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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."
Big pharma lobbied for legal immunity against any vaccine damage claims decades ago. Claiming they don't have time to fight lawsuits since they are too busy "saving the world". I'll start using vaccines when they are able to actually take responsibilities of their own products.
One of the things many in medicine are worried about is that anti-vax people are going to provide a host population and something like measles will mutate and go back to killing millions of people.
Keep in mind that this is more of a risk because of vaccination, for two reasons:
1: When the diseases were not vaccinated against, the diseases were still mutating and competing, and the most successful strains over time were the milder, which didn't kill the host, and allowed propagation. Lethal spreadable diseases are evolutionary dead ends compared to their less lethal cousins. With vaccines, we've eradicated the competition too, making it easier for a dangerous mutation to propagate.
2: And on the flip side of the coin, before vaccination, the humans who had genes that made it more likely they would survive the disease would have more viable offspring. After vaccination, those genes no longer give an advantage, and others without the resistance propagate their genes just as much, leading to a population that is more susceptible to not surviving an outbreak.