Health freedom and suppression of information - an interview with Leon Pittard of FairDinkum Radio

The following is a transcript of a radio interview I did a few weeks ago with Fairdinkum radio. You can listen to the original interview here - http://fairdinkumradio.com/resources/AVN%20050512.mp3.

Leon: Today, our podcast is featuring Meryl Dorey of the Australian Vaccination Network. Meryl joins us quite regularly to talk about vaccination subjects and issues. And the topic of our podcast and discussion today is the Australian government’s assault on health freedom. Meryl, welcome to Fairdinkum Radio.

Meryl: Thanks, Leon.

Leon: Meryl, your organisation, the Australian Vaccination Network, has been active for many years endeavouring to give information to the public and the people of Australia and indeed the world on the other side of the vaccination question and often the information that is not shared freely by other interested bodies.

Just recently the Australian Vaccination Network went through a long and protracted court case which ended on the 24th of February. Maybe for our listeners who are not familiar with that, you could give us a little overview of what that court case involved and what the ruling was.

Meryl: Sure, I’d be happy to Leon. Back in 2009 – so it has been a very long time – an organisation was setup called Stop the AVN and this group was very closely associated with an organisation called the Australian Skeptics that’s associated with sceptics’ groups around the world. And even though they’re called sceptics they’re not at all sceptical. They are sceptical of anything that is not supported by mainstream medicine and health, and they basically support mainstream medicine and health. Vaccination is probably the one issue that they all absolutely agree on, and many of them are for compulsory vaccination. But all of them believe that there is not a second side to the vaccination issue. There’s only the side that doctors will tell you and everyone should vaccinate. So they opposed our organisation from the very beginning and in 2009 they setup this group and its stated goal is to close us down in any way they can. And that started with a string of complaints to just about every single government organisation. And one of these organisations is the Health Care Complaints Commission of New South Wales. And this commission was setup to basically protect the population from dangerous health practitioners; doctors and other practitioners. So we said from the very beginning that the complaint that was filed was not a valid complaint because it has to affect the care and treatment of an individual client, and we don’t have individual clients. But we went through an entire year long process of investigation where the Health Care Complaints Commission just about ignored everything that we said, where at one point when I told the investigator that I felt that there was great bias in the investigation, she said to me “well, you have to understand that the Health Care Complaints Commission is a government body and, as such, it must support government policy which is pro-vaccination”. So there was quite strong evidence of bias.

And at the end of this 12 month investigation the Health Care Complaints Commission issued a public warning stating that the AVN was dangerous, deceptive and misleading, and that we needed to post a warning on our website to let people know that our information was solely anti-vaccination. And we refused to do that. We do have freedom of speech in Australia, we do have freedom of communication, and we do not consider ourselves to be anti-vaccination. We are pro-information and pro freedom of choice. But we’re certainly not telling people that they shouldn’t vaccinate. So as a result of our refusal to put this warning on the website.. sorry, put the warning that we’re anti-vaccine on the website, the Office of Liquor, Gaming and Racing which administers charities, revoked our authority to fund raise, meaning that for almost the last 2 years we were unable to accept new memberships or donations from the general public. And it’s my strong belief that it was thought that that revocation would have forced us to close our doors. It came very close to it. I had to get rid of all of our office staff and for the last 2 years, I’ve been doing everything myself. But we decided that we were going to push the envelope on this, we were going to take the government to court because we knew that what they had done was illegal and we wanted to prove it, not just for the AVN but for all the other organisations out there in Australia that go against government policies and have the information to back up what they’re doing. And that’s many natural therapy organisations, many natural therapists because we’re all under attack in Australia and around the world right now.

So we fought our case in the NSW Supreme Court and as you said, on February 24th we won this case and the court awarded costs to us. And they said what the Health Care Complaints Commission had done was illegal. And because the only reason that our charity authority had been revoked was because of the warning of the Health Care Complaints Commission, on the 18th of April the Office of Liquor, Gaming and Racing reinstated our authority to fundraise. So we are now once again able to take on members and donations from the general public. And that was a huge victory for us because everybody said that you can’t possibly take on the government and win, especially when you’re unfunded. We had a barrister who was working on spec and a solicitor who we did pay and that took an awful lot of our cash, our little bit of cash to do, but it was such an important issue - and our members supported us through this - that we felt it was something that we had to do. And almost immediately after our charity was reinvoked, was reinstated, excuse me, the Shadow Minister for Health in NSW has asked the Minister for Gaming & Racing to revoke it once again.

Leon: This is incredible because this really goes to the heart of.. the extension of your case is that my website, and any information sharing website, is, will be under assault to share information which may be contrary to government policy.

Meryl: Exactly. It’s a very big danger. And even with our victory in the supreme court, the decision said that what the Health Care Complaints Commission did was illegal because the complaint did not involve the care and treatment of an individual, but the decision of the judge said that the 'care and treatment of an individual' and the word 'affect' can mean that someone can come to our website… let’s say they come to our website and they decide to vaccinate even though our website has information on the dangers and risks of vaccination. If they then file a complaint with the Commission saying that they were 'affected' by the information on our website, then that would be a valid complaint. And the Stop the Australian Vaccination Network group has been advertising, trying to find someone to file this complaint and for all I know they may have done so by now. I just haven’t heard from the HCCC. So there is incitement and conspiracy, as far as I’m concerned, to actually try and shut our organisation down by these groups. This is illegal. What they are doing is completely illegal. I don’t know what the end result is going to be, but I think it’s something that all, especially natural health practitioners, need to be aware of because the same group that is doing this to us is trying very hard to do this with individual practitioners in Australia and with the organisations that govern the practitioners in Australia. There is a very strong effort to get rid of any natural therapy practitioner, supplements, homeopathy, chiropractic, all of these things are under threat. And I believe that it’s time for us to band together because if we don’t band together we’re going to be gone.

Leon: Absolutely. I’ve got no doubt that this is a test case for the future and that’s why we need to fight it in every way on the basis of humanity’s freedom to choose to research, to choose to investigate, and to choose to make a decision about what enters their body. This is a freedom issue, fundamental and… vaccination, which is a form of allowing someone to enter your body, must be done only by the individual or the parents consent. That’s where we stand today but this case is obviously trying to push that boundary and cross that line to where it becomes a department’s policy that the body will be impregnated by what and who they choose.

Meryl: That’s right. Isn’t it just a basic human right to say what we will and will not take as a health therapy for ourselves and for our children? And when the government says that they have the right to tell us what to put in our bodies and we don’t have the right to say no, then I say that the government is stepping well and truly outside of their boundaries. And it’s time, when that happens, for us to take a stand and say only this far and no further. I think we’ve reached that point.

Leon: Absolutely. Since that case and that ruling on the 24th of February there is now four separate government investigations which have basically started since then. The Department of Fair Trading, the Health Care Complaints Commission, the Office of Liquor, Gaming and Racing, and the Therapeutic Goods Administration. Now, you have information that leads you to believe that all four of these have now begun the wheels of process in an endeavour to work out a different way to come at you so that this ruling is not applicable for you being a charity.

Meryl: Yes, well I don’t know for sure that the departments themselves are trying to work this out but I know that the Stop the AVN group and especially several members of that group who are very active, one in particular, Mr Ken McLeod, who is the original complainant with the HCCC. He has since filed another complaint with the Health Care Complaints Commission, a complaint that is 90 pages [long], and the HCCC assessed that complaint even though once again it did not involve the care and treatment of an individual. Mr McLeod actually referred back to conversations on our email discussion list in 1998. I mean that is how desperate they are. And the Health Care Complaints Commission basically said that they had no complaint, that he had no valid complaint. He said that I had given incorrect information when I told someone that there is no requirement by the Australian government for people travelling overseas to get a yellow fever vaccine. He said that was a lie. The HCCC checked it out and said “well actually, as a matter of fact, that’s true”. So, they’re trying in any way, sort of like shooting arrows in the air and hoping that one of them will fall down and hit something, because they are filing these massive complaints with so many government departments and it’s only a matter of time before one of the departments will actually do something.

So they filed complaints with the Health Care Complaints Commission, the department of Fair Trading, with the Therapeutic Goods Administration and that’s a really interesting one because I got a call from the TGA. Now the Therapeutic Goods Administration, if I can give just a little bit of background for the listeners, it’s like the American Food & Drug Administration. They are the government department that licenses and approves drugs and vaccines and therapeutic products. So all therapeutic products that are licensed in Australia have to go through the TGA. And the TGA, even though it is a government department, receives no funding from the Australian government. Since 1998 they’ve worked under something called cost recovery and what that means, and I think it’s a fairly evil policy, it means that the government gives them no money to operate. All of their operating expenses come from the licensing fees for drugs and vaccines. So when a pharmaceutical company wants to license a new drug, the pharmaceutical company does all the testing, then they give the study to the TGA, and based on that information without any further checking, the TGA licenses the drug or the vaccine. If they stop licensing the drugs or the vaccines they won’t have money to operate. So they are totally dependent on the multinational corporations that they are meant to oversee. They are meant to protect the health and wellbeing of the Australian population but in the way that they’re setup it’s impossible for them to do that. And this has come out lately, there are many enquiries into the TGA that have been going on.

But what the complaint that was made about the AVN to the TGA says, and I’ve only just received this information, you’re the first person I’m speaking with about it, is that we sell a DVD on our website. Now we have a lot of books and DVD’s about general health issues, vaccination, natural health, instinctive parenting, environmental issues, we feel it’s our responsibility to allow people to access information that they might not find elsewhere. And one of the DVD’s that we sell is by Elaine Hollingsworth called One Answer to Cancer. Now, Elaine runs a health retreat up on the Gold Coast called Hippocrates Health and she was almost killed by a mainstream cancer treatment, I think it’s called Aldara, I could have the name wrong. It’s been banned in many countries. She had skin cancer, was given this treatment and it almost killed her. As a result of that experience she found a treatment that’s been used for at least 2000 years called black salve. And it’s a combination of herbs and minerals that is applied topically to cancer and it’s called nature’s scalpel. Now I’ve used it myself on a cancer that I had on my shoulder. I’ve got to tell you, it is like a scalpel, it cut it out in a perfect circle. And it got rid of it completely. So, the Australian government several years ago banned the use of black salve on humans and you could only buy it for animals. As of a couple of weeks ago you’re not even allowed to sell it for animal use.

Leon: Unbelievable.

Meryl: The only reason.. they haven’t actually given any reason except that it hasn’t been safety-tested by the organisation that licenses drugs and vaccines which also haven’t been independently safety-tested, the TGA. But because they’ve banned this now and because, I’m assuming, someone from Stop the AVN and I don’t have information on this yet, has filed a complaint with the TGA. They’ve come to me and said that we have to remove our sale of this DVD because actually providing information via a DVD, according to the TGA, is exactly the same as advertising and selling the product. And we’ve been in touch with several natural health practitioners who’ve been told the same thing. They may have an article on the use of ‘x’ herb for stomach ulcers, let’s say, and the TGA says even though they are not selling that herb the fact that they are giving out information on it’s use, may influence someone to actually go out and find a retailer who sells this herb and to buy it and therefore they’re advertising it.

Leon: Yeah. See, this is incredible because what this is opening up, this is the thin edge of the wedge of total surveillance of all information sharing to… by government bureaucracies to oversee every piece of information that the public receives. And therefore even any information sharing website, and let’s take the subject of fluoride, that may be opposite to public policy, will be subject to litigation or court action even though you may not be selling fluoride – it’s the government selling fluoride – but you’re the person that is sharing the other side of the story. Therefore you will be subject to litigation because it is against what the public system has already incorporated.

Meryl: That’s exactly right. The government has a policy, they’ve put some policy in place and if you are giving out information that opposes that government policy then you can be prosecuted, or persecuted is more likely, as a result of it. We saw the Howard administration start to do this with their anti-sedition laws and I proudly wore a t-shirt saying I’m a seditionist because I believe that in a democracy, public debate is supported. Not only supported, but protected. And if Australia wants to be considered a democracy and not a banana republic, then it has to support the right to free and public debate on all issues. If an issue does not have enough information to back it up, well you have to believe that the people are smart enough to figure work that out for themselves. The fact that the government is trying to control and suppress this sort of communication is frightening and it is not something that a democratic government should, or would, do.

Leon: The thing is we can see that schoolchildren are being taught that we are entering a phase of dangerous global warming and that is the government’s position. That is put in the curriculum. Now there’s many in society that question the validity of that indoctrination and therefore anyone who would oppose that, automatically, their information is not able to be shared. To just follow on from that example, for instance, all of the price increases via the carbon tax, there has been legislation passed to say that the business cannot put on the product that this product is $10 dearer because of the carbon tax. It is illegal to put there what the increase is. Now you can see there that what this legislation, and this is related to what we’re talking about because what it is, is a dampening of the information to the public about the government policy. Now, it’s an attack on openness, it’s an attack on freedom, and it’s an attack on information sharing about the truth. If a person believes something is the truth he should be able to have the freedom to share that.

I wanted to ask you, Meryl, about… to register as a charity. Now, this was the recent ruling and I notice that what the opposition health person, Dr Andrew McDonald, is now asking is why has the Minister reinstated authority for charitable fundraising for the AVN. Can you describe to us what the parameters and the conditions are for being a charity?

Meryl: Yes. Now, from the very beginning because of our constitution, the AVN has been considered a charity. A charity basically means, and there is a whole lot that you can read on the Office of Liquor, Gaming and Racing website about this, and every state has their own body that administers charities. If the government determines that the activities of the organisation constitute the pursuit of a charitable purpose then they are a charity. Now the really crazy thing is that we had actually tried to get rid of our charitable authority well before this happened because it is a huge onus, a huge burden, for a charitable organisation. Especially a small unfunded one like ours to be considered a charity. You could go out tomorrow, Leon, and you could put a “donate here” link on your website – I don’t know, you may even have one now – and there would be absolutely no requirement for you to report to anybody or do anything because you’re not pursuing a charitable purpose. But if you’re pursuing a charitable purpose and you are registered as a charity, you have to account for everything that you do. You have to account for the size of the collection box that you use when you go out and do a seminar and put up a collection box on the table.

Leon: Incredible.

Meryl: You have to be audited every year at a cost of… well, it’s cost us upwards of four to five thousand dollars a year just to get that audit done. Where if we were not a charity, all we would need is a plain accountant to do our end-of-year figures, which might cost four or five hundred dollars. So we tried to get rid of this but we were told that we pursue a charitable… we have a charitable pursuit, our organisation, so we are a charity. And even when our authority was revoked the OLGR said that we still needed to abide by those regulations because we pursue a charitable purpose. The only reason that we were not able to accept new memberships and donations during that period when our status was revoked was because the OLGR said that we pursue a charitable purpose. So Dr McDonald saying that we are not a real charity, it means to me that he really doesn’t know 100% what he’s talking about. He also said that we get special tax breaks because we’re a charity and that’s not true at all. I think he might be talking about becoming a tax-deductible gift recipient and that’s one of those organisations where if you donate more than $2- you can deduct it off your tax. And the AVN applied for that several times. The last time the ATO told us that we definitely do qualify as a deductible gift recipient but they wouldn’t give it to us because they considered that we were anti-vaccine and the government is pro-vaccine and therefore they wouldn’t give us the deductible gift recipient. Which they weren’t supposed to do.Tthey were supposed to make that decision based on whether we qualified or not. And the other thing is that some charities can be income tax exempt but you have to apply for that, it’s not automatic. So Dr McDonald really doesn’t know what he’s talking about in this situation. And in his questions on notice in NSW Parliament that were given yesterday, he said that… he asked the government whether there were any reasons for declining our authority, such as alleged fraud. Now, he’s using parliamentary privilege to say something that I believe he might know is not true because there was no alleged fraud. The Office of Liquor, Gaming and Racing specifically stated that they found no evidence of fraud when they did an audit of our organisation. What they found were breaches to the Act and mistakes, errors. And they said that these were of a technical nature and that they were common in organisations of our sort. And they asked us to fix everything and we immediately fixed everything. So they said that there was no reason to revoke our authority based on the errors that they found.

Leon: The very fact that you raise this issue about ‘is there any alleged fraud’, I mean, he’s planting seeds in peoples’ minds about your organisation. And he goes onto say, is there any other questionable issues about this organisation that we could revoke their authority on. I mean, I could raise a thousand issues against him and his former government about selling his people out, selling our electricity and selling us in every way. The corruption that was in that government is just incredible. And here they are burdening the individual who’s just trying to share information with so much… I only saw the numbers the other day, in the last 12 months we’ve had 16,000 pieces of legislation passed in Australia, in the last short time.

Meryl: Wow.

Leon: Just incredible.

Meryl: How did they know that?

Leon: And what they’re doing to us, as individuals, they’re loading us up with requirements, checks and balances, how big’s your offering box, all of these different things. And yet, those in power basically march on and take away everything that’s dear to us without question.

Meryl: Yeah, a government’s responsibility is to mandate, not to mandate, but to govern the safety and wellbeing of the population in as far as infrastructure goes. They are not there to tell us what we can eat, what treatments we can use, how we educate our children. All of these things they are stepping outside of their real responsibility on. And I believe that it’s time for us to put the government back in its place cause it’s stepped right outside of that place.

Leon: Absolutely. Well that’s, you’re exactly right. That’s what they are doing, they’re crossing the line to say what we should teach our children, what we must teach our children, what we must give our children as far as healthcare goes… the direction of our whole lives is being impregnated by government policy and even about the cost in our lives, everything is being encroached upon. Now Meryl, regarding this… is there anything else you wanted to add regarding this latest assault by Dr Andrew McDonald?

Meryl: Not really. The only thing I would ask is if your listeners are interested, our blog “No Compulsory Vaccination” which is on wordpress, will have regular updates as we find out more information and as we put in our responses to these issues. So if people are interested in finding out more and staying up to date with what’s happening, I urge them to stay in touch. You can subscribe to our updates on our blog and that would probably be a really good thing to do.

Leon: That’s good. Now another question I wanted to ask you about the gaming authority, sorry, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, you were saying how the only way that they actually get funded is by the registration process of vaccines and therapeutic drugs, etc. Do they receive grants from any other foundations, to your knowledge?

Meryl: Not to my knowledge, that’s not anything that I’ve ever looked into. I do know that they receive no funding to test either the safety or the effectiveness of the drugs and vaccines that they license. And that they’re licensed purely on the information that’s provided to them by the drug manufacturer.

Leon: Ok. And the reason I ask is I’ve been doing a little bit of research into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and have discovered that their foundation has been giving millions of dollars to different media outlets and these media outlets actively promote their vaccination programs and what they are doing around the world with vaccination, etc, especially in places like India and Pakistan. And that these millions of dollars that go to these different media organisations, these media organisations then produce documentaries about the miracle working power of vaccinations in all of these countries. And if you follow the money you see a link between those promoting the vaccines and the media companies that are actually promoting them, which leads me to an article that I was reading last week about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation program in India which was promoted as the last mile to eradicating polio in India. And it featured a promotional video which was displaying numbers of the cases of polio in India decades ago, with the number of cases dropping to 42 by 2010, but it appears that the wild polio virus stats have been traded for polio from vaccines and non-polio acute flaccid paralysis. Now, in India over 47,000 cases of this non-polio acute flaccid paralysis was reported in 2011. Now these symptoms are practically the same as what is attributed to the eradicated wild virus polio. Now, apparently vaccine polio viruses also cause polio paralysis. Have you got any thoughts on that, Meryl?

Meryl: Yes, it’s interesting. India declared itself, or was declared by the World Health Organisation to be free of polio for the first time, I think it was about two months ago, sometime in February. And there was wild celebration, our polio vaccine campaign has worked! But this article that you’re talking about was published by two Indian researchers. And what they found, they did an absolutely, fantastic job of researching this. As you said, there were 47,500 cases of acute flaccid paralysis, and non-polio paralysis. And it’s interesting because before the polio vaccine came in, polio was always diagnosed using clinical symptoms. So we didn’t know what virus was causing paralysis before the polio vaccine came in. And in India there was very little testing done up until fairly recently, it’s only within the last 8 years that there’s been widespread testing. So they’ve had a lot of paralysis and they’ve been calling it polio, but they don’t really know what virus is causing it. Now, they’ve had to politically declare that all of these millions and millions of dollars, well actually billions of dollars, that have been spent trying to rid India of polio have been successful. So they’re doing all these tests and they’re finding that there are 47,500 cases of paralysis but that a lot of it’s not being caused by the wild polio virus. A lot of it’s being caused by the vaccine virus and what these researchers did is that they found that the death rate from the non-polio, non-wild polio virus is twice, it’s double, what the death rate is from polio. So if you get polio naturally you are half as likely to die from it as you will be if you get it from the vaccine or from one of these other viruses which 10 years ago in India would have been called polio anyway. So it’s playing with statistics.

And the other thing they’ve done is they found that India is using polio vaccine as if it was water. In Australia, a child will get four polio vaccines by the time they start school age, and I believe there’s another one at school age. In India, they are getting up to 50 doses of the oral polio vaccine. Every time this vaccine campaign, the pulse-polio campaign comes through a village, it doesn’t matter, they don’t check to see if the person’s already got the vaccine. If one dose is good, fifty’s better. And because you’re continually exposing people to this live virus, and these people live in less than hygienic conditions, and polio virus is a stomach virus, it’s an enteric virus so it’s carried through stool, you’re spreading the disease. We stopped using the live polio vaccine over 10 years ago in Australia, and in the U.S. they stopped using it a decade before that, but it’s cheaper to produce. So we send it to third world countries which is the last place where it should be used because of hygiene problems. So not only has the vaccine not eradicated polio in India, it has made the situation worse. It has increased the number of cases of paralysis, and who cares if paralysis is caused by polio virus or by another virus. The fact is that your child is paralysed and it doesn’t make any difference to you whether it was caused by polio virus or something else. The fact is your child is paralysed. And if we are causing more paralysis by vaccinating than we were by not vaccinating, then why aren’t we looking at what we’re doing? We are causing huge tragedies, huge numbers of tragedies and grief in a country that’s already dealing with so many issues. And we’re declaring a victory when there was no victory; or what there was, was more disease.

Leon: It was good work of those Indian researchers to find that and as we discussed in one of our other conversations, how a lot of the out-of-date swine flu vaccines were dumped on countries like India, Brazil, Pakistan, even though they were a year or two out-of-date. They had millions of these vaccines left over, and they dumped them on these countries as an experiment or we had to get rid of them somehow. What’s going on with these poor people? As you said, we don’t use this polio vaccine anymore and yet it’s ok for them.

Meryl: Yep, what’s done in developing countries by medical organisations is beyond immoral. It’s horrible, it’s absolutely horrible. These people are used as guinea-pigs for tests. There have been vaccines that have been given in these countries that have abortive agents in them, in other words, vaccines that will prevent a woman from getting pregnant, make them lose their baby if they are already pregnant. This is not conjecture, this is confirmed by the World Health Organisation. And they’re used as guinea-pigs in drug and vaccine testing because ethics committees in developed countries will not allow these sorts of tests that are done in these countries. Doctors are paid an awful lot of money in these countries to refer parent, who don’t know what their children are getting, to these studies.

Leon: Look, they’re using these countries as experiments, they want sterilisation, they want population control, and vaccines are a perfect way to deliver that outcome. Now, Meryl, I want to talk to you a little bit about autism rates and I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of… the autism rates have spiked, and I notice there’s a lot of articles circulating regarding that, but I would like to just speak about Donald Trump for a minute, and a statement he made which obviously makes a lot of ground because he’s an important type person, someone’s that in the spotlight. He acknowledged that speaking out against vaccines and a vaccine schedule is very controversial but he went on to state, he said “I don’t care less. I’ve seen people where they have a perfectly healthy child. They go for vaccinations and a month later the child is no longer healthy.” Trump’s statement is a victory for parents who have long believed vaccines contribute to neurological damage their children suffered post-vaccination. It goes on to say that the Centers for Disease Control just released a study based on 2008 data revealing autism rates have risen to an all-time high. Health records for 8 year old children in 14 states were analysed showing autism now affects 1 in 88 children and 1 in 54 boys in the U.S. Have you seen these rates recently?

Meryl: I have. And it’s amazing. First of all, if there was anything that twenty years ago caused 1 person in 10,000 to get a disease and that disease has now risen to 1 in 88, there would be worldwide panic. There would be billions of dollars. Look what happened with AIDS. I mean billions, if not trillions, of dollars were thrown at that issue trying to solve it. And yet, with autism there’s this constant thing from the government and the medical community “calm down, it’s not really happening, it’s all smoke and mirrors”. But it’s not. These are real diagnoses of autism, it’s not better statistic keeping because the countries where this statistic keeping is done have always kept good statistics on autism. And that 1 in 88 figure, we’ve gone from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 88 as of the year 2000, because they did this in 2008 with 8 year old children. The U.S government says that the rate of autism is increasing by 12% a year and if we extrapolate that, that means that a child born today has a 1 in 20 chance of being autistic. It’s not 1 in 88, it’s 1 in 20, and possibly 1 in 10 for boys. So, when are we going to panic? When are we going to start saying what is going to happen to the future of these children? How is our society ever going to provide for kids who can’t speak, who can’t learn, who are constantly ill? It’s the most amazing situation, the emperor has no clothes and yet everyone is saying what a beautiful outfit he’s wearing.

Leon: Exactly. And I notice between 1960 and 1980, we talked about these rates before, children were subject to around 25 doses. Today, children are subject to about 70 doses in the same time period. To put this in perspective, a child born today, if you follow the schedules, would receive more vaccine doses by the time he’s six months old than his mother did by the time she went to college. And we’re looking at 160 or so vaccine doses from a child to an adult. It’s just incredible. It just keeps growing and growing.

Meryl: But don’t worry, because Paul Offit, who’s at CHOP, the Children’s Hospital, Pennsylvania, and who has sold his patent for a vaccine for an estimated 20 million dollars, says that children can get up to 10,000 to 100,000 vaccines at one time without suffering any ill-effect. So the number of doses that our kids are getting, according to Paul Offit, should make no difference to their health. Yet, we have parents all over the world, millions of parents, who are saying that they had a perfectly healthy child one day, they vaccinated them, and then the next day their child regressed into autism or had another health condition that either permanently disabled them or killed them. But Paul Offit says this is not happening despite the parents out there whose own experience have shown them that it is.

Leon: You know what’s incredible about the time which we’re living in, you alluded to it there about the emperor having no clothes. Cancer rates are increasing. Autism rates are increasing. Neurological disorders increasing. All of the health of humanity. Obesity. It doesn’t matter what avenue you look at, people are getting sicker and yet the one thing that the system will never do - they will never ask why. They will always provide a new vaccine to fix this problem or a new chemical drug to fix this problem, but they never ask, "Why are people getting sicker?" Why are these rates increasing. And they will refuse to look at the link between the chemicalisation of foods, the genetic modification of foods, and the vaccines that are going into people’s lives, that is actually a cause of all of these… I mean, mercury, there’s more and more studies showing the damage that adjuvants like mercury do, and the link to mercury and autism. And yet, this is never addressed by the system and anyone that wants to speak out about it, they’re side-lined and they’re isolated. Like in your case where the assault is against your organisation to even receive a donation.

Meryl: That’s right. It’s very true. But I have to say I think that all of these attacks, which are accelerating and getting far worse, not just in Australia but around the world, are the last gasp of an industry that is on… it’s dying. We’re at a tipping point right now. The latest research shows that I think by the year 2016, the average cost per year for American citizens for healthcare will exceed the average income of the American citizen. We cannot continue the way that we’re going and it’s obvious that there are more and more people becoming better informed about these issues and making decisions not to use chemical drugs, not to use vaccines. For once, I believe that it’s true, when the governments say that the rate of vaccination compliance is declining. They’ve been saying it for years, crying wolf, but now I think it’s actually true because people are better informed, because the internet is there, and because people are finally waking up and saying enough is enough. Our children are sicker. In Australia, over 40% of Australia’s children are currently being treated for a chronic disease; in the U.S. it’s over half. We’re sicker than we’ve ever been before, and yet we spend more money on medical care and medical treatments than we’ve ever spent before. This generation of children is going to be the first generation in history that’s going to live for a shorter time than their parents have. Where is the great success? Where are the blockbusters that we’re constantly hearing about every day? They are not working and people are finally knowing that they’re not working, and they’re looking at the safer, effective natural therapies and they’re saying “When I take them, I feel better. When I have a condition and treat it with natural therapies, I get better. So why I am listening to my doctor and using these drugs when all I do on the drugs is get sick?” People are saying this. You can only fool people for so long.

Leon: I think you’re right. People are waking up to the system and waking up because of the research that they’re doing themselves, and that’s the great thing that we have with the internet today that we are able to research and look at two sides of the story or as many sides of a story as possible. Ladies and Gentlemen, a return to good health is what we need, eating good quality foods and removing ourselves as much as we can from the chemical assaults that we are under today. And I encourage you all to investigate the other side of the story with vaccinations. Go to the Australian Vaccination Network website. I encourage you all not to vaccinate until you do the research and if you choose to vaccinate after you do the research that’s your privilege, but we encourage you to do the research, read and investigate, and look at the statistics. Meryl, it’s been great speaking with you again. Is there anything you’d like to add in closing?

Meryl: No, Leon, I’ve think you’ve said it all, that was perfect.