There has been a request for Gardasil to be examined. The main question/accusations from the request being:

According to the numbers given above, they want to spend £100,000,000 to possibly prevent cervical cancer in 700 people each year.

That is the sole justification for this.

What this article doesn’t count out are the numbers of people who will certainly be permanently damaged by this vaccine:

‘We have concerns about the inadequacy of the safety trials that have been conducted on the HPV vaccine.
‘They have been tested on adult women meaning we do not know whether they are safe for boys and young girls.’

So, basically, we need to know whether Gardasil works, and if getting an injection of Gardasil is safe or not. Is there a chance of permanent injury? For this we need the original data of the peer-reviewed article published to support the claims of Gardasil effectiveness and safety. This was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a well-respected clinical based journal.

This may seem like a hard read for the lay person, but all we need focus on is this:

By comparing vaccine to placebo, we see no serious significant differences between the groups. Just having a jab gives ‘adverse reactions’. Here’s what Merck says on safety of Gardasil. I would guess most of the adverse reactions are due to the use of alum as an adjuvant. Not something to worry about particularly, and certainly not for inducing ‘permanent damage’.

According to the CDC, four fatalities occurred near the time of the patients’ Gardasil injections. One patient died three hours after receiving the Gardasil vaccination; blood clotting was listed as the cause of death.

I can find no reference for this, either in the quoted article, or in the google. This info cannot be trusted.

There are now 7 reported deaths. Here are a few excerpts from those reports.

19 year old female — Echocardiogram revealed very enlarged right ventricle & small left ventricle as well as large blood clots within both the right atrium & right ventricle.

15 year old female — Consult states had HPV vax at PCP on 3/2 & no other recent vaccines.

11 year old female — She experienced cardiac arrest, required lung bypass (ECMO) and “may not have expired.” It was also reported by the same nurse that the physician from the hospital said that “the death was due to an anaphylactic reaction to Gardasil.”

Unknown — Information has been received from a physician who attended a conference that mentioned two patients who were vaccinated with Gardasil. Subsequently the patients died.

I can’t find any original medical evidence for Gardasil-associated fatalities either on the wider web, or in PubMed. [search ‘gardasil’ and ‘fatal’ or ‘death’]. It would help if those with axes to grind would show us their grindstones.

However, this doesn’t mean Gardsil is a lovely safe thing. I highly recommend reading this very well-written article, also in NEJM. In summary, this article dissects the clinical trial data, and says what YOU SHOULD ALREADY KNOW; that the trial was devised and designed to maximise any potential benefits of Gardasil, that the measurements used are the most generous available while remaining acceptable to external reviewers, that the study groups do not match the likely patient groups. And so on. To summarize, Gardasil works to some extent, over a relatively short period (5 years protection from 3 jabs is pretty poor, immunologically speaking), but is not apparently dangerous in itself, depite the misgivings of a few unreferenced articles.

So, why make an HPV vaccine? Well, cervical cancer is worth preventing and it is kind of ‘proof of principle’ for other potential cancer vaccines. And prevention is better than cure in this case. But there are public health and parental choice concerns.

If you have access to a print library/doctor/medical school get a copy of the BMJ and read this article.

Seems like there are plenty of clinicians ready to air their scepticism at exactly why this drug is being pushed on such a large population, and with little or no patient choice.

The vaccine is undoubtedly set to be a blockbuster product for Merck. Twenty US states are considering bills that would make the immunisation a requirement for school attendance, which could net Merck billions of dollars

Gardasil now mandatory in Texas for your 10-12 year old daughters…

Merck is bankrolling efforts to pass state laws across the country mandating Gardasil for girls as young as 11 or 12. It doubled its lobbying budget in Texas and has funneled money through Women in Government, an advocacy group made up of female state legislators around the country.

And what else did you expect? We’ve told you this scenario before, with chickenpox vaccine. A pretty low health risk, but a potential fortune for the drug company that gets in first and persuades YOUR government to LEGISLATE to MAKE YOU TAKE IT UP THE ARSE.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 7th, 2007 at 5:07 pm and is filed under Medicine, Money, Politricks, Science.