Piercing the Vaccination Hype

This nation is so obsessed with encouraging teenagers to be promiscuous that it clutches at any straw which appears to facilitate that.  Couple that with the corporate greed which drives the drug industry’s marketing of its pharmaceutical products and it is easy to see why the new anti-HPV vaccines, Gardasil and Cervarix, have been welcomed as the latest new dawn of a sexually-liberated day, the things which will keep our kids fornicating in safety.

The trouble is, they won’t.  Vaccines are not without danger. One health-care company offering the Gardasil vaccine also supplies the single mumps, measles and rubella vaccines, responding to parents’ legitimate concerns about MMR.  (Did Leo Blair ever have the MMR?  His dad wouldn’t say.)

And will the message that women still need to go for screening pierce the fog of hype about vaccination?  The vaccines could be spreading false hope and more promiscuity and result in more sexually-transmitted disease of all kinds and more deaths from cervical cancer, not fewer.  And that is without the safety concerns about side effects of the vaccines themselves.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation has recommended – and the Government has accepted – that all girls should be given the jab in the first year of secondary school starting from September 2008 with a catch-up campaign to vaccinate all girls aged 12-18

The vaccine costs more than £300 for a series of three doses, more than all the other childhood vaccinations put together. By comparison, the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine costs about £12 for two doses.

The cost will be more than £100m a year for all the 12-year-old girls, and well over £500m – that’s half-a-billion pounds – to play catch-up with girls up to 18 in the first year.  Sanofi Pasteur Merck Sharp & Dohme, who make Gardasil, and Glaxo Smith Kline, manufacturers of the rival vaccine Cervarix, will be bidding for the Government contract to supply the vaccines.  There is a lot of money at stake.

In October 2005, when the story broke in the UK , the vaccines were hailed as a ‘wonder drug’ which would end the need for smear tests.  Pamela Morton, director of the cervical cancer charity Jo’s Trust, said: “The successful development of a vaccine that will prevent cervical cancer cannot come soon enough.”

Jo’s Trust had emerged as a strong proponent of vaccination, and their voice, as a patients’ group, carried weight.  Suddenly, we find Glaxo Smith Kline funding Jo’s Trust to the tune of £11,400 in the very next year, 2006.

We are still trying to find out how much GSK have paid Jo’s Trust to date in 2007.  Jo’s trust is also part-funded by Sanofi Pasteur Merck Sharp & Dohme, so we have the two drug companies who are in the running for an HPV-virus vaccine contract being the same two drug companies who are giving money to the patients’ support group lobbying for HPV-virus vaccination.

Jo’s Trust itself is very cagey about just how much money it receives from the two drug vaccine companies.  www.jotrust.co.uk (click on ‘who we are’) merely says:   ‘Jo’s Trust, in 2006 only, received an unrestricted educational grant and support in kind from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). The trust did not receive any unrestricted educational grants from Sanofi Pasteur MSD (SPMSD) but it did receive support in kind.’

Neither Jo’s Trust nor Sanofi Pasteur Merck Sharp & Dohme will say how much the latter has given the former, despite SPMSD’s communications manager hilariously telling this author their funding is ‘transparent’.  We have in fact challenged Jo’s Trust to detail all their income from drug companies and other corporate sources.  But the GSK funding alone is 9% of the charity’s income, and £2,500 of it enabled Jo’s Trust to put on a ‘Parliamentary Breakfast’ last year.  It would be no surprise to find that Jo’s Trust pushed hard for vaccination at that lobbying event.

But despite the hype, neither Gardasil (that’s the Merck Sharp and Dohme one) nor Cervarix (Glaxo Smith Kline) is a ‘wonder drug’ as hailed just two years ago.  The maximum protection is against 70% of the viruses which cause cervical cancer, so neither drug is any more than 70% effective.  All women will have to carry on with screening even after being vaccinated. (See Q&A: Cervical cancer vaccine.)

‘…vaccination does not substitute for routine cervical cancer screening’ say Merck, and it ‘may not result in protection in all vaccine recipients.’

Of course if those proposing the vaccine were that serious about preventing HPV, they would recommend giving the vaccine to boys as well, who as carriers are obviously 50% of the problem.  But the typical male reaction is that this is a ‘women’s issue’.  James Whale perfectly articulated this view on TalkSport Radio on 25th June 2007 .  ‘Boys don’t get cervical cancer’ so why should they have to be vaccinated, he asked.  Of course, from the Government’s point of view, vaccinating boys would double the cost – or embarrass them when take-up was miniscule.

Now we turn to the side effects.  It took a Freedom of Information Act request in the United States of America to winkle out that Gardasil had been implicated in deaths of 3 women and 1,637 adverse reactions (May 2007).

371 of those reactions were serious, one of the deaths was within hours of having the vaccine and there have been foetal abnormalities as well.

Although Gardasil is available in the States, the adverse reactions have stalled Merck’s hopes of USA-wide compulsory vaccination.

Such is the hysteria for mass vaccination in the UK , for a long time, only the Daily Express had mentioned the possibility of side effects. (See ‘12-Year-Olds Will be Given Anti-Cancer Vaccine‘.)

In The Scotsman, it was left to a lone blogger to mention the problems at the end of a typically sycophantic article. See ‘Schoolgirls in Scotland to be vaccinated with cervical cancer drug.’

Up to October 2007, no British newspaper had headlined the associated deaths and adverse reactions with the exception of Metro, the free sheet which is part of the Daily Mail stable.  Metro also carried the obligatory complacent response from the Department of Health’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. See ‘Cancer jab implicated in deaths of women.‘

But now the Daily Telegraph has highlighted the problems. See ‘Cervical cancer drug Gardasil linked to deaths.‘

And the same paper has also pointed out that no study has yet shown 12-year-old girls are protected for longer than five years. See ‘Concerns raised over girls’ cervical cancer jab.‘

Meanwhile, the Sunday Express reported at the end of October 2007 on shocking side effects after vaccination in the United States , including eight deaths among the 3,500 adverse reactions. See ‘Eight Deaths Linked to Labour’s New Sex Jab for Schoolgirls.‘

We saw earlier that despite vaccination, women will still need to be screened, but the Daily Mail has now carried an article about a new screening method which actually detects the virus itself, enabling much earlier and more reliable diagnosis.

It seems women commentators in the USA are not exactly falling over each over to express delight in Gardasil like their counterparts in Britain.

Elsewhere, sites are pointing out that the vaccine has traces of Aluminium and that it has not been proven totally safe.

On the testing background, Phase II trials were on just 552 women aged 16-23, and the follow-up was only 2-and-a-half years.  Merck are concerned enough about the possibility of consequent foetal abnormalities to be monitoring births of women having the vaccine. See ‘Gardasil HPV Vaccine Reduced Infection and Disease in New Clinical Study.‘

1,529 adolescent boys and girls aged 10-15 were in another trial of Gardasil. Results looking at anti-bodies are good, but no follow-up time has been reported to look for long-term adverse effects, including any carcinogenic problems. (See, ‘Merck’s HPV Vaccine Produces Stronger Immune Response in Girls, Boys Than Women, Study.‘)

Phase III trials have just completed on 12,167 women aged 16-26, of whom half (just over 6,000) were given the vaccine in a three-dose regimen over six months.  The follow-up has been just three years.

The mantra has been: ‘young people are gong to have sex anyway, so let’s just make it as safe as we can for them’.  Do we say ‘young people are going to smoke /get smashed on drink / climb onto railway lines anyway, so let’s just make it as safe as we can for them’?  No, we don’t.  So why the exception for sex?  It must be that some people out there – women of a certain age running family-planning clinics and some peculiar secularist men – get a perverse vicarious pleasure in the thought of teenagers being sexually active.

We even dress little girls like tarts and then wonder why some men draw the obvious conclusion.

In the real world there is a sexual health crisis amongst the young, with something like 10% of young people infected with Chlamydia, the disease which causes infertility.

The secularists and ‘family planners’ might care to explain their part in the sexually-liberated new dawn to those young people which it has left unable to have children of their own.

Sorry, people, it might offend against your liberal prejudices, but chastity is the only lifestyle which will protect against STD’s. Not condoms, not any number of inadequately-tested jabs, not more sex education, nothing except chastity and fidelity.

But unlike vaccines, medicines and contraceptives, there’s no money in chastity, so don’t expect the professionals to flock around supporting it.

In a recent meeting with officials from the Governments’ Teenage Pregnancy Unit, Christian campaigners raised the point about infertility, only to be told: ‘But this is the Teenage Pregnancy Unit.  We aren’t concerned with infertility here.’

Indeed, as the Government’s teenage sex targets all revolve around teen pregnancy, don’t expect them to be that bothered about infertility in the young.  In fact, it’s a horrible thought, but they might well be pleased, because infertile young people aren’t going to figure in the pregnancy statistics, are they?

What a dysfunctional, disease-ridden, fornicating society we live in, made even worse by the fact that some actually like it this way.

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