The Millenium Project – May 2015

AVN! Stopped! (23/5/2015)
The impetus for starting this site in 1999 was that I found a group of child killers called the Vaccination Awareness Network had changed its name to the much more inoffensive and deceptive Australian Vaccination Network. For the next decade I battled along by myself fighting this organisation, and then Facebook happened. In 2009, appalled by vicious attacks by the AVN and its supporters on the parents of a child who had died of whooping cough, my friend Daniel Raffaele created a Facebook group called “Stop the AVN”. This brought together a large number of people with diverse skills and backgrounds who committed themselves to driving this vile organisation into the ground.

It now looks like we have succeeded, and all that is left is for a priest to perform the Last Rites and for dirt to be shovelled into the grave on top of the coffin.

We’ve had some success over recent years in forcing a change to a less deceptive name and having the AVN’s deceitful charity status revoked. Prominent figures in the organisation seem to have disappeared (generally by having their real names hidden behind sock puppets). Now, however, it looks like the implosion is almost complete. This is the current situation:

• The AVN’s website is but a shadow of its former self and is rarely updated.
• Ownership of the domain name avn.org.au has been transferred to someone that nobody has ever heard of before.
• The AVN’s Facebook page has been renamed to “Friends of the AVN” and there appears to be much confusion over who manages and administers it, although denials that are still belongs to the AVN are regularly issued.
• The registered address of the AVN is no longer at the home of erstwhile president Meryl Dorey but is now at a virtual office which is really only a telephone answering service.
• The Facebook page that become more of an echo chamber than it was before, and most of the posts seem to be regurgitations of standard conspiracy theories with the responses generally being along the line of “Wow! That’s awful”. It had a brief resurgence recently to repeat the sickening comparison of vaccination to rape.
• People who have been members of the committee over many years have vanished and the current President is rarely seen. Official records show that Meryl Dorey is still the Public Officer (the public face of the organisation to the bureaucracy) but maybe this is just an oversight in filling in the forms.

The following piece of drivel appears prominently on the AVN’s web site:

No, the debate is polarising because one side uses science and the other just makes up lies. There might be doubt, but there is no reasonable doubt.

It makes me feel so good that I think I have to say it again. In big letters.

AVN! Stopped!

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This makes me immeasurably happy.