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Is there really a problem?
Cervical cancer is a rare disease in the US, representing less than 1% of all cancer deaths. Since the introduction of widespread screening with the ‘Pap Test’ over 50 years ago it has been in sharp decline. In the last thirteen years alone, hospitalisation rates have dropped 36%.[1] Deaths from cervical cancer have dropped 75% over the last 50 years. Recent studies indicate that mortality rates are still going down.[2,3]

Do we need a vaccine?
Nearly all cervical cancer deaths are preventable by a simple Pap Test and appropriate follow-up. In the state of Illinois there are only about 200 deaths from cervical cancer a year, but nearly 20% of women in the state still do not take advantage of Pap Test screening.[4,5] Simply improving uptake of Pap Tests can further reduce cervical cancer.

The use of tobacco and the Pill, sexual promiscuity and the non-use of condoms all increase a woman’s risk of developing HPV infection. These behaviours can all be modified through education, reducing the possible risk of developing cervical cancer still further.

A series of three Gardasil jabs costs at least $360 (£177). A Pap Test costs about $50 (£24). The annual cost of Pap smears in the US (about $1.6 billion/£79 million) is about a third of the projected US sales for Gardasil.

Does HPV cause cervical cancer?
The development of the Gardasil anti-HPV vaccine is based on the medical orthodoxy that HPV can lead to cervical cancer. Although most women will at some time become infected with HPV, in the overwhelming majority of cases it does not progress to invasive cervical cancer (See Ed). Can the forced vaccination of 80,000-90,000 Illinois schoolgirls, with all its attendant risks, in order to possibly prevent a few women a year from developing cervical cancer be justified? (Also - see Editorial below)

Gardasil’s effectiveness
The effectiveness of Gardasil against both HPV and cervical cancer is completely unproven.

Gardasil targets the most aggressive two out of the fifteen or so strains of HPV thought to be linked with cervical cancer (HPV-16 and HPV-18), plus two strains of HPV thought to be linked with genital warts (HPV-6 and HPV-11). HPV (particularly strains 16 and 18) is now blamed for 70% of cases of cervical cancer but no-one knows for sure (see Editorial below)

No-one knows what proportion of 11-12 year olds will be protected against HPV by Gardasil, or how many years that protection will last, because insufficient research has been done. Although Merck claim near 100% effectiveness against HPV for women aged sixteen plus, the same lack of research exists here, and cases of HPV occurring in women only three years after having a Gardasil jab have already been reported.

Furthermore, no-one knows whether Gardasil will actually reduce cases of cervical cancer. Invasive cervical cancer usually takes eight to twelve years to develop and can take as long as 40 years.[6]

Adverse reactions
.Published papers claiming vaccine safety (and effectiveness) are not credible. All of the five major studies published in peer-reviewed journals were funded by Merck and Co. Of the 69 listed co-authors, 81% had financial connections to Merck, 42% were actual Merck employees, presumably holding stock/options, and therefore were positioned to benefit financially from their own favourable reporting. In four of the five papers a co-author was actually a Gardasil patent holder.

Merck’s research would be better classified as criminal than biased. Following a similar pattern to the research carried out by Merck on its (now withdrawn) anti-arthritis drug Vioxx, Gardasil researchers designed studies using women who were low-risk for HPV transmission and followed them for two years or less. Despite reporting adverse events in 90% of those vaccinated (of which approximately 40% were systemic reactions*), they minimised the significance by engineering similar reaction rates in ‘placebo groups’ by vaccinating them with high doses of aluminium (a crime in itself, see Ed (ii)) rather than saline (as usually used to control the results of vaccine safety studies).

Pandora’s box
If Gardasil is effective against the four HPV strains it targets, it might make the cervical environment available for the other eleven HPV strains linked to cervical cancer to flourish, even mutate and become even more aggressive, unleashing a Pandora’s box of cervical disease.[7]

Aluminium
Gardasil contains 18,000 times more aluminium than the US Food and Drug Administration considers safe in injectable products.[8]

Aluminium has been shown to cause behaviour and memory impairment associated with death of motor neurons in animals). The Gardasil three jab series will expose young girls to approxima tely seventeen micrograms per kilogram, a dose above that known to be neurotoxic in animals (See Ed).

Conclusion
(i) Mandating a vaccine against sexually transmitted diseases (HPV and cervical cancer) in 9-15 year-old children is illogical. If proven to be effective and safe, it makes more sense to offer it to women aged 16+. Only 3% of these have been infected by the strains of HPV Gardasil targets (Gardasil only reliably protects against a strain, apparently, when a woman has not already been infected by that strain).

(ii) Reduction of cervical cancer rates is more probable through enhanced Pap Test and education programmes, which will cost a lot less.

(iii) The HPV vaccine is a unique type of vaccine with no prior clinical experience. The potential for benefit is not nearly as great as the potential for widespread harm if given to hundreds of thousands of children.

* systemic reactions: reactions in the body away from the site of the jab

Ed.- (i) Does HPV cause cervical cancer?

The US National Cancer Institute says that a causative link has not been proven. In a controlled study only 33% of women with cervical cancer had HPV infection and HPV had not led to cervical cancer in 43% of cases

A 1994 six-year study followed the medical outcomes of 200 women with smears suggesting mild dyskaryosis (mild changes in the appearance of cells at the neck of the womb which revert to normal in 90% of cases). It noted many cases where the presence of HPV-16 virus had not increased a woman’s likelihood of developing cervical cancer (low grade or high grade). Where low-grade cervical cancer had developed, the presence of HPV-16 had made no difference to the speed with which it had then progressed to high-grade cervical cancer [9]

Another study found that, in cervical cancer tumours with HPV DNA present, the DNA sequences and gene expression was inconsistent. On the other hand, all of the tumours they studied contained a rare chromosome abnormality which could have developed spontaneously or been triggered by exposure to some chemical toxin. The researchers felt it far more likely that the tumours had been triggered by some environmental carcinogen and that the HPV (which 80% of us carry) had infected the proliferating cancer cells (cells dividing wildly). Proliferating cancer cells are particularly prone to infection.[10]

(ii) According to professor of neurosurgery Russell Blaylock, injected aluminium appears to stimulate immune system activity for many years, causing major damage. This damage has been consistently linked to Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease, as well as to autism, attention deficit disorder and

Gulf War syndrome
(iii) The promotion of mandatory vaccination with Gardasil by Merck is easy to understand - the more jabs, the more profits. The pursuit of profit rather than medical benefit may also be why Merck is pushing to target the 9-15 age group although there are millions of uninfected adult women to protect. American schools, some of which already bar entry to children who have not had specified jabs, can be used to maximise uptake.

The enthusiasm for mandatory vaccination within so many American states is more difficult to explain, especially given that the American moral right wing condemns Gardasil as “a license for sexual behaviour”. After all, influenza kills ten times as many people as cervical cancer but there is no call for mandatory flu vaccination. In Texas, where Governor Perry made Gardasil mandatory without consultation, many have noted that Merck gave $6,000 towards the Governor’s re-election campaigning and that a senior Merck lobbyist, Mike Toomey, had previously served as Perry’s Chief of Staff. Then there’s the coincidence that Perry’s current Chief of Staff’s mother-in-law, Texas Republican state representative Dianne White Delisi, is also a state director for Women in Government, the lobby group Merck hired to lobby for mandatory Gardasil in Texas. Perhaps there’s a clue there?

 

 

As reported previously, Departments of Health all over the world (including the UK) are getting excited about Gardasil, Merck’s new vaccine against human papillomavirus (HPV). Merck claim that, by protecting against HPV, Gardasil also protects against cervical cancer, based on the current medical establishment belief that the majority of cases of cervical cancer are triggered by HPV.

In the US, Gardasil is now used widely. Texas has made it mandatory for girls entering secondary school in September 2008 (age 11-12). Many more states, including Illinois, are considering following suit.

What follows is a précis of a submission made by radiologist David Ayoub and colleagues at the Prairie Collaboration for Immunization Safety to the Human Services Committee of the Illinois General Assembly. It challenges (i) the effectiveness and safety of the vaccine itself and (ii) the logic behind the proposed mandatory immunisation of girls aged eleven and twelve. Although at times specific to the situation in Illinois, their arguments are relevant to any regional or national health board considering mass immunisation with the vaccine.

Some of the points made have been covered in other Green Health Watch articles, but this issue is so important to the short- and long-term health of our children that they bear repeating. Now, because no-one knows how effective the vaccine will be in girls aged between nine and fifteen (as adequate studies have never been done) there are proposals to mass vaccinate all nine to fifteen-year-old boys as well - a sort of belt and braces approach which will double Merck’s profits. Again, no-one knows how effectively (if at all) the vaccine will prevent HPV in boys or men, because no research whatsoever has been done on the effect of Gardasil on males.