My response to Judy’s latest communication:
I would like to correct the misinformation that has been placed on the internet by the Illawarra Mercury about the research presented by PhD research student Judy Wilyman. On the 11th June Dr. Mathew Berryman, a Senior Research Fellow in the SMART Infrastructure Faculty at Wollongong University misrepresented my comments about the promotion of vaccines to the public and took these comments to the media. The actual comments that I made can be found on my website: Vaccination Decisions.
And your comments below have all been made before, in one shape or another. You talk (below), of “open debate”, Judy, yet repetition of claims that have been already addressed isn’t debate.
Dr. Berryman, a specialist in infrastructure technology
I am not a specialist in infrastructure technology (ignoring cloud computing infrastructure), rather my current research is in modelling and analysis of large-scale systems. If anything, my speciality is in modelling and analysis large systems in general.
(and not health policy or vaccination)
Right, but as I pointed out here, I am certainly qualified in matters scientific (including a background and training in statistics thereof), and from a general scientific background, I can see that your research cherry-picks and misrepresents evidence to support your argument, ignoring evidence that doesn’t support your argument. As Popper pointed out, one should actively look for evidence that contradicts your hypothesis. Thus I can safely say with my background your research is not scientific. It would be remiss of me not to look at the advice of people who have doctorates in the science (such Dr David Hawkes) behind viruses and/or vaccination, as opposed to arts PhD candidates in public health and their non-public-health non-medical research supervisor, who also find your research unscientific.
made 3 comments that I would like to correct:
He stated ‘the arguments I am presenting are unscientific’. This is untrue. The research I am presenting on whooping cough was completed as part of a research project for my Master of Science degree (Population Health) and has been published by the Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA) and other peer-reviewed organisations. This research can be found on my website.
This “research” (flawed, as pointed out above) on whooping cough was published in 2011, during your PhD, post your MSc.
Presumably you mean “Whooping Cough: Is the vaccine effective?”, The Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA) Intouch Newsletter, April 2009?
The Intouch Newsletter, unlike their journal (The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health), is not peer reviewed.
The comments I made with reference to the promotion of vaccines to the public stated the government has been promoting the whooping cough vaccine on ‘anecdotal evidence’ and I gave an example. Anecdotal evidence is the evidence from one individual – it is their experience and it is not representative of the community. This is not the type of evidence that is used in a public health policy and the public is entitled to see what evidence is being used to suggest a particular vaccine is for the ‘good of the community’. There are other children that have died from vaccines therefore we cannot use individual cases to promote the need for a vaccine to the public.
The McCaffery family, as do I, publicly rely on and and support research by actual vaccination experts, such as Prof. Booy: http://www.chainofprotection.org/, who use scientific evidence.
To suggest that “I had misused the case of 4-week-old Dana McCaffery’s death from whooping cough against the wishes of her family” is a complete fabrication.
Oh, then why did they post this, amongst other complaints about your unethical conduct?
I resent your accusation that I am lying.
The McCafferys agreed to promote the vaccine to the Australian public and received an award ($1000) from the Skeptics organisation in 2009 for doing this.
Which they donated to medical research. Lying by omission to falsely implicate they were doing it for the money, again, Judy?
The public must be able to openly debate this topic and be consulted on the policies that are implemented. It is important that researchers in universities who are bringing you a different perspective should not be criticised for presenting their scientific arguments.
Judy, if you dislike having your “scientific” arguments criticised, particularly when they misinform the public, (and let’s be clear again, it’s your arguments, not you I am criticising here), you should not be at a University, you will find it a terrible place.
Some other comments on other vaccination-related issues:
I find it disappointing that the University of Wollongong avoids, in public, e.g. http://www.illawarramercury.com.au/news/local/news/general/uni-responds-to-antivaccine-views/2585887.aspx, supporting a pro-vaccination stance, apparently in order to be seen to be supporting “academic” freedom. The University can be supportive of Judy’s research* and academic freedom (through allowing unrestricted rights, barring intellectual property delays, to publish to peer-reviewed journals, as they do), but at the same time respectfully having their own pro-vaccination (and thus pro-science) stance. This would help communicate important health messages to the Wollongong and wider community, to which the University usually stresses its responsibility for.
*I hope they have now looked at her poor supervision in matters of vaccination.
No response yet to my complaint (in writing, via registered mail) to Vox FM.
Ms Wilyman has labelled her publication tab on vaccinationdecisions as “Peer-reviewed information…). In fact she has not published anything that has been peer reviewed since 2010. It is also interesting to note that the only two journals which could qualify as peer-reviewed are the in house journal for the Australasian College of Environmental and Nutritional Medicine, and Medical Veritas which is a magazine notorious for anti-scientific publications, one of their editorial board is Andrew Wakefield (website has to be seen to be believed http://www.medicalveritas.org). These are not journals (no matter what they state), they are magazines or newsletters. I think I could make a good arguement for Ms Wilyman having never published anything in a peer-reviewed journal.
What on earth is a peer-reviewed organisation? Organisations publish journals or newsletters and the articles themselves may or may not be reviewed by others working in the field – peers. What matters is whether the particular article has been the subject of critical scrutiny by other colleagues and experts. Not whether the organisation sometimes publishes articles that have.
It’s possible it’s an innocent mistake, although taking David’s comment into account it seems less likely. What it really sounds like is someone throwing around buzz words they know will please their listeners while not quite knowing what they mean (or assuming their listeners won’t know).
One thing she mentions that’s interesting, on further reflection, is where she reports doing a “research project for my Master of Science degree”. This, and the fact she lists a broad topic rather than a title, would indicate that she’s done a Masters by Coursework (with minor thesis) as opposed to a Masters by Research (a mini-PhD, with a higher bar for novelty and quality of research than a minor thesis).
I don’t understand the system but her thesis can be located here
http://www.vaccinationdecisions.net/resources/Jude%20Report%20Rev%2010%201_5_07%20double%20sided.pdf
It is a 70 page thesis with 35 pages of references and appeendices. I have started to read through it and the data presented in graphs is very uneven, She does not make clear distinctions between the whole cell pertussis vaccine and the acellular vaccine in her figures. Figure 1 gives notifications as raw numbers (not as per 100,000) for all age groups, and doesn’t point out that the increase in notifications does coincide with the change to the acellular vaccine. However Figure 2 gives the notifications as per 100,000 and in age groups but only between 1991 and 1997 (this thesis was created a decade later). She uses Table 4 and 5 to demonstrate that pertussis had gone down before the vaccine but only gives the 5 years from 1946 to 1950, and 1950 is a low year. If she had given a table with the ten years before vax and the ten years after vax she might have made a convincing point. I think you get the idea.
I think Judy has been attending the Dr. Viera Scheibner School of Truth Manipulation. Dr. Viera claims to have been published in peer-reviewed medical journals, when the texts she has had published were letters to the editor, not reseach articles. Not-a-doctor Judy claims to have been published by a ”peer-reviewed organisation”, but was only in a publiction that did not require review.
Pingback: Judy Wilyman’s unending distortions about a grieving family | reasonablehank