I was honoured this year to be awarded the Order of Australia Medal for service to medicine, and to the promotion of immunisation. The most common question I’ve been asked, however, is how or why an orthopaedic surgeon became so interested and involved in immunisation. As many of you would know, I have several degrees to my name, and the one that sparked my interest in this field was the Masters of Clinical Epidemiology. For those of you who know what epidemiology is, please stop yawning. For those of you that don’t, it’s the study of how medical research is carried out, and how it is analysed and conclusions reported. You may now commence yawning.
The thing is, the vaccination rates in Australia have been steady for many years, somewhat lower than the ideal 95%, and also alarmingly low (<50%) in some communities. Despite the best efforts of professional vaccination researchers, nothing seemed to have an effect on this rate. Children were suffering and in some cases dying because they were not vaccinated, or worse, because the people around them were not.
Enter Meryl Dorey and the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN). Meryl sold a message of false concern for children’ health, and often promoted herself as an “expert” in vaccination. Far from it, she and her ilk would misquote research, use unlikely stories of “vaccination damage” and, of course promote, the discredited idea that vaccination was responsible for a whole range of diseases. This last idea has been proven false more times than I’ve had hot dinners. She even suggested that “battered baby” syndrome was due to immunisations and not domestic violence. The sad truth is that Meryl and people like her spread misinformation and fear to parents who often didn’t know any better.
This all came to a head about five years ago when she made it onto national television at the same time as a real immunisation expert, as well as the parents of a child who had died of whooping cough (she was too young to be immunised). A Facebook group, Stop the AVN, was formed and shortly afterwards I joined it. The rest, as they say, is history. We lobbied, we cajoled, we argued and we lobbied some more. We exposed the media to the lies the AVN spread and effectively had it banished from the news. No longer was Meryl an “expert” but now she was an “anti-vaxxer”. The membership plummeted, the income fell, and the AVN is now only a shadow of it’s former self.
Of course, others have tried to step into the breach and get a slice of the money and fame, but for a couple of years now they have been duly recognised by the mainstream as charlatans, liars and not people whose words can be trusted. Judy Wilyman, who was awarded a PhD by the University of Wollongong, has been widely criticised for the content of her thesis, and for writing a document based on false assumptions about vaccination. It was never examined by anyone with real expertise in immunisation. My thoughts can be read in an opinion piece in the Australian, which you can read here. She is still emailing myself, journalists and UoW academics demanding that someone pay her attention.
Sadly for her, no one has.
But what of the positive side? Beginning with a newspaper campaign called “No Jab No Play” restricting day care to immunised children, the Federal Government took the scheme one level further and implemented “No Jab No Pay”, closing a loophole that vaccination refusers were using to get government payments that they were not entitled to. As a result, vaccination rates have risen more than they have in ten years because there’s less parents refusing vaccination, but also because those who found it difficult to get their children vaccinated are now much more motivated to do so.
Vaccination has finally been given the priority it deserves. Denialists, liars, fear mongers and rogues have been put in their place. Children are safer now than they were a year ago.
And we will count the number of lives saved by the small graves that will not need to be dug.
John
