Read the following and then decide if Gardasil is safe. Surely you owe it to children to do your own homework when their life is involved.

Pam Martens

Vaccine Expert Warns of Gardasil Side Effects
http://www.nvic.org/PressReleases/pr62706gardasil.htm

Leading HPV Vaccine Researcher Speaks Out Against Vaccine For Little Girls
http://www.kpcnews.com/articles/2007/03/14/online_features/hpv_vaccine/hpv01.txt

How Dangerous Are Merck's Thought Police (A look inside Merck)
http://www.opednews.com/articles/life_a_pam_mart_070402_how_dangerous_are_me.htm


Cancer Monthly: HPV Alone Insufficient To Cause Cancer
http://www.cancermonthly.com/iNP/view.asp?ID=169

UK Guardian Exposes Merck's Marketing Tactics in Europe (Includes Paying Journalists)
http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:v06zTeetjK4J:www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,,2042653,00.html+guardian+AND+gardasil+AND+raffle&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&ie=UTF-8

Is citizen INFORMED CONSENT to medical treatment dead and buried; governments and drug companies seem to want it that way?
Year 10 Genevieve Stewart’s thoughtful letter to The Age on 29/5 states “If I had known, I would have refused the vaccination”, referring to Gardasil’s genetic modified nature and to side-effects they were not warned of. Klein and Reist’s opinion piece outlines that this vaccine is not effective against many causes of cervical cancer, in addition to the problems Stewart mentions.
One reason for public discontent with vaccines is that governments, in collusion with drug manufacturers go within a millimetre of coercing entire groups of the community to take the drugs. The exercise is so thorough that most parents and children would believe they are legally required to take it; no choice.
Yet it has been a cornerstone of medical ethics to give patients choice, free of coercian, coupled with complete information about possible dangers and limits of benefits. This is called the principal of Informed Consent
With vaccines and a number of new ‘wonder drugs’ politicians love to believe they are 100% effective and free from side-effects, and drug companies love to do their bit to foster that grand illusion.
We must hear from thinkers such as Klein & Reist, to balance the massive barrage of media releases reported in the press, that the vaccine is 100% benefit with no risk. For goodness sake, the press even regularly report the opinion of Dr Fraser, Gardasil’s inventor. You could hardly get a more emotionally invested commentator.

It is a measure of the success of vaccines in promoting human health (reducing infectious disease) that the conditions of community complacency can now exist that allow widespread opposition to vaccination. If this was the 1800s where most of us would have seen siblings, parents, friends, partners etc die from infectious diseases (that are, nowadays, almost forgotten due to vaccines) the general attitude in the community to vaccination would be completely different.

Thanks to Renate and Melinda for presenting the other side of the Gardasil story. A bit of balance to this pretty scary story is what our community needs. What I can't understand is how come so many people are so willing to accept "the girls were just stressed about having the vaccine" explanation for the extreme reaction so many of them had. Questions need to be asked, like: Why has Gardisil been pushed on to our daughters and granddaughters with such haste? Whatever happened to proper procedures for trialling drugs? If this is the way Drug Companies are going to be allowed to conduct their business in the future, God help us all!

re we must not ignore the risks:

in response?

"Articles such as this undermine the credibility of onlineopinion."

and

"This has to be one of the most irrational and profoundly ignorant pieces on OLO for a long time."

and

"The motivation behind this article is obvious. The opposition to the vaccine comes from the religious right who oppose any efforts to prevent STIs that aren’t focussed on the promotion of abstinence, an approach that could most generously be described as “public health by wishful thinking”. The authors’ half baked “feminism” does little to conceal this, and will cost women’s lives."

Why all the reaction? This is an argument which deserves a thorough hearing.

I will never forget the death of a friend's little sister, a long time ago, from the same vaccine that made me very ill, a long time ago. Risks and benefits must be weighed - by communities and by individuals, on the basis of hopes and fears and solid information.

Hopefully as many of us as possible have the option of an informed choice.

Thanks to the authors, and others who have posted useful links.

As for those who continue to fulminate, perhaps OLO could add to their webpages, beside their "printable version" button, an "unprintable version" button.

Sir Vivor,

Tankhard Reist and Klein are purporting to engage with what is essentially a scientific question: are the risks of HPV vaccination justified by the benefits?

This is a legitimate question to ask, and anybody contemplating any kind of medical intervention should always be satisfied that the question has been resolved to their satisfaction before they consent to medical treatment.

However, in composing this diatribe the authors have not referenced a single scientifically acceptable peer reviewed article about the risks of HPV vaccination (let alone about the benefits). One of the wonders of the internet is it makes it easy to search for the sources used in dodgy “scholarship” such as theirs. Here are three used for this “article”:

http://www.judicialwatch.org/6299.shtml (a US ambulance chasing group)
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,21783101-5000106,00.html (Neil Mitchell, famous for his scientific credentials), and
http://www.909shot.com/ (The site of the so called “National Vaccine Information Centre”).

None of them is peer reviewed, or has any pretensions toward a balanced analysis of the scientific issues. The authors of this piece clearly betray their ideological bias and ignorance in the way they have composed this piece. It has no credibility whatsoever, and the fact that one of them claims a PhD is a serious worry to anyone concerned about the standards of tertiary education in this country.

The “National Vaccine Information Centre” despite its official sounding name and its claim to “promote informed consent” is little but a conspiracy theory website set up by US anti-vaccination activist Barbara Loe Fisher. This is one of the problems of the internet: anyone can set up a site and promote themselves as an authority. An academic with any claims to credibility would be aware of this, and declare the true nature of such a source.

By all means research the risks and benefits of any proposed medical intervention. Start with scientifically credible authorities such as the US CDC and follow the peer reviewed references.

http://www.cdc.gov/std/hpv/STDFact-HPV-vaccine.htm

It is a serious question, the authors' piece adds nothing credible to the discussion.