Federal health officials are very disappointed with us. It seems we are not lining up in appropriately vast numbers to receive the vaccinations the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends. To nudge us along, the results of a study involving 838 teenage girls, disproportionately black, Hispanic and poor — a survey completed nearly 5 years ago — have been released with much hype and hysteria. 1 in 4 teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease! They are teeming with the human papilloma virus (HPV)! Go get your 9-year-old the Gardasil vaccine to prevent cervical cancer!
A few facts to mull over. First of all, HPV is actually 100 different viruses that live on the skin. They are transmitted by skin-to-skin contact and cause terrible things like the embarrassing wart you had on your thumb in third grade. 37 of HPVs can be sexually transmitted. As with most viruses, an HPV infection generally resolves on its own, usually with no symptoms or lasting effects. In the case that an HPV infection lasts for years and years, it may indeed lead to cervical cancer. However, it is easily detected with a routine Pap test and, if found, successfully treated. So exactly how will vaccinating our 9 to 14-year-old daughters benefit anyone?
Well, it will benefit Merck and Company, the maker of Gardasil, to the tune of a billion dollars a year. It will benefit the doctors who provide the vaccination for $400 a pop, plus the cost of the three required office visits. It will benefit hospitals when the young girls become sick from the vaccine. In the 18 months since the vaccine was approved by the ever-vigilant FDA, there have been 1,981 emergency room visits and 143 hospitalizations directly attributable to Gardasil. It will also benefit funeral homes and morgues. So far Gardasil has caused 51 life-threatening events and the deaths of 11 girls. Lest you disbelieve me, you may check out the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System which is maintained by the CDC and the FDA.
Okay, I’m convinced, you say. I won’t vaccinate my daughter. Ah, not so fast. Merck representatives have been feverishly traversing the country encouraging state legislatures to make the HPV vaccine mandatory for young girls. That’s right: mandatory. Leading the obeisance charge is Texas Governor Rick Perry, who recently issued an executive order mandating that all girls entering the sixth grade receive the vaccine. Read this again, an executive order. He completely bypassed the Texas legislature, parental authority, and normal political process. He ordered Gardasil into law. And, guess what? He has ties to Merck. Why does this shit not even surprise me anymore?
Good at playing follow the leader, nearly every state legislature is going to mandate the HPV vaccine for girls between 12 and 14. This sickens me beyond belief.
To recap:
*The HPV encompasses more than 100 different viruses, 37 of which are sexually transmitted. Gardasil prevents only 4 of the HPV strains.
*HPV is so common that 80% of women have had it by the time they’re 50.
*HPV is easily detected during an annual gynecological exam and easily treated if found.
*Gardasil is expensive, dangerous, possibly deadly.
*The long-term effects of Gardasil are unknown. (Keep in mind the recently discovered connection between childhood vaccinations and autism).
One more tidbit of info. Merck is also the maker of Vioxx, a harmless little drug that relieves the pain of arthritis. Turns out, and of course they knew this, that Vioxx greatly increases the incidence of heart attack. It took more than a few deaths before Merck pulled Vioxx from the shelves, one of the largest drug recalls in history. The company is spending millions fighting and losing class-action lawsuits involving their last harmless wonder drug. What I wonder is why anyone continues to trust anything Merck claims. The strong-arm marketing campaign for Gardasil should be renamed Gardasil: Helping us pay for Vioxx losses one young cervix at a time.
Parents, please do NOT subject your daughters to Merck’s Gardasil vaccine. And when you are told by your school district that it is mandatory for school entry, remind them that under the law you are able to OPT OUT. It may take an affidavit from your pediatrician, but that’s an office visit you should gladly pay for.
Good for you!!! This information must be passed from blog to blog to get parents to wake up and realize they are being taken in by BigPharma, once again. And, at the expense of their daughter’s health.
Your post is highly misleading and factually incorrect. As a result it reaches a very dubious conclusion.
“The HPV encompasses more than 100 different viruses, 37 of which are sexually transmitted. Gardasil prevents only 4 of the HPV strains.”
Those four strains cause more than 70 percent of cervical cancer cases and 90 percent of genital warts.
“HPV is so common that 80% of women have had it by the time they’re 50.”
And, as a result, each year in the U.S. 11,250 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer and 3,670 women die from it. The fact that a preventable disease is common doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to prevent it.
A very large proportion of people eventually die of a cardiovascualr disease or cancer. Does it then follow that we shouldn’t try to stop those diseases?
“HPV is easily detected during an annual gynecological exam and easily treated if found.”
Pap smears fail to detect early stage cervical cancer 45% of the time, and in real life, people sometimes skip diagnostic test visits due to lack of health care. Newer tests, which are in the final stages of human testing, are better (missing only 5% of the time), but even if you do detect it you need to engage in expensive, burdensome and not 100% successful treatment. The HPV vaccine is 100% effective against the relevant four strains that cause the most harm, eliminating the risk and eliminating any need for treatment expenses.
“Gardasil is expensive, dangerous, possibly deadly.”
Gardasil is cheaper that the cost of treatment times the probability of needing treatment and is cheaper than the human cost of deaths avoided from cervical cancer at any reasonable value placed on a human life.
The claim your post makes comes from the “National Vaccine Information Center” (NVIC) a group that opposes almost all forms of vaccinations contrary to strong scientific evidence, which was spread further by the conservative group Judicial Watch. The VAERS data upon which the claim is based does not support the claim made by the groups. VAERS collects data on any adverse event following vaccination, be it coincidental or truly caused by a vaccine. The NVIC report upon which the Judicial Watch report is based itself notes that “event reports to VAERS do not prove causation.” The FDA has looked at the eleven deaths and concluded that they weren’t related to the vaccine. Life is dangerous and some people are going to die in proximity to receiving a vaccination given to hundreds of thousands of people, and this will produce VAERS reports.
“*The long-term effects of Gardasil are unknown. (Keep in mind the recently discovered connection between childhood vaccinations and autism).”
There is overwhelming evidence with huge independent samples that childhood vaccinations do not cause autism. Indeed, analysis of the data shows that thimersol presence in vaccinations given is associated with lower rates of autism.
There is a single recent case involving a child with an extremely rare co-morbid condition in addition to autism where a government compensation board chose to pay a compensation award. By random chance one would expect 1 in 15,000,000 to have both conditions, and conducting expensive discovery in a fluky situation to see whether vaccines could be related to autism in this situation that involves at most 20 people in the United States would have been far more expensive than paying a small compensation award to someone clearly in need of assistance whatever the cause of her condition may have been.
Also, to be clear, I have absolute no financial or personal interest in pharma. I am a lawyer with a small civil practice, who has previously represented both personal injury plaintiffs (including those in class action medical device cases) and people provided counsel by insurance companies sued for personal injury, and I currently do neither.
ohwilleke, I appreciate the time and effort you put into your comment. And I don’t disagree with much of what you say. To me, here is the crux of it.
Of the hundreds of millions of women who have had the HPV by the time they are 50, 3,670 die from it. Not even 4,000 annual deaths from this ruthless killer of women? So millions of girls are to be subjected, mandatorily subjected, to an expensive and possibly dangerous vaccine? I’m sorry, of course every life matters. But I imagine 4,000 people die each year walking into plate glass windows. Does that mean that plate glass windows are a public health hazard?
Neither one of us has addressed the emerging body of knowledge that indicates vaccinations in general negatively affect the immune system — by disallowing it to fight foes as nature intended — thus decreasing its disease-fighting ability and making us more vulnerable to other viruses/bacteria that would normally be easily suppressed.
I’m sorry, ohwilleke. Intentionally or not, you are parroting the party line. I respectfully disagree that the Gardasil vaccination is safe or necessary.
Even less people are made sick by bacterial meningitis, so is that a reason, Marie, in your book, to not get young people vaccinated against it?
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dbmd/diseaseinfo/meningococcal_g.htm
Plus, over 11,000 women a year come down in the US with cervical cancer, and it is the second most common cancer in women world wide, right behind breast cancer. This disease is a serious problem and should be prevented if we can do so.
Yo Marie,
According to your logic we should not get any shots unless they are in a glass. Guess where would be then. Ugh! Chill out girl. Prevention is the idea, shots are not that bad, baby.
George
Actually, shots (aren’t kids now required to get something like 30 shots before the age of 2?) are implicated in the increasing occurance of autism and shots are implicated in Gulf War Syndrome.
The problem is that America has a Candida epidemic on its hands, and the yeasty devil can be blamed for everything from allergies to fibromyalgia to heart disease to cancer. But awareness is more than lacking on the topic. Most doctors prescribe an antibiotic for a yeast infection, and once the external symptoms go away, not another thought is given it until the next outbreak. These little yeasties come back after treatment, feeding off the several pounds of sugar that Americans eat daily, and remain in our bodies without producing symptoms. All the while they are depositing toxic wastes that the body must deal with over years and years until finally organ after organ submits and declares defeat in the form of cancer or diabetes or heart disease. Men are not immune. If Americans would just lay off the sugar, candida could be defeated and American teens wouldn’t need Guardasil. And the drug companies would be out all that money for heart disease, cancer and diabetes drugs. Darn. From sugar and flour subsidies to the government’s food pyramid, the system is set up to keep us ailing.
I just found out that Guardasil is the first genetically altered vaccine and here is its track record:
2207 adverse reactions as of August 2007.
5 deaths
31 life threatening conditions
1385 emergency room visits
451 have not recovered as of July 2007
51 girls are disabled
Sorry, major, hate to rain on your arrogance parade with facts. According to Marie’s logic, we shouldn’t believe an ounce of what our corporate overseers tell us, lest we could wind up dead. Again, it’s the sugar. Without our lust for sugar, Americans wouldn’t need all these drugs in the first place…..drug corporations know this, and they are doing everything in their power to keep the truth about our health from us.
Incisive analysis aside, Swissy, I am going to laugh all night over yeasty devil!
SwissMissTress, where do these supposed statistics come from that you put out here? Out of the hat on your head?
Plus, your idea that women’s yeast infections are principally caused from eating too much sugar is rather off the wall. Try these reasons below…
‘In women, yeast infections are the second most common reason for vaginal burning, itching, and discharge. Yeasts are found in the vagina of most women and can overgrow if the environment in the vagina changes. Antibiotic and steroid use is the most common reason for yeast overgrowth. But pregnancy, menstruation, sperm, diabetes, and birth control pills also can contribute to getting a yeast infection. Yeast infections are more common after menopause.’
from eMedicineHealth,com
OMG! This is not a medical textbook, it’s a BLOG!
Yo Marie,
Agree, someone needs to chill out. Some shots are good some shots are…well maybe but overall most are good for human kind. I do not have girl children so leave this choice up to you ladies, to get shot or not. Tony, ’nuff on the yeast infection, really more than I want to know, dig? AHHHH Neg vibes again. Chill – be cool children.
George
your faoright neocon, retired army combat officer & Texican