Anti-Vaccination Campaigner Dies Of Rubella

Doctors at Byron District Hospital this morning announced the sudden and unexpected death of leading anti-vaccination campaigner Meryl Dopey from rubella, a vaccine-preventable illness.

Ms Dopey is reported to have developed a fever of paranoid stupidity while penning a hyperbolic missive denigrating the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s campaign to eradicate polio, a preventable disease which continues to kill and cripple children in the third world. “Those starving kids are suffering anyway; if they don’t die of polio, they’re just going to die of hunger.”, she wrote shortly before her death, continuing “Their so-called ‘foundation’ has been linked with the notorious Rotary International in its genocidal efforts to murder this helpless virus. Bill Gates should stop shoving his nose into other people’s illness and stick to making crap software.”

By the time she reached the hospital, the rubella virus had infected her brain. “We were surprised it could even find her brain.”, said Doctor Southerby, a leading infectious disease control expert. “But this is no laughing matter; she was the Australian equivalent of the Pakistani Taliban murdering health care workers. She just used words instead of bullets to get her paranoid message across.”

With the fresh perspective offered by a complete lack of any medical training behind her, Ms Dopey headed up the Anti Vaccination Network and spent her life campaigning against the use of vaccines that prevent disease. Backed by a self-righteous disdain for the scientific method, she used blind passion for her cause to promote unnecessary human suffering; pillorying the work of doctors, scientists and other legitimate health care workers in the process.

Anti-vaccination campaigners like Ms Dopey grew up in the first generation to be largely protected against a range of childhood diseases that had had a devastating effect on many children from earlier generations, such as polio, mumps and measles. Most campaigners never encountered these diseases at all, or encountered them in much less dangerous form thanks to their own childhood inoculations. Having not experienced the full force of these diseases personally, they downplay the suffering they cause and instead blow the tiny risk associated with vaccination out of all proportions; often suggesting that ineffective “alternative” remedies be used in their place.

“I’ve never met an anti-vaccination campaigner with polio”, remarked Dr Southerby.

Ironically, the very same generation that benefited so much from vaccination themselves went on to question it when it came to their own children. Unfortunately there is no vaccine against paranoia and stupidity. If there was, Ms Dopey would no doubt have campaigned against it, too. Ignorance and misinformation she worked tirelessly to spread helped contribute to a decline in vaccination rates in her local area, which led to a resurgence of the rubella virus that ultimately claimed her life.

Many people within the medical community will be breathing a sigh of relief that Ms Dopey will be breathing no more. She had been accused of spreading lies, deceit, misinformation, and historical revisionism that demonised modern medicine’s greatest contribution to reducing the suffering of mankind on an enormous scale: vaccination.

Taking up a paranoid anti-social cause against government, the health care system and “big pharma” gave Ms Dopey’s otherwise unremarkable life a sense of meaning and purpose. The conflict generated by the ludicrously unsubstantiated ideas she spread gave her lots of ego-gratifying attention and feelings of self-importance. While she could have devoted her life to medical research that would help prevent other diseases for which we currently have no effective cure, instead she devoted her time to obstructing and demeaning the efforts of those who had already developed cures for debilitating infectious diseases in the form of safe and effective vaccines.

Few of her readers realised that Ms Dopey was actually a humorist; albeit a rather poor one. Her exceedingly dry sense of humour and ability to keep a straight face when delivering even the most ridiculous misinformation as if it were the truth meant that many people who read the articles on her blog or heard her interviewed actually took her views seriously. Turning modern medicine’s greatest success into a failure; how can that be anything but a bad joke?

A private funeral will be held for Ms Dopey, to prevent people with polio from attending and attempting to carry the casket.

To learn more about the Anti Vaccination Network, visit this page.