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"Conversation" by Smile My Day on flickr
Written by Amanda Marcotte for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
"Conversation" by Smile My Day on flickr
One thing guaranteed about presidential election season is that any issue that a major candidate chooses to raise, no matter how obscure beforehand, can suddenly rise to an issue of national importance. Thus it has been with the HPV vaccine. Ever since it’s come out, those of us in the trenches on reproductive health care have been trying to raise the alarm about right-wing opposition to the vaccine, which prevents transmission of harmful forms of Human Papilomavirus (HPV), thereby also preventing the possible development of genital warts and of cervical cancer, and all the various and unpleasant treatments women have to endure to make sure they don’t get cervical cancer, such as coloscopies and LEEP procedures. But because it prevents a disease you get through sexual contact, many on the Christian right oppose the vaccination. They tend to mindlessly support anything—even deadly cancers—that can be perceived as divine justice for the very human act of having sex.
Before Michele Bachmann started yapping on national TV about the vaccine and claiming that it makes girls “retarded”, pervasive right wing opposition to the vaccine wasn’t deemed worthy of much mainstream media attention. I suspect that it was seen as a fringe phenomenon, like the belief that fluoride in the drinking water is a mind control agent. In one sense, it is a fringe belief—there’s consensus amongst experts that this vaccine is a good thing. But because the experts believe something doesn’t mean that nutty opinions in the public at large can’t have widespread negative effects. Whisper campaigns against the HPV vaccines are a perfect example. Only a third of girls are getting all three shots, for instance. Part of the problem is that it’s a hassle to get three shots, and part of the problem is that it’s expensive. But the research has shown that as income levels rose past a certain point, vaccination rates declined slightly. This probably reflects the fact that people on the somewhat wealthier end of the spectrum are more likely to be conservative, and therefore more likely to think it’s appropriate to use the fear of disease and death to control female sexuality.
Whisper campaigns work. Conservatives have been chugging away, insinuating in a person-to-person way that the vaccines cause sluttiness, retardation, and all sorts of sundry evils. Since people tend to already have deep-set fears about female sexuality—especially when they’re forced to think about how their own little girls are going to turn into grown women who have sex—these rumors can do tremendous damage. Even liberals are holding off on vaccinating their girls because they heard “somewhere” that the vaccines are “untested” and “dangerous,” even though that’s simply not true in the slightest, something they could verify for themselves by consulting with the Centers for Disease Control. If you hear that the vaccine is dangerous and untested, it’s wise to stop and think about where that idea is coming from, and that is basically people who think sex is so evil that they literally believe young women should face death as a possible consequence of having sex.
It took Michele Bachmann saying the sorts of things on TV that people have been saying in private for the story to get covered. And really, when you hear with your own ears the clumsy fear-mongering around the vaccine, you start to see why it was so hard to cover the story before. It’s simply that difficult to believe anyone would buy the legends that have been circulating about the vaccine, particularly the notion that a 12-year-old could get it and suddenly and without warning develop severe mental illnesses.
What I don’t see happening, however, is what most needs to happen: a national dialogue on how irrational fears about sexuality, especially female sexuality, allow people to believe all sorts of nonsense about women’s bodies and sexual health. I see this topic being avoided in no small part because a lot of otherwise rational people can get completely silly on this issue, and when called out for it, they get incredibly defensive.
After all, they’re not like those people, aka fundamentalist Christians who believe Satan speaks to kids on records and that you can go to hell for masturbating. So they lock up and refuse to discuss how it is that they have a totally irrational fear of a vaccine that just so happens to prevent a common STI. Mary Beth Williams’ reaction to being criticized because she had an irrational freak-out over her daughter accidentally being vaccinated against HPV instead of against meningitis is typical. Even though her original article regurgitated rumors and innuendo that have been spread through the public by right wingers with an anti-sex agenda, she simply couldn’t accept that was perhaps why she irrationally believed that the HPV vaccine was dangerous and untested, even though the information demonstrating that it’s safe and tested is easily available. Being a rational person, she did eventually get her daughter vaccinated, but the insistence that this vaccine is somehow scarier and requires more hand-wringing, crying it out, and worrying about choice than any other vaccine on the market—which is simply administered, no questions asked—does have its roots in this right wing whisper campaign. Rumors work because they prey on unconscious fears, and one of the biggest is our unconscious fears about female sexuality.
But the gawking and laughing at Michele Bachmann for being so clumsy about her attacks on the HPV vaccine might help. Most people are more sophisticated in generating their irrational excuses for being worried about it, making vague insinuations that it wasn’t tested enough or there’s some unknown and undiscovered danger. By actually making claims about what she believed that danger to be, Bachmann showed how silly people’s fears really are. Maybe going forward, more people who had these vague, unarticulated fears about the supposed dangers of preventing HPV transmission will cringe in shame at the possibility that they sound like Michele Bachmann, and will instead make the right choice to be more rational about this.
3 Comments
here is a group of medical people, doctors, etc., who don’t think Gardisal does anything very much useful to justify it’s expensive price. First of all, it was only intended for the Third World never the US but because Merck was losing it’s monopoly position, they wanted to push it out to as many young girls as possible. Second, it doesn’t really do very much and has some serious complications with a high incidence of them.
http://www.pop.org/content/merck-researcher-admits-gardasil-guards-again…
I really resent your article saying ” Being a rational person, she did eventually get her daughter vaccinated…” as if only unrational people would refuse.
I’m not against all vaccines but when my daughter was faced with this her mother and I and my daughter did some research and we read articles about it. It could be that the reason higher income people are not getting the vaccine isn’t because they are more conservative but it could merely be that they did more research on the Internet about it. You are saying only “irrational” people would refuse this vaccine when Merck’s own medical people have a hard time explaining the benefits of the vaccine to other healthcare professionals. (Read link above.)
And, FYI, I’m a sex-positive liberal.
Accy to the article:
As I sat scribbling down Merck’s claims, I wondered why such mass vaccination campaigns were necessary. After all, as Dr. Harper explained, 70% of HPV infections resolve themselves without treatment in one year. After two years, this rate climbs to 90%. Of the remaining 10% of HPV infections, only half coincide with the development of cervical cancer.
So this must mean when we vaccine 9-12 year olds we are assuming they are already having sex or going to in the next year or so. If you read the article, written by a health professional, you can see there is very little medical case for this vaccine and some compelling reasons to avoid it.
http://www.pop.org/content/merck-researcher-admits-gardasil-guards-again…
It is hard to imagine a less compelling case for Gardasil. First of all, it is highly unlikely that 70% or more of the female population will continue to get routine Gardasil shots and boosters, along with annual PAP smears. And even if it did, according to Dr. Harper, “after 60 years, the vaccination will [only] have prevented 70% of incidences” of cervical cancer.
But rates of death from cervical cancer are already declining. Let’s do the math. If the 4% annual decline in cervical cancer death continues, in 60 years there will have been a 91.4% decline in cervical cancer death just from current cancer monitoring and treatment. Comparing this rate of decline to Gardasil’s projected “very minimal” reduction in the rate of cervical cancer of only 70 % of incidences in 60 years, it is hard to resist the conclusion that Gardasil does almost nothing for the health of American women.
Despite these dismal projections, Gardasil continues to be widely and aggressively promoted among pre-teen girls. The CDC reports that, by 1 June 2009, over 26 million doses of Gardasil have been distributed in the U.S.4 With hopes of soon tapping the adolescent male demographic, Merck, the pharmaceutical manufacturer of the vaccine, and certain Merck-funded U.S. medical organizations are targeting girls between the ages of 9 and 13.5 As CBS news reports, “Gardasil, launched in 2006 for girls and young women, quickly became one of Merck’s top-selling vaccines, thanks to aggressive marketing and attempts to get states to require girls to get the vaccine as a requirement for school attendance.”6
Just as I began, in my own mind, to question ethics of mass vaccinations of prepubescent girls, Dr. Harper dropped another bombshell. “There have been no efficacy trials in girls under 15 years,” she told us.
Merck did study a small group of girls under 16 who had been vaccinated, but did not follow them long enough to conclude sufficient presence of effective HPV antibodies.
If I wasn’t skeptical enough already, I really started scratching my head when Dr. Harper explained, “if you vaccinate a child, she won’t keep immunity in puberty and you do nothing to prevent cervical cancer.” But it turned out that she wasn’t arguing for postponing Gardasil vaccination until later puberty, as I first thought. Rather, Dr. Harper only emphasized to the doctors in the audience the need for Gardasil booster shots, because it is still unknown how long the vaccine immunity lasts. More booster shots mean more money for Merck, obviously.
I left Dr. Harper’s lecture convinced that Gardasil did little to stop cervical cancer, and determined to answer another question that she had largely ducked: Is this vaccine safe?
Here’s what my research turned up. To date, 15,037 girls have officially reported adverse side effects from Gardasil to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). These adverse effects include Guilliane Barre, lupus, seizures, paralysis, blood clots, brain inflammation and many others. The CDC acknowledges that there have been 44 reported deaths.7
Dr. Harper, who seems to specialize in dropping bombshells, dropped another in an interview with ABC News when she admitted that “The rate of serious adverse events is greater than the incidence rate of cervical cancer.”8 This being the case, one might want to take one’s chances with cancer, especially because the side effects of the vaccine are immediate, while the possibility of developing cancer is years in the future.
In the clinical studies alone, 23 girls died after receiving either Gardasil or the Aluminum control injection. 15 of the 13,686 girls who received Gardasil died, while 8 died among the 11,004 who received the Aluminum shot. There was only one death among the group that had a saline placebo. What this means is that 1 out of every 912 who received Gardasil in the study died.9, see p. 8 The cervical cancer death rate is 1 out of every 40,000 women per year.10
The numbers of deaths and adverse effects are undoubtedly underestimates. Dr. Harper’s comments to ABC News concur with the National Vaccine Information Center’s claim that “though nearly 70 percent of all Gardasil reaction reports were filed by Merck, a whopping 89 percent of the reports Merck did file were so incomplete there was not enough information for health officials to do a proper follow-up and review.”11 On average, less than 10 percent—perhaps even less than 1 percent—of serious vaccine adverse events are ever reported, according to the American Journal of Public Health.12
Given the severity and frequency of Gardasil adverse reactions, I definitely wasn’t the only one in Dr. Harper’s audience who winced when she dismissed most Gardasil side effects as “easily just needle phobia.”
Due to the young age of the trial participants and the short duration of the studies, the effects of Gardasil on female fecundity have not been studied. I did discover, in my post-conference reading, that Polysorbate 80, an ingredient in the vaccine,13, see p. 12 has been observed in a European clinical study to cause infertility in rats.14 Is this an additional concern? Time will tell.
I do not wish to give the impression that Dr. Harper presented, even inadvertently, a consistently negative view of her own vaccine. She did tout certain “real benefits,” chief among them that “the vaccine will reduce the number of follow-up tests after abnormal PAP smears,” and thereby reduce the “relationship tension,” “stress and anxiety” of abnormal or false HPV positive results.
To me, however, this seems a rather slim promise, especially when weighed against the deaths and side effects caused by the Gardasil campaign. Should millions of girls in the United States, many as young as 9, be put at risk, so that sexually active adults can have less “relationship tension” about false positive HPV results? Is the current rate of death, sterility and serious immune dysfunction from Gardasil worth the potential that in 60 years a minimal amount of a cervical disease (that is already decreasing on its own) may perhaps be reduced?
But what I really wanted to know is why Merck is so eagerly marketing such a dangerous and ineffective vaccine? Aren’t there other ways they could make a profit? While Merck’s behavior is probably adequately explained by the profit motive, what about those in the Health and Human Services bureaucracy who apparently see Gardasil as medicine’s gift to women? What motivates them?
Please consider posting your reply as a diary. I found it much more compelling than this diary. This diary was light on facts, but not what I’ll call PR spin.
Statements like this remind me of the kneejerk reactions on lefty blogs when you point out that climate science is not settled. You get told about this supposedly slam dunk argument about Exxon Mobil having funded opposition research. They don’t want to talk about whose side Goldman Sachs is on, and they usually don’t want to talk about the science, either. I don’t believe I’ve encountered any who knew of the accumulating evidence against their belief.
BTW, just recently, a Nobel prize winning physicist quit the American Physical Society, because of it’s embrace of the global warming belief.
Anyway, back to vaccines. I know a lot less about vaccines than I do about global warming. However, I listen to Gary Null with some regularity, who is not only dubious of much of the practice of vaccines, but has collecte vaccine info at: http://www.vaccineinitiative.org/ and
http://www.garynull.com/home/category/vaccines
The lead story at the latter link is:
A Case of Contamination: Growing Concern over the Safety and Efficacy of Merck’s Gardasil HPV Vaccine. Seems that some of the vaccines contain live, genetically modified HPV. Oops…..
This is somewhat off topic, but I don’t believe that vaccines are innocent in the creation of autism in children. Gary Null has achieved wonders in curing/treating some autistic children – the one that I saw, in person, went to hell right after he was given vaccines. (Both parents were cops, so don’t even think about making up a story about how they’re seeking attentions.)
Well, just yesterday I was reading up on methyl B12 (not the typical cyanocobalimin form), and the author reported good response in treating autism when the methyl form was used, and administered via a particular subcutaneous injection. Not sure if this directly relates to vaccine damage, or not, but it’s still good to know.
See http://www.tacanow.org/family-resources/methyl-b12-a-treatment-for-asd-with-methylation-issues/
Wow, now that really is scary. The vaccine causes the virus. Nice Merck!
Autism has some relationship with low vitamin D according to JJ Cannell at http://www.vitamindcouncil.org