the time of vaccine administration make a causal connection incompatible, it is to be classified as ‘Unrelated’

For adverse events that have a plausible time relationship to vaccine administration, the next level of the algorithm is used to distinguish Probable from Possible. If the death cannot conclusively be attributable to another cause, it is classified as ‘Probable related’. If the death can be attributable to another cause then the association with vaccine is said to be ‘Possible’

What these docs, and a lot of them are actually real doctors*, are whining about is that the assessment in this study was changed from their preferred AEFI classification and that:

Using this new classification, they declared that 3 of the Sri Lanka reactions were ‘unlikely’ to be related to vaccine ‘although it could not be conclusively attributable to another cause’

Of course, the doctors reporting to the WHO made the choice to use this methodology, not the WHO. The reason for this I can't yet figure out, but hey, that's the report they produced.

So, let's recap. A group of doctors and sundry tag-alongs have written a letter to the BMJ complaining that they were mentioned in an article as "antivax", and whining about a methodological difference from what they expected in the said BMJ article. They got an "unlikely" and they wanted a "possible" or "probable". They actually include the cause-of-death assessments of the three subjects in question. These causes are not "unknown", so the best they'll get is a "possible".

It's possible that I'll convert to Islam tomorrow.

Just not very likely.

Frankly, it's a non-story about some methodological arcana that is probably more boring than useful, unless you're into medico-legal detail. It has some socio-economic insight into the way Indian medicine works, but overall it's not very useful as proof of vaccine dangers.

And it's been elevated to the status of "UK Report in the BMJ says five children killed by vaccine" by a numpty news agency, then regurgitated wholesale by Meryl Dorey, who claims to be an "expert" on vaccination.

WTF?

I mean, seriously.

Meryl. Check your sources.

 

And now, the version for the attention-span challenged:

 

---

The pentavalent or the five-in-one vaccine that has been recommended in India by the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization actually killed children in Sri Lanka and Bhutan, warns an article in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

NO IT DIDN'T AND NO IT FUCKING DOESN'T!

 

 

 

* Yes, real doctors, so they're legit. Although a couple of them seem to have a bee in their bonnet about globalisation and the WHO, which might colour some of their statements somewhat.

Courtesy of the NSW Healthcare Complaints Commission:

The AVN’s failure to include a notice on its website of the nature recommended by the Commission may result in members of the public making improperly informed decisions about whether or not to vaccinate, and therefore poses a risk to public health and safety.

Read the full release at the HCCC: Public warning about the Australian Vaccination Network.

 The link Meryl has tweeted comes from the conspiracy website nationalexpositor.com. It speculates about commercial-in-confidence agreements signed with vaccine manufacturers, something that's done to provide governments  maximum information with minimum commercial exposure. It's not, in principle, unlike an NDA between say, a software company and their developer partners. I've signed a lot of those. They're normal procedure.

Of course, to the National Expectorator, this means they're secret contracts to cover up vaccine deaths. No kidding.

As a taste of their usual menu of paranoia, their top story at the present time is:

"False Flag Cyber Attack Could Takedown The Internet

Billion dollar cybersecurity industry at the forefront of ‘Top Secret America’ complexPrison Planet - An increasing clamour to restrict and control the internet on behalf of the government, the ..."

No, seriously. It's a syndicated article from prisonplanet.com, the very nadir of conspiracy bollocks on the internet. The crux of the article is, apparently, that there'll be a "cyber 9/11" engineered by the government in order to restrict internet freedom of speechohnoesnottehinternets!!

Honestly. I haven't included a link, because it's just that crazy. And it's not even their most crazy story. It's just the top one right now. The nationalexpositor appears to syndicate content with PrisonPlanet, Infowars and several other dens of slavering paranoid conspiracy boner merchants. It's quite the little conspiracy hub

And to add the cherry to the delicious cake, here's a quote from Meryl Dorey a while back

"While we are already seen as rabid, idiotic fringe-dwellers by so many in the mainstream, it does our argument no good at all to bring in conspiracy theories which, though we may subscribe to them, are unprovable."

Meryl, you're doing your argument no good at all

 So, apparently, this big beardy guy in the sky already knows everything I'm ever going to do, ever.

But also, apparently, I choose to sin.

What's with that?

Surely if god knows everything I'm ever going to do, I basically have no free will. And if the whole doctrine of sin relies on my free choice in the matter - my choosing to sin, or at least, choosing not to repent and all that - then surely I can't actually, in any meaningful sense, commit a sin. Ever. Because I have no choice. It's pre-destined. All I have is an illusion of choice, because the big beardy guy already knows what I'm going to do and I can't change that.

So, if there's no sin, why exactly did god sacrifice himself to himself again?

Checkmate

Of course, @apiyor is one of the most benighted theotards on the entire internet. He won't understand this, and he'll keep spouting his bullshit until eventually he stumbles in front of a car, or falls into a wood chipper, or electrocutes himself while cooking a microwave ready-meal or some other tragic accident brought on by his lack of basic intelligence.

*sigh*

Dear, dear readers! You're smart, numerate kind of people. Some of you will have read my previous posts on hokey maths. Some of you can even count.

Can you see how Meryl is lying with numbers? Here's a tip. There's more than one lie.

Tell you what, I'll help you out a little. Here's the NSW vaccination schedule.

And Meryl Dorey's overall claim as that there are 31 doses of vaccine in the schedule by 12 months of age*.

OK, you're seeing it now? No? OK, well allow me to explain.

The first lie is in Meryl's claim that three doses DPaT equals nine doses total. This is, of course, only three doses on the schedule. It's her very first number, and she's got it wrong.

"Did I say that? I don't believe I did. Let me see."

Of course, Meryl would try and get out of this by saying "of course it's three doses. There are three vaccines in one.". To which I'd say three things.

• The word you were looking for was "trivalent", you dolt.
• Infanrix Hexa actually covers against six diseases - hence the name - making it "hexavalent", or more usably, "polyvalent". You missed an opportunity there.
• How come you didn't do the same for MMR? That's a trivalent vaccine. If you needed a nine to massage the numbers into place, that would have been more sensible. Is it because the fact of MMR's single-dose trivalency is more commonly known?

The second lie, of course, is in the total number of doses and how they're totted up. Meryl's "31 doses in first year" claim has been floating around for a long time. The actual number in NSW is 12, as you can see with reference to the schedule. Meryl, of course, to inflate the numbers, counts individual diseases rather than doses. But even if you do that, you only get 29.

Huh?

So, to get to 31, Meryl adds Varicella (Chicken Pox), which actually comes at 18 months, and adds an "Influenza" category, which only appears in the schedule for adults. It's a lie that might slip by the uninformed, since Haemophilus Influenzae Type B is in the schedule, and they sound similar, right? Of course Meryl has already counted Hib. Actually, she counted it three times, when it actually appears in the schedule four times. Rotavirus appears in Meryl's list three times, but in the schedule only twice. She includes IPV, which is not in the schedule until 4 years (Polio is included under Infanrix Hexa), and includes Meningococcal as three doses, when in fact it's a single dose at 12 months.

It's hard to be further from the actual truth of the matter. Meryl has got less than half of her made-up schedule right. This is a truth/bullshit ratio that's slanted well to the stinky side of the scale, and it shows.

Of course, there are other explanations of the schedule. It's still nigh on impossible to reach Meryl's numbers, try as I might.

The third lie, of course, is the "too many, too soon" fallacy which forms the body of the entire post. There is no evidence that the number of vaccines is in any way an unreasonable risk factor. You still get the very small individual risk for each vaccine, but the antivaccine brigade suggest that there's a cumulative, non-linear risk in stacking vaccines. This is not the case. In fact, there are some risk factors that are significantly decreased by using multivalent vaccines - sharp contamination or handling error being just two, not to mention the decrease in cry factor you get by jabbing your child once instead of three (or six) times. Won't somebody think of the children?

Meryl suggests that Peter Bowditch should take these vaccines to demonstrate their safety. I'll join in here. Meryl, you pay, and I'll do it, subject of course to actual medical advice rather than the slipshod, lean-to, Heath Robinson version that Meryl Dorey herself seems to give out.

 

In case you're new here, here are some posts on Meryl's previous fail:

Sure, Meryl. It did nothing
Australian Vaccination Network: OWNED
Meryl: Failing Infectious Disease 101
So, apparently, 99.2% is the same as 0%
Meryl Dorey: Still lying on schedule
Meryl Dorey and the Fallacy of the Excluded Middle
"You didn’t die from it 30 years ago and you’re not going to die from it today.”
Two posts on Meryl's fail in one day?
Meryl, Sanskrit and Epic Fail
The AVN gets unexpected results
Meryl undermines her own case again
Antivax: Sometimes what you omit defines the most effective lies

And for those who like their Antivax fail served up with some piano-accordion and a side order of lulz: That Meryl!

*  Being charitable, we'll say Meryl means "up to and including 12 months". To me, "by 12 months" means "before". Not including. But that would be hair-splitting

I was just musing, up to my gills on painkillers. And I got to thinking...

It has been said that human beings are not, in fact, Homo sapiens - the Wise Man - but that were are in fact Pan narrans - the Storytelling Ape.

I believe I heard this first from Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, and it's an idea I'm much enamoured with. It's true that, if anything, humans in general are far from wise. When we think intuitively, we're often, if not usually, wrong. Suckered in by charlatans, tricked by cults, bamboozled by the way the real world works, we invent stories to explain the things we observe and in doing so, fall prey to our own biases and cognitive failings.

Humans, I would say, aren't smart by default.

The thing is, our propensity for inventing and consuming stories is probably the thing that initially drove our success as a species. What really separates us from the rest of the animal "kingdom" is our use of technology coupled with our use of transmissible units of culture - stories - often termed "memes".

Imagine, for instance, pleistocene man passing on the secrets of, say, fire. Or the movements of the great mammoth herds. Or the best way to hunt elk while avoiding large predators.

Our friend pleistocene man would probably have held this knowledge in the form of a story or meme. "When you rub these sticks together really hard, they get angry, and their anger causes fire" explains things perfectly, but is far further from the truth than "rubbing these sticks together causes friction, which heats the material, eventually triggering, with careful managment, combustion". Ancient memes would have been passed on in this way, and the ones that were more interesting would have been easier to remember, and more popular in the retelling, and so thrived. And, in parallel, the ones that were most useful would have had high importance and so would have ended up being made more interesting, because if your important memes were made interesting, well, that resulted in a more effective tribe. Interesting and useful would have had a co-evolutionary trajectory. Interesting stories and useful stories, barreling aloing together in evolutionary time, feeding off each other. But the important thing is that the truth value of them is not important to this relationship - the only important thing is that they're successful. They just need to reproduce and survive.

"Disease broke out because the gods were angry with sin, so we should stay indoors to avoid the eyes of the gods and ostracise the sufferers because it's their fault" is a meme that is entirely wrong, but leads, luckily, to a breaking of the transmission chain. A successful meme, which if couple with an interesting allegory or two actually benefits those who propagate it. Yet it's entirely wrong. It's easy to make interesting - you just tack on a story or two about the gods and how they think, and maybe something about a human hero who managed to figure it all out and your meme is launched. But it's wrong. But interesting to Pan narrans.

We do this kind of thing to this day. Look, for instance, in the direction of religion. Religious morality tends to be encapsulated in stories, allegories, which allow the passing on of units of culture, memes, to the next generation in an interesting and memorable manner. Look at popular science writing. Carl Sagan's Cosmos, one of the best science series' ever, takes a narrative format for many of its most memorable segments. Sometimes looking forward, sometimes looking back, it takes the form of a story, and we humans are suckers for stories.

Which brings me, inevitably, to conspiracy theorists.

As I've said, the most interesting memes thrive. And we love conspiracies. Conspiracies form many of humanity's greatest myths. You see satan plotting and sneaking and undermining the good guys. You see Loki screwing around with the gods of Asgard. You see the gods of Olympus constantly playing intrigues against one-another, hiding heroes away, lying and hiding their cards. Human's didn't figure out fire. Prometheus stole it from the gods and handed it to man in the culmination of a series of tricks. Trickster gods - conspiracist gods - abound in human culture. We find conspiracies fascinating. Perhaps because, in the absence of better information, they allow us to codify social abstracts and rationalise away the pitiless nature of the real world.

Oh, the hunt went badly, but it wasn't our fault. evil spirits conspired against us, and so what we need to do is fight the spirits and our next hunt will go well. A couple of hundered years of confirmation bias and before you know it, the demons are real.

Conspiracy theorists seem to always go with the more fascinating option. The more convoluted and the bigger the narrative payoff, the better they seem to be. Conspiracy theories are fascinating. Conspiracies abound in fiction, from the bad guys of Sherlock Holmes to those who would see James Bond suck down his last Vesper. We know there are secrets, and when we find those secrets, we get a delicious shiver. And then we tell other people.

And this is what I think it's all about. What's more interesting? "A bunch of brainwashed religious zealots manipulated by a few guys in the middle east flew some planes into some buildings", or "Cheney was in on it, and Bush new too. And the Jews knew as well. They all plotted it together, and clearly it was done with explosives, and rmote control planes and secret CIA mind-control techniques - which I know all about - and metal just doesn't melt in fires, hey look at me, I have interesting information.". Holy Crap, I know which one would make the more gripping thriller novel to be sold at the airport bookstore.

Of course, I'd prefer a science book for my long flight, but there you go.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that a delight for conspiracy is hard-wired in us all, because once upon a time it was more important for a story to be interesting, with side-effects, than for it to be actually true. Some people fall into the thrall of ancient modes of thinking and ignore evidence in favour of the interesting meme, and that ensures propagation. They have less truth value, but they propagate by subverting our curiosity and delight for conspiracy. 

And conpiracy theorists just aren't able to separate the interesting story from the probably-mundane reality.

It's sad, and sometimes dangerous, but it's understandable, even if it is utterly infuriating and downright dangerous.

And I'm damned if I know how to fix it.

 

The article Meryl cites is here

The very first paragraph reads:

Pertussis (whooping cough) is a mandatorily notifiable disease in Slovenia and since 1959, there has been an active national immunisation programmme. Since the start of this programme, the annual number of notified cases has fallen sharply [1]

Does that really sound like the vaccine did nothing?

Really?

OK, that's just the beginning of Meryl's fail. Let's delve further.

The study cited is of an outbreak in a kindergarten. Of the 12 kids in the kindergarten, two (16%) had confirmed pertussis, most likely picked up from either the parent cited in the paper*, or the same source as the parent's infection. Of the rest, another nine developed respiratory-type illnesses - but all these cases tested negative as pertussis. They did not have it, despite exposure.

The article notes that the most likely reason for the outbreak, in the opinion of the investigators, is antigenic shift. I quote:

Some hypotheses for this apparent vaccine failure are:

• antigenic shift so that the circulating strains and vaccination strains of Bordetella pertussis diverge and vaccine efficacy is reduced
• other factors, alone or in combination

To investigate the first hypothesis, B. pertussis strains that have been collected in Slovenia in recent years, should be characterised by sequencing surface protein genes. Changes in circulating B. pertussis have been reported in the Netherlands [2] and Australia [4]. The extent to which bacterial polymorphisms affect vaccine efficacy probably depends on the vaccine used [2], on the proportion of polymorphic bacteria in the human population, and other factors. Further studies are required to assess the effect of the antigen changes on the efficacy of pertussis vaccines.

So basically what we have here is an account of a small outbreak, involving two kids in a kindergarten, who were vaccinated. The other kids, ~84% of the sample, did not get pertussis. The investigators speculate that maybe it's antigenic shift that allowed the two cases (and the parent case) to occur - a prudent speculation - but note that more work needs to be done, and describes exactly what form this work should take.

I'll just note a study I dug up

the efficacy of DTP against cough illness of 7 days duration caused by Bordetella pertussis was 84%

So, wait a minute. A vaccine with an expected efficacy rate of something like 84% had an efficacy rate of something like 84%?

And Meryl Dorey thinks that this means the vaccine did nothing.

Meryl is too stupid to have an internet connection, but apparently she runs a non-profit organisation that claims to provide parents with factual information on the subject of vaccination.

What. The. Fuck?

 

* the parent was vaccinated as a child. no booster information is provided.

JUST. WATCH.

More will follow later, once I've recovered from the excruciating toothache brought on by grinding my teeth at Meryl's bare-faced lunacy. I'm up to my hairline on strong painkillers right now, but I have plenty of material to use once my head is straight.

Ken McLeod, The McCafferys, Daniel Raffaele, Everyone at SAVN. You are fucking heroes.

Follow #stopavn on twitter, join the facebook group. Do it.

I just had to blog this. It's just too absurd to let slip.

Did you know that it's only possible to contract a single disease at a time?

Yes, really.

Meryl Dorey says so, so it must be true

 That's a page from the Winter 2006 edition of the Australian Vacination Network's "Informed Voice" Magazine. If you click and get the bigger version, you'll see that just above "How many is to many?" Meryl has made the following claim:

It is also a fact that we will only ever contract one disease at a time - measles - not measles, mumps and rubella. Measles - not measles and 9,999 other diseases

I, of course, was rather surprised at this. There was me thinking that one of the big fears in hospital intensive care departments was that patients already infected with life-threatening illness A might pick up life threatening-illness B and or life-threatening illness C while there. I'm pretty sure I've sat in an intensive care unit overnight while this very multiple- infection drama has been played out in front of me.

So, of course, I did the single thing that Meryl clearly didn't bother to do.

I did a web search

Google: "multiple simultaneous infections"

Bing: "multiple simultaneous infections"

Wikipedia: "multiple simultaneous infections"

Google Scholar: "multiple simultaneous infections"

So it's not true then. Surprise fucking surprise.

Perhaps Meryl got a bit confused about the oft-cited factoid that Syphilis can, in some cases, be cured via Malaria infection (or, in fact, anything that causes a sufficiently high fever). It's a risky cure from the 1920s, which is where most of Meryl's medical information seems to come from, so that's at least plausible. More plausible than the idea that only a single disease can be happening at a time.

Still, if only this little nugget of bullshit were true. Doctors treating Ebola outbreaks could just inhale a bit of rhinovirus on the way and be guaranteed safe from the worse disease for the duration of their miserable sniffles. What a breakthrough. They could then, of course, just treat the rhinovirus with Meryl's much-loved magic water, after they've stopped the Ebola outbreak with a mixture of chiropractic, intercessory prayer and mother-earth chanting circles. Then they could all go to the local whole-food collective cooperative farmers market and enjoy some biodynamic granola while they give each other organic fair-trade coffee enemas and sing protest songs on out-of-tune accoustic guitars.

What a shame we don't live in the same fantasy land as Meryl Dorey, eh?

 

Another post from my ongoing "Keeping Two Chevrons Apart" series, in which I murder the music of Half Man Half Biscuit for my own amusement and the amusement of other lunatics who happen to stumble by.

Normally, I just do a one-take "live" version on a single guitar or ukulele, because I'm both lazy and time-poor. Today, however, I had some time free, so I have something a little more involved.

Yes, folks, a full-band mix, involving programmed drums (via Hydrogen), bass, guitar (lead and crunch), mandolin, banjulele and vocals. Enjoy.

I enjoyed making it muchly, and here's how it was done.

 The Making Of

 Ingredients:

• One laptop, loaded with:
  • Audacity
  • Premiere (or your favoured video software)
  • Hydrogen
  • A webcam and software
  • A USB Audio interface (preferably with onboard mixer/compressors. I use a Yamaha Audiogram 6 coupled with a second small mixer.
• One bass guitar. Mine is my much-loved 1971 reissue Fender Jazz, but any electric bass will do
• One electric guitar. Mine is a cherry-red Epiphone G400 SG, but again, your choice
• One mandolin. Mine is a sunburst Epiphone Mandobird VII electric solid-body, but with mics or pickups any mando will do
• One banjulele. I use an aNueNue concert size banjo-ukulele, but at a pinch, any uke will do.
• One or more effects pedals with overdrive/distortion/reverb/compression. I use a Zoom G1x, a Zoom 505 and some Boss pedals, but again, vary to taste.
• A microphone and stand. I used a Behringer B2 condenser - cheap but the quality/price ratio is high win. I also used a Behringer XM8500 cardioid vocal mic for the banjulele part.
• Headphones (avoid feedback!)
• A willingness to make an idiot of yourself

Method:

First, lay down a drumbeat with Hydrogen. Make sure you count out the bars of the song you're doing and make notes. Uffington Wassail has a break (hand me down my silver trumpet...) which goes for two bars, one of eight beats, one of seven. Or four bars, three of four, one of three. For the purposes of this recipe, the exact beat/bar ratio is not important, as long as you understand it and have it noted down. This was the trickiest part of this track, which is a pretty basic tune.

Export the drum part and import into Audacity.

Get your mic. soundcheck yourself in. Do a scratch track. Add a guitar if you need it. This track is just so you know where you are in the song, so it doesn't need to be perfect. You can talk, remind yourself of chords, count yourself in, whatever. Just make sure you know where you are through the entire song. This can save a lot of hassle later. Get this right, and the rest can be made a lot easier.

Now, get your bass, soundcheck it in at a level not too loud and not too soft. I wanted mine up on the brink of distortion, so I could play a bit harder and nudge it over the edge. I added a bit of compressor to stop it going too far, but wanted it to fuzz a little. Play your bass part.

If you need to, split your bass part into sections and record bit by bit, but make sure your settings are either kept or noted down. If I was only using the Audiogram 6, I'd have needed to note settings, but my extra mixer allows me to plug in six stringed instruments, or microphones, at a time without having to lose settings. And nine other line-in instruments if I want them. If you're doing it in bits, you'll love the scratch track, which you can, of course, mute or unmute as you need it.

OK, your bass part is down. Now, you have choices. Guitar parts or vocal parts. Either way, again soundcheck yourself in and record your tracks. This track had a bit of trial/error in vocal compressor, which I eventually left quite mild, and in guitar FX, which ended up being a preset on the G1x. The guitar part I did here was the "solo" bit, just the two notes and slide.

At this point, I filled in the mandolin break, which is just some strumming in B, and listened back. It sounded weak, so I did two things.

One: I added banjulele behind and below the mandolin, mic'd with a cheap cardioid mic. If you listen carefully, you can hear the banjo-esque tone doing a slight variation on the strum.

Two: I multi-tracked the vocal, layering three vocal tracks into one.

Now, having filled the break out with depth, I needed to add a bit more depth with the guitar chords at the end, and also multi-track the "Vreni Schneider" vocal. Here, I layered a shouted version with two sung versions, which seemed to work.

At this point, I was over it, but the audio track was pretty much done.

The came the video. As I went along, I was recording on webcam. After I finished, I filmed a few more short snippets, and sliced up the video in Premiere with the backing track and lined up as best it would allow. There is one mime fail in the start of the fourth verse, where I used a vocal I liked with a video snippet I liked, when the two didn't line up. I didn't feel it was a big problem.

Then I exported the video, dropped it into Windows Live Movie Maker to add my favoured titles and caption, and uploaded it you youtube.

Job done.

I like it. If you like it too, that's a bonus. Now, it's over to you. I want video responses. Get on it!

I've had two or three requests for the chords to this in the last couple of weeks. On checking back against the blog, I realised, to my horror, that I'd never actually uploaded it or provided the chords. Which is a bit of an oversight. So below the fold, in glorious technicolor, is a slightly altered arrangement of Lord Hereford's Knob, by Half Man Half Biscuit, featuring me on guitar, me on bass, me on vocals, me on backing vocals, and my foot on drums.

Well, it is if you're an antivaxxer like our old friend Meryl Dorey. Just so you don't think I'm putting words in Meryl's mouth, here's a little screenshot from the Australian Vaccination Network's blog.

 

What Meryl and Tom are discussing here is a paper entitled "Measles outbreak in a fully immunized secondary-school population".

It seems Meryl didn't read much beyond the title, since the actual article examines the difference between seropositive children in a fully vaccinated population (that is, those which had active antibodies against measles), and seronegative children (who didn't).

There were 74 seronegative students and 1732 seropositive students. That's about 4.3% seronegative. 14 of the seronegative children contracted measles in this outbreak. None of the seropositive students developed measles.

Ordinarily, I'd do some hokey maths here to drum in the point, but I don't have to. Liam over at SAVN did it for me

Percentage of students who *didn't* contract measles
= 1 - 14/1806
= 99.2%

Yes, that's right. The "outbreak" was confined to ~0.8% of the study population. ~19.4% of the seronegative kids got sick. 0% of the seropositive kids got sick.

There's the point, none of those who reacted as expected to the vaccine were infected. Only those who showed up as seronegative, which can happen for several reasons, were infected.

Now, let's get all speculative for a moment. Those seronegative kids could have been immune supressed, at the time of vaccination or at the time of testing. They have have been, for some other reason, incapable of reacting to the vaccine. The simplest explanation, and the one that the paper actually covers is this:

"Stratified analysis showed that the number of doses of vaccine received was the most important predictor of antibody response."
- from the paper "Measles outbreak in a fully immunized secondary-school population".

So the kids who were seronegative most likely had incomplete or insufficient vaccination, basically. This is exactly in line with the science as we understand it.

But still Meryl contends that if 100% of the population wasn't covered, then the vaccine just doesn't work.

This is, frankly, insane.

There's a fallacy called the "Perfect Solution" or "Perfect World" fallacy, also known as the "Nirvana Fallacy", closely related, but not identical to, the "Excluded Middle" fallacy (discussed with reference to Meryl here). Meryl's response to Tom is the most perfect example of this Perfect Solution Fallacy I've yet seen in the wild.

What she is saying is that 99.2% coverage, with gaps where the vaccines were incomplete or otherwise ineffective, is equivalent to no vaccine at all.

Again, don't think I'm putting words in her mouth. Read the statement above for yourself. You can even go see the statements on her blog here. She says "the vaccines simply don't prevent the disease".

Which, again, is frankly insane. Because they do, and that's what the study shows.

I think it's just icing on the cake that she then goes on to conflate "hypothesis" with "theory", channeling, not for the first time, every creationist loon ever, and then decries herd immunity, an effect which is meant to help protect those who cannot be vaccinated or do not react correctly to vaccination.

Not for the first time, I'm at something of a loss as to how to even begin to converse with someone who thinks this way. I find it difficult to believe that she's merely doing this as a deliberate, considered lie in order to shore up her position. It's too absurd. She must really believe it. All I could do was post a link to Wikipedia's article on the Nirvana Fallacy in the forlorn hope that Meryl might learn something.

I'm not holding my breath.

This is just one more reason why Meryl's nonsense must be stopped.