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Gardasil Cleared of Anti-Vax Nonsense (slate.com)
New submitter Zane C. writes: A new study once again shows vaccines have no link with yet another batch of medical disorders. The vaccine in question is a relatively new HPV vaccine called Gardasil, mainly targeting preteens to reduce infection. Phil Plait has more on this, debunking anti-vax claims and explaining why you should receive the vaccine: "It’s another typical anti-vax call to arms due to a complete and gross misunderstanding of how reality works. To them, if something happens after something else, it was caused by that first thing. This is the classic post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. But the Universe doesn’t work that way. And this kind of bad thinking has consequences. In the U.S. alone, 79 million people are infected with HPV. That’s more than a quarter of the entire population. Fourteen million new cases crop up every year. Gardasil can substantially cut those numbers back—it’s working, and working well, in the U.S. and Australia—but not if the fearmongering falsehoods by anti-vaxxers get traction."
Gardasil is made by Merck Sharp & Dohme.
Cervarix is made by GlaxoSmithKlein.
Believing that a vaccine is by nature safe. This article makes it out like it's ridiculous to believe that a vaccine could have serious negative side effects. It's not; being a vaccine doesn't make anything safe. Yes, the data show that Gardasil isn't the cause of the various things some suspected of it. But that wasn't a foregone conclusion.
The whole article is an ad hominen .
The piece tries to sell vaccines by calling anyone against _this_ particular vaccine an Anti-Vaxxer, and saying that rejecting this vaccine is is Anti-Vax nonsense.
It's not nonsense. Vaccines can be very risky. The first thing you have to do is doubt them.
Then they need to be proven safe. They can be sold then.
Then they need to be proven effective. You might want to use them then.
Then they need to be proven beneficial to the people as a whole, as opposed to the same money used on the next best. Then you can have governments pay for it.
Then you need to prove the herd effect is very useful. Then you can have the government ask everybody to use it.
There's no common test for HPV, and a very large percentage of people have some strain of it. So let's say you have a daughter, who is magically pure and never thinks about sex but is eventually going to grow up and marry a man, and lose her virginity in order to produce children. There's a 1/3 chance that the guy has HPV and doesn't know it.
Only if he's been promiscuous.
There's a significant chance that the HPV causes cervical cancer.
Only if they continue to be promiscuous after contracting HPV...it takes multiple strains to be an issue.
So even in this optimal scenario, not vaccinating your daughter is the equivalent of playing Russian roulette with your daughter's health. In real-life scenarios where teenagers spend most of their free time making out with each other (HPV is transmitted by kissing too), she's guaranteed to be exposed to HPV unless all her friends were vaccinated.
Most strains of HPV are benign, and the body normally flushes them out quite quickly. HPV only becomes an issue when multiple incompatible strains are present at the same time. There's a reason that a vast majority of the population has been exposed to HPV but only an extremely small percentage are suffering any kind of side-effects - a percentage that is smaller than the percentage of people suffering side-effects from the supposed cure.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
That's actually entirely wrong. I am a physician who gives gardasil to young adults routinely - it is approved through age 26 in men and women. The vaccine is a combination of 4 recombinant capsid proteins, one from each of 4 strains of hpv. The only genetic manipulation was inserting the genes for these proteins into yeast for mass production. Injected into the body it works like any other vaccine that doesn't consist of live virus. And finally, the reason it is indicated for young people is to give them protection before encountering the virus. You could give it to a 40 year old virgin with the same effect. The problem is it is so prevalent that most people are exposed by the time they are 30. Let's not forget that hpv is the cause of most anal cancers in men, including straight men, as the virus has been shown to migrate from the scrotal skin up the perineum to the anus where it basically replicates in much the same way as the cervix.