My favorite anti-vax Facebook heroine is going off about Gardasil this week. She’s posted links to specious YouTube videos depicting healthy vibrant young women who have been tragically struck down in the prime of life by this fresh new menace from the bowels of Merck. However, the videos are nothing more than cheesy Windows Moviemaker slideshows set to either vomitous Christian pop or The Fray. Moreover, all they depict are healthy vibrant young women doing healthy, vibrant young woman-type things: going to the beach, drinking with their friends, snuggling with babies/puppies/kittens, etc. There are no pictures showing any sort of tragic striking-down of anything. You keep expecting to see the subject transformed into a drooling monstrosity with buboes growing out of every orifice, but it never materializes. Kind of disappointing, really. The music just ends and young Ashley or Kaitlyn’s prom pic dissolves to black.
OK, so off to wiki I trot, searching for the source of this fresh anti-vax nonsense. There’s nothing to be had. Wiki is always thorough in its treatment of pharmacology topics. If there’s any sort of litigation or controversy surrounding a drug’s efficacy or safety, there will be a comprehensive discussion of it. But there’s nothing—just a good overview of the vaccine’s (minimal) side effects, and nothing more. A generalized Google search didn’t turn up anything of substance, either. So what’s the deal here? I’ve heard other nutters go off about Gardasil, so what’s the issue? They must be making some sort of claim—what is it?
[ul][li]Gardasil is a vaccine []Vaccines are bad []Ergo, Gardasil is bad.[/ul][/li]Here’s the proof- what more do you need?
If they had anything more specific than that, they would have mentioned it. It’s just that Gardasil is relatively new, and therefore they have not had the chance to make up anything specific to that vaccine.
Give it time. There will be falsified and misrepresented garbage before you know it.
Anti-vaxx in this case could be allying with anti-teen-sex-ed-or-precaution, because there was a flap about Gardasil from the “vaccinating them against HPV just encourages them to have sex” people back when it first became widely available.
Every vaccine gets put through the microscope. For Gardisil you suddenly created a circumstance in which three shots are given over 6 months. 25% of that 6 month period is within 2 weeks of getting one of those shots. 25% of all bad things that occur in that 6 month period will be within 2 weeks of getting one of those vaccines - car accidents, strokes, seizures, cancer diagnoses, being hit by a safe falling off a building … of those things that have no good explanation for why they happen those that occur within 2 weeks of one of those shots will be blamed on the vaccine. That’s where it came from. Indeed there is no actual increased incidence of being hit by a safe or seizures or strokes … but for some that does not matter.
There is no shortage of lawyers willing to sue drug manufacturers and whip up hysteria, but there has not been any widespread concern about Gardasil side effects that I’m aware of. (Although as JayJay mentioned, there has been staunch opposition to requiring the vaccine, especially for young girls, since it’s direct purpose is to prevent the spread of an STD.)
The FDA website is always the best source for actual info on a drug’s history, and here’s what they say about the safety of Gardasil: there were 772 reports of adverse reactions (out of more than 23 million doses given). Those mostly included things like fainting, pain at the injection site, headache, etc.
A lot of the scaremongering is based on reports in VAERS, a government database that accepts reports of adverse events occurring around the time of vaccination. As DSeid notes, there are extra chances with Gardasil that some unrelated untoward health event might occur over the period that one is getting the shots. I’ve seen a number of anti-Gardasil screeds simply on the basis of raw VAERS data; however there is nothing to back up claims that serious reactions are more common with vaccination against HPV than other vaccines (which is to say that they are very rare).
The latest off-the-wall complaint about Gardasil is that it supposedly has (gasp!) DNA in it. More on that here.
I know a guy who told me that he won’t let his daughters get the Gardasil vaccine because it would be supporting teen sex (since, of course, you can’t GET HPV unless you are having sex, and, if his girls are out having sex, then they deserve to suffer, and getting HPV is apparently an appropriate penalty).
Actually, it’s getting cancer, not getting HPV. Gardisil vaccinates against the specific strains of HPV that cause most of the cancer. His children, should they become sluts as a result of Gardisil vaccination, can still get HPV, they just won’t die a lingering death from it.
The latest study out of Australia shows a more one third drop in the number of cervical cancer cases in young women. Australia was one of the first countries to adopt this vaccine. Yes, we can cure cervical cancer. But we do it by giving women a hysterectomy. Very few young women want to give up their reproductive organs before they’ve had much chance to use them. My girls will be getting this vaccine.
Seriously, don’t start me on these morons. Do they not understand that someday, their daughters might be adults and might want to have sex with, oh, men to whom they are married, perhaps? And that said men might not be virgins by that point?
I had surgery for early-stage cervical cancer a few years back, in my 30s. If I had kids, they’d be getting the vaccine as soon as it was medically sensible. Wish it had been around for me.
As a kind of side question to this, is there any good reason not to vaccinate boys as well as girls? My understanding is that boys here in the UK are not offered the shots.
I realise, of course, that cervical cancer isn’t a risk to boys, but surely vaccinating them would help stop the spread of the HPV virus to girls and women.
Money, I’d guess. If vaccinating boys against HPV wouldn’t make that much difference if you’d already vaccinated all (or almost all) the girls, then there’s not a good cost-benefit argument to vaccinating the boys. Since it’s a new vaccination, time will tell how much difference it makes and if vaccinating boys is worth it cost-wise.
That’s partially what my self-proclaimed guardian of children’s health and morality is so apoplectic about—that California is considering legislature which will allow any child twelve years of ago or older to obtain the vaccine without her parents consent or knowledge. She’s thrown down the gauntlet and is encouraging all her Facebook friends to rally to battle with her.
Maybe or maybe he figures that not allowing them to have the vaccine will discourage them from having sex. That reasoning is not in itself illogical as such, assuming that his value system is such that he considers that discouraging teen sex is so important that the risks he is deliberately creating are justified. Many people do think this.
What if his daughter gets married at age 22, to a fellow who had one or two indiscretions before Seeing The Light, coming clean, and committing to monogamy. And one of that fellow’s past relationships happened to be with young ladies who’d be VERY indiscriminate, and had gotten HPV as a result…
In short: “moron”.
For what it’s worth: I haven’t had Moon Unit vaccinated - yet - for a number of reasons (some of which are gradually becoming outdated, and I will re-evaluate; she’s 14 and just started high school for what that’s worth).
it’s still fairly new and I don’t want to be the first “kid on the block” with this toy. There *have" been vaccines which were approved, and later withdrawn due to fatalities (see the rotavirus vaccine).
There are concerns that while it blocks out some flavors of HPV, that may make room for others to become more prevalent.
The manufacturer did some INTENSIVE lobbying to get lawmakers to make it mandatory, which told me that they were rather more interested in profits than in health (sure, great if it helps health, but profits seemed more important to them). It may be irrational, but this really raises my hackles makes me VERY reluctant to go for it. As the disease isn’t spread casually around schools like, say, mumps or measles, there was no reason to make it a requirement.
The duration of the protection is questionable (same concern as with chicken pox vaccination, for what it’s worth). If you vaccinate her at age 13, and it wears off by age 23 - when she’s out on her own and even MORE likely to be playing around, it’s largely been a waste.
Early reports of unpleasant side effects and a handful of deaths (to be sure, none of these are proven, and quite likely coincidental).
I’m a bit leery about playing around with the immune system anyway. My kid has eczema, and a family history of some autoimmune issues. So we’ve followed a slower-than-usual vaccination schedule for her (she DOES get the shots, just never more than 1 at a time and usually a bit longer between them than the standard schedule).
She truly doesn’t have a social life, barely leaves the house. Which is another issue, but it means she’s ESPECIALLY low risk right now.
All in all, to us, there seemed to be no upside to going for it right away, and a number of potential downsides to doing so… for now.
Would I hold off because I thought it would give her “permission” to be active? Egad. No, she knows she’s not allowed to date until she’s 25!
