In the "why am I not surprised" department, Michele Bachmann attacks Rick Perry's endorsement of vaccination against HPV by falling for anti-vaccine hysteria:
The problem is, it comes with some very significant consequences. There's a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine. She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine. There are very dangerous consequences. It's not good enough to take, quote, "a mulligan" where you want a do-over, not when you have little children's lives at risk.
I personally don't think requiring the vaccine for HPV is a great idea, because it is not really a public health crisis and all vaccines do have risks. But stories like this are widespread among the vaccine-hating population, and hardly any of them stand up to scrutiny.
Ed Morrisey:Huh? “Mental retardation” typically takes place in a pre- or neo-natal event. Autism becomes apparent in the first couple of years of life — and primarily affects boys. Gardasil vaccinations take place among girls between 9-12 years of age. Even assuming that this anecdote is arguably true, it wouldn’t be either “mental retardation” or autism, but brain damage.
The FDA has received no reports of brain damage as a result of HPV vaccines Gardasil and Cervarix. Among the reports that correlate seriously adverse reactions to either, the FDA lists blood clots, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and 68 deaths during the entire run of the drugs. The FDA found no causal connection to any of these serious adverse events and found plenty of contributing factors to all — and all of the events are exceedingly rare. The “mental retardation” argument is a rehash of the thoroughly discredited notion that vaccines containing thimerasol caused a rapid increase in diagnosed autism cases.
The problem with nutty, outside-the-mainstream people is that while some of their ideas may be refreshing, others are dangerous. Anti-vaccine hysteria is very dangerous; off the top of my head I can think of few more things a US President could do that would harm America more than endorsing the fear of vaccination.
2 comments:
The fact of the matter is that the HPV vaccine, unlike other vaccines, only protects from only a few out of over 30 forms of HPV. It absolutely is not a prevention of cancer which is what the drug companies have been trying to promote it as, AND they are only trying to force *girls* to have this vaccine when it can be administered to both boys and girls and spread between both sexes. There is something very very messed up with this one, and I don't consider people like me 'outside the mainstream' or 'dangerous' because we don't blindly follow what the drug companies or politicians tell us to do - questioning is good, it's healthy.
EcoGrrl,
While you are correct in noting that Gardasil only protects people from 4 strains of forms of HPV. The fact of the matter is actually that out of those four--two of them cause 70% of the cervical cancer cases and two of the strains cause 90% of HPV cases.
If you are going to make a blanket statement like "is is absolutlely not a cancer prevention", then you need to back that up with some sources or provide some data that it does not prevent cancer. obody is saying it prevents all forms for cervical cancer.
And you are correct. The vaccine can be given to both sexes. From a public health point of view, it is more cost effective to vaccinate girls alone vs. girls and boys )UNLESS there is a low rate of girls getting vaccinated). There is a very nice analysis that has been done regarding the cost analysis of vaccinating boys and published in the October 2009 edition of the BMJ if you'd like to read more about their methodology and results.
Questioning IS good and it IS healthy, but I'd really like to see more people go out and try to find actual research (from reputable sources) before they either accept what is being told to them by whatever information source they are getting it from. Nobody is asking your to blindly follow. The information IS out there.
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