You can read the original article at the link above and I will include my response which was submitted and rejected below, in case you hadn't read it yet.
 
Immediately after I was informed by one of our members that this article had been published in the paper, I contacted the Editor of this section, Leigh Dayton. She appeared to me to become immediately aggressive and angry when she heard who I was and told me that she had no sympathy for the position of the AVN. She also said straight off that her section only published science and would not provide a venue for information from the 'anti-vaccination' movement.
  I told her that was great because the AVN did not represent the anti-vaccination movement.   We were pro-information, pro-choice and pro-science and that I felt this article defamed our organisation as well as containing information that was not verified or verifiable. Therefore, I requested the right of reply. She told me to submit my response and she would consider it.
 
I did that about an hour later and received an email back almost straight away to say that since Sue Page did not name our organisation in her article, she would not consider giving us the right of reply.
 
I spoke with the Chief of Staff of the Australian about this and asked for the paper's policy regarding right of reply and was told that he did not have that information there at the time so he could not really comment, but that the section editor had the right to include or not include whatever she wanted in her section.
 
At that point, I filed a complaint against the paper with the Australian Press Council and also advised our readers of the fact that I had been denied the right of reply, asking them to write to the newspaper about this issue.

More than 80 of you took the time to write and your letters are phenomenal! I have to apologise because I usually write to thank everyone who has written in during one of these action alerts, but it has been so full-on here, I haven't been able to do that, so please consider this to be group thank you!
 
I have put all of your letters (up until a few days ago - there are some that came in later and they did not make it onto this page, sorry) up on our website and would urge everyone to take the time to go and at least scan these letters since they represent a viewpoint that is not given much airplay but that demonstrates so clearly how those who question vaccination are highly educated and have studied the science rather than making decisions from a basis of fear. Please also forward this newsletter to your friends, family and colleagues using either the forward button below or simply by hitting forward in your email software.
 
The web page can be found here and if you would prefer to just download the pdf file of the letters, you can do that directly here.
 
I heard back from the Press Council fairly promptly and their reply was not at all what I would have expected. Here is just a part:
 
Dear Ms Dorey,
 
The Council has received your complaint form of October 19 in which you raise a concern with material published in the Health section of the Weekend Australian.
 
... The section in which the article was published is clearly marked as being available to "health professionals". The article was written by someone fitting that description. The newspaper undoubtedly has restrictions on whom it publishes in that section. Nor would the Press Council say that you or your organisation was entitled to some opportunity for response to the published article - which is clearly the viewpoint of the health professional expressing her opinions, which the newspaper is entitled to publish.
 
(Please read the above paragraph carefully. What the Press Council seems to be to be saying is that health professionals are exempt from slander and defamation rules as well as the rules governing providing proof of the veracity of their statements simply because they are health professionals. Also, this section is in a public newspaper, so does the Press Council think that, seeing the banner advising that this section was available to health professionals, nobody but health professionals would read it?)
 
The Press Council then went on to urge me to submit a letter to the Editor of the Australian and said they would write to the paper asking them to print my letter. A letter to the Editor would be good - but is limited to 250 words, so how can I respond to this piece with such a ridiculous number of words? And why can't a response be printed in the same section of the paper as the original piece appeared? Are doctors really given so much latitude that they can say and do anything with absolute protection?
  In addition, it is rather ironic that the HCCC is investigating both myself and the AVN for being 'unregistered health professionals' - a claim that we deny absolutely - and yet the Press Council states that the Australian has no need to print my reply because neither "...you or your organisation" are health professionals.   Is it a matter of using the moniker that suits the occasion - whatever can keep our views out of the media at the appropriate time?
 
Next, I decided to proceed by investigating one of the claims made by Sue Page in her article. The quote follows:
 
"In epidemics in NSW in 1981 and 1984 there were 200,000 cases [of measles] with 2,850 recorded hospital admissions."
 
Now, this just did not seem right to me. Were there really 200,000 cases of measles reported and did this statement mean that there were 200,000 cases in both years or 200,000 cases between 1981 and 1984?
 
I decided to do some research on this subject and proceeded to the Australian Bureau of Statistics' (ABS) website but the earliest information available online regarding the number of reported cases of measles was 1989 and in that year, across all of Australia, there were a total of 169 cases. Was it possible that in 1981 and 1984 there were 200,000 cases in NSW alone and only 5 years later there were only 169 in the whole country?
 
I contacted the ABS and spoke with one of the consultants there who told me that prior to 1989, all the ABS did was keep track of who had contracted measles - not the actual incidence of the disease. So they would say, for instance, that 78% of the population had contracted and recovered from measles over all time and now were serologically immune - they did not count the number of cases that occurred each year. The ABS told me that NSW Health had its own tracking system and perhaps the figures would have come from either them or the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW).
 
I contacted the AIHW first and was told that all of their information came from the ABS - they did not have any other figures for incidence of measles apart from what the ABS had.

Next port of call was NSW Health (evidently, this organisation is different than the NSW Department of Health). They told me that they had only started keeping records on the incidence of measles in 1991 - two years later than the ABS - and had no data for anything earlier. Curiouser and curiouser.
 
They suggested calling the NSW Department of Health, where I was put through to their media department. After several days of emailing back and forth with the very nice gentleman there who really didn't have any information but needed to keep asking other departments for the details, I was told that, "We have been advised that information on communicable diseases relates only to data since 1991 and can be located here in the communicable diseases year in review section."
 
So, a neat little circle had been drawn and I was right back where I started.
 
I contacted Leigh Dayton again at the Australian and if she had been angry the first time I spoke with her, she was even more so this time. It seemed to me that she had been informed that I was questioning the source of the claims regarding the number of cases of measles because she immediately told me that she had spoken with Sue Page and that Sue had provided her with the reference for the 200,000 cases of measles in 1981 and 1984. I asked her if she could tell me what the reference was and she said that she didn't have it there and probably hadn't saved it but that Sue had emailed it to her. I asked her if she could see if she would be able to find this because I had contacted the ABS and NSW Health and neither of those organisations had this information. She then told me that the reference had been provided to her by a very trusted source, a doctor, and that was good enough for her and that she did not have time to go running around looking for things for me.
  She then told me that the reference had been provided to her by a very trusted source, a doctor, and that was good enough for her and that she did not have time to go running around looking for things for me.   She said if she could find it, she would forward it but, if not, that would have to do and she terminated the conversation.
 
OK. Not to be deterred, I decided to press on.
 
My next idea was to go right to the source - Sue Page. You can read more about her here. For some time, she was the immunisation spokesperson for the Northern Rivers Division of General Practice and was also instrumental in setting up a website, www.vaccination.org.au, the sole purpose of which appears to me to be to refute everything the AVN says without ever referring to us by name. Their mascot is an echidna named Spike whose motto is "Vax 'em". Not exactly cute and cuddly, I would have thought.
 
I have met Sue several times in the past and have great respect for her support of nursing mothers and for her calm and gentle approach every time I have seen her speak. It is only on the issue of vaccination where we really do not agree. But surely adults can disagree on one topic and still treat each other with respect?
 
The conversation started out well - though she sounded very surprised that I'd called her. I said that I would like to get a reference for the quote regarding measles she had used in the Australian article and was told that she didn't have it there. That a woman in her office who had died from breast cancer a few years ago had held the hard copy of this paper but that, since she was gone, Sue didn't know where it was to be found. Remember that just a few minutes earlier, Leigh Dayton had told me that Sue had sent her the reference...
 
I asked her, if she didn't have a hard copy, did she at least have a citation and was told that this information came from a NSW Health Communique from the 1980s and that since this was before the Internet, it would not be available online and she did not have the citation.
 
I then asked if the reference meant that there were 200,000 cases of measles in both 1981 and 1984 or between 1981 and 1984 and she said 'between'. So I brought up the ABS information that there were only 169 cases reported in all of Australia in 1989 and said I thought it was extraordinary that we had gone from having such a high number of cases in NSW alone over that period to having such a low number of cases in 1989 - only 5 years later.
 
She said no, it is not extraordinary because that was when we had a large measles vaccination campaign. I asked her, do you mean Michael Wooldridge's campaign (the then Federal Minister for Health who initiated the Immunise Australia campaign in the late 1990s) and she said yes. I told her that this campaign did not take place until 1998 so could have nothing to do with this decline and that the measles vaccine was introduced in Australia in 1970 and added to the schedule in 1975 so again, I don't believe that vaccination had anything to do with this decline.
 
Sue then went on to say that the 200,000 figure made perfect sense because if you took into account that a 20-year-old might be immune to measles through contracting the disease and that a newborn would not have immunity and would therefore be susceptible, you would assume, by taking into account the birth rate in NSW, that there would be a large body of susceptible individuals and therefore there would be a large number of measles cases because it is such an infectious disease.
 
I found this reasoning astounding and asked: is this 200,000 figure the actual numbers of reported cases or is it simply an estimate extrapolated by taking into account the birth rate and assuming that there would be a certain number of susceptible individuals? Sue said it was actual reported cases. Based on my knowledge, this seemed at the time, and still does seem, very strange to me.
 
So I asked her where I could get a copy of the communique that she had referred to in her article. She told me that she doubted I could because it was put out by NSW Health and "why would they keep a 30-year-old communique? There is only a legal requirement to keep information for 7 years" so she doubted that there would be any copies left!  
Once again - I was astounded!   I found this situation quite surprising. I know that at the AVN, we reference EVERYTHING to primary medical sources and we try to be as meticulous as possible with our source documentation. Yet here is someone who is a professional and an academic who appears to be telling me that they have prepared an article and published it in a national newspaper which draws conclusions about the incidence of disease based on a document or statistics that she now cannot produce and appears to be based solely on her recollection.
 
told her that I believed that NSW Health should have kept copies of this regardless of any requirements by law and that I had been to libraries in Sydney and Brisbane and seen medical information from health departments going back to the turn of last century. At this point, she appeared to begin to get angry with me then and said that, if anyone would have it, it would be Marianne Trent who works for NSW Health. She said I should contact Marianne to ask her for a copy.
 
I then said that I had approached Marianne Trent several times in the past by telephone, email and written correspondence but that she had not returned my calls, emails or letters.

I then asked Dr Page if she could contact Ms Trent to get a copy of the document which could then be forwarded on to me. Dr Page did not give me a reply to this request and at that point, terminated the conversation
 
OK - I can handle that.
 
Next mission was to call Marianne Trent. Marianne has worked for the North Coast Area Health Service for as long as I've been running the AVN and her area of interest is vaccination, though I am not sure of her actual position or title at this point in time.
 
This time, I was actually able to speak with her because the receptionist did not ask who was calling and put me straight through.
 
The minute she heard who was calling, she said, "Meryl, we had an agreement that you would not call me and everything you had to say would be done in writing." As I said, I have tried writing and calling in the past, and I don't recall such an agreement anyway, but at this point, the phone went dead.

It appears to me that a pattern is developing...

So, I emailed Ms Trent - on the 22nd of October, and have yet to get a reply. Does anyone out there know if State employees are allowed to refuse to speak with members of the public on the phone and also refuse to reply to correspondence? I would be really interested to know if such a policy or law exists on this point.
 
So my last step has been to go back to the media rep at the NSW Department of Health and ask him again if he could get a copy of the communique in hard copy.
 
His reply to me on the 27th of October, 2009 is a classic example of bureaucratic non-answers:
 
Hi Meryl,
 
I have again checked this out. I have been advised that the reference you are seeking is a Commonwealth Health publication from the 1980s entitled Infection Disease Communique.
 
This response made me wonder if he had simply contacted Sue Page and repeated what she had told him? And why is he saying that it was a Commonwealth health publication when Sue said it was from NSW Health? Does this paper actually exist and, if so, how do we get a copy of it without a reference? The 1980s is a pretty broad category to search.
 
I have written back to the media rep to ask if he could provide me with a copy or at least the exact citation but as of today, I have not received any reply.
 
Is this how government health departments are run?
 
I can picture it now. Let's look at the health department on planet Medicos Alpha.
 
Bureaucrat A meets bureaucrat B in the halls of the Medicos Alpha Health Department building.
 
A- I have just been reading some information which stated that drinking water causes cancer.
 
B- Incredible! Let's write into the health section of the newspaper to let people know that. All those crackpots out there who are urging people to drink water must be stopped!
 
A- Good idea! And let's get a doctor to write the piece so it will be respected.

B- Do you have a reference to that paper you read, by the way?
 
A- No, it was old and I threw it away after I read it, but if a doctor writes the article, there won't be any need to put in a reference. Nobody questions what doctors say.
 
A- That's right! What was I thinking?
 
And away they go off the hall - another job well done.  
This is the sort of nonsense we at the AVN and you as people who believe in science and asking educated questions are up against:   the immediate and unquestioning acceptance by the media and many in the general public of anyone who has an MD after their name.
 
It seems to me that for whatever reason, those who are unhappy with our message and who also cannot respond to the scientific basis for our statements that the benefits of vaccination do not necessarily outweigh the risks have decided to not deal with the facts but instead to try and shoot the messenger.

We will see how successful their attempts will be. It is up to you who are now reading this to ensure that this information gets as wide an airing as possible.

Below is the response, written by Meryl Dorey, which the Australian newspaper has refused to publish.

It is dangerous to represent a viewpoint that opposes what the mainstream considers to be self-evident. Dr Semmelweis discovered this when he was discredited for claiming that women and babies were dying from Puerperal fever due to surgeons going straight from the morgue to the maternity ward without washing their hands. It was decades before he was exonerated and decades more before hand washing became routine.
It took decades for doctors to admit that smoking cigarettes did not reduce the symptoms of asthma; that thalidomide did in fact cause catastrophic birth defects; that Vioxx increased the risk of heart attacks and stroke and that antibiotics were most-often counterproductive in the treatment of otitis media.

In each of these instances, those who pushed for increased attention to safety and scientific principles in opposition to ingrained beliefs were called anti-science, ignorant or crackpots. They were ridiculed, ignored or denigrated by those who could not accept that something they believed in could possibly be wrong.

No other area exemplifies this resistance to open debate more than the issue of vaccination where, instead of examining the opposing viewpoints, the pro-choice side is accused of misinformation even though their evidence is scientifically based.

Dr Page criticises those who ask questions about vaccination, but who benefits when questions are suppressed? Where would we be now if Semmelweis had been stopped or if McBride hadn't questioned Thalidomide?

In her article, Dr Page accuses the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) of spreading absurd conspiracy theories. Check our web site - we don't. Our information is referenced from primary, peer-reviewed medical sources.

Dr Page says that death rate is a crude measure of vaccine effectiveness, but many studies have shown that between 95-97.5% of doctor-diagnosed measles diagnoses are wrong. Other diseases such as whooping cough are also incorrectly diagnosed more often than not. Crude though it may be, death rate is the most accurate measure of infection we have. And as Dr Page says, these diseases declined long before vaccinations were introduced.

An investigative journalist would be good; a Royal Commission would be better. How about a study examining the health of the vaccinated compared with the unvaccinated, using the Medicare database which is linked with the ACIR? Simple - and Australia is possibly the only country in the world that can do it.