This provocative film documents the stories of the numerous girls adversely affected by the HPV vaccines – giving these young women and their families a chance to speak out – share their dismay and sense of betrayal for simply believing the pharmaceutical and medical industries were protecting them when marketing HPV vaccines for the prevention of cervical cancer.
More about this project and their plea for help
Yeah, I heard that vaccinations cause autism as well.
ReplyDeleteReally? This is a strange new low.
ReplyDeleteTo deny some people have adverse reactions to vaccines, some of which lead to death, is beyond belief.
ReplyDeleteI can appreciate the argument that the numbers might be small, relative to the total number given but that is a different argument to make.
The marketing of HPV suggests it is totally safe, but that is not the case to the specific cases this documentary will cover.
Would you have called any discussion about early reactions to thalidomide? It took 4 years and 10,000 plus cases of birth defects before its safety record was properly questioned.
I haven't done anything to sensationalise this, you've decided that merely linking this is "over the top".
Truth doesn't have to hit some magic percentage of quota to still be the truth. I welcome any "balancing" comments you care to make, but calling it a "new low" and suggesting this is as fictitious as the supposed link to autism is, to my mind, a strange new low.
Good to see the liberal and science types are equally gung-ho about collateral damage as the right wingers are accused of being.
Where is the evidence that Gardasil is dangerous? Without evidence you have a lot of anecdotes.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure the people that movie will feature have had truly awful experiences and it's natural for us to try and find a cause for how something happened. But sometimes young people get sick, or even die with no apparent trigger. When we look at one case in isolation we can never know if it was a coincidence or if gardasil triggered some response, because we can't go back an undo it.
Thankfully we have ways of detecting these sorts of effects when we look at data for a whole population. Trials of gardasil showed no evidence for serious adverse effects and even the VAERS database (which is self-reporting and not about causation) only includes two symptoms higher than the base-line. For really serious effects (guillain barre etc) it's below what you'd expect in the unvaccinated population. That's the quota you need to hit before you start worrying about the danger posed by Garadsil.
What's really amazing though, is that the anti-vax movement used to made almost entirely of left-wing nutcases who though "natural" was the only way to do things and vaccines were "a pollutant in our systems". I wonder why conservative folks are more concerned about Gardasil ...
All medical procedures and medicines can cause adverse side effects. The real issue is that people need all the information so that they can make informed consent re: their medical options.
ReplyDeleteIf women are going to have a variety of sexual partners in their life (and that's their choice) then it's wise to vaccinate for genital warts since we know there is a relationship between that STI and cervical cancer.
If women decide to not have multiple sexual partners and the man they have sex with does likewise then there isn't a lot to be gained from the HPV vaccine. The risk (because with everything there is a risk, no matter how small) will outweigh the benefit.
I see it as a personal, medical decision between a patient and her doctor.
Firstly, it is clear that what we see hear is a promotion to raise money. there is no research or evidence that says anything of note. It is a very nicely put together piece, but does anyone believe that news anchor intros are factual- they are sensational by design, and are there to keep you watching, facts come a poor second.
ReplyDeleteThe wording at the end makes the all too common mistake of associating a reported adverse event with a vaccine. That is not what VAERS in the States, and the NZ equivalent at CARM is about. Anyone can report an adverse event without evidence of an association. Determining the cause of the adverse event happens later, and at this stage not one death has been associated with Gardasil, remember that the 98 deaths include motor vehicle crashes, suicides and death from pre-existing and documented illnesses. If there was some mechanism by which Gardasil did kill you would expect, after over 50 million doses world wide for some real evidence that proves this.
thanks- my 2 cents worth anyway.
Without evidence you have a lot of anecdotes.
ReplyDeleteEr, no. What you have is a whole of lot of eye-witness accounts. They are not just stories.
My understanding of the vaccene is that ther eis actually no point in taking it - it blocks only some viruses, so smear tests are still needed.
ReplyDeleteSo what's the point? If you could take a pill that'd mean you didn't have to look out for buses when you crossed the street, would you do that? Of course not, because you still have to look for cars all the same and given that fact you're taking a risk for no real benefit. Sure, it's an extremely small risk, but even as small as it is, there's basically zero real benefit.
They are not just stories.
ReplyDeleteHow are they different than stories? Millions of people have taken this vaccine, if you look at a few peoples account at disregard the vast majority then you aren't going to get a fair idea of the true story.
Lucia Maria said...
ReplyDeleteWithout evidence you have a lot of anecdotes.
Er, no. What you have is a whole of lot of eye-witness accounts. They are not just stories.
Err, eyewitnesses to what, exactly?
Correlation does not equal causation.
"The plural of anecdote is not data." Dr Ben Goldacre, bad Science.
My understanding of the vaccene is that ther eis actually no point in taking it - it blocks only some viruses, so smear tests are still needed.
ReplyDeleteOn that basis you could say there's no point in washing your hands, as it only reduces your chance of getting sick.
They are not just stories.
They may not be. However, vaccination stories have the same propensity for "post-hoc, ergo propter hoc" fallacies as homeopathic remedy stories. With homeopathy, you always hear that someone was sick, they took the homeopathic remedy, then later they got well, so obviously the homeopathic remedy cured them. With vaccination scare stories, it's round the other way: you always hear that someone was well, they had a vaccination and then later they got sick. All you can say about such reports is "Yeah, well maybe - or maybe not." Causality would need something a little stronger than "B followed A, therefore A caused B."
...suggesting this is as fictitious as the supposed link to autism is, to my mind, a strange new low.
Good to see the liberal and science types are equally gung-ho about collateral damage as the right wingers are accused of being.
There were two reasons for my comment:
1. Theob1966 has pointed out that this kind of thing is taken seriously, and in the case of Gardasil nothing's been found to suggest it's dangerous, so any "collateral damage" is purely speculative.
2. The anti-Gardasil people seem to have a political/cultural objection to it - which means, if we're to toss up the relative merits of the views of disinterested parties who maintain the records of adverse effects of vaccines vs those with an axe to grind, the disinterested parties carry a lot more weight.
LRO,
ReplyDeleteSome sort of reaction, obviously.
I have a child who reacts, in varying degrees, to food.
If I could not notice cause and effect, I'd still be feeding him stuff and then wondering why he was throwing up and getting skin reactions.
If something unusual happens to your child, especially when they get very sick, you think about all the unusual things that happened to them around the same time - well, at least I do. You think, did they get chilled, did they have too much sugar and not enough fresh food, etc, etc.
To say that just because the unusual event is an injection, that it doesn't warrant that same sort of evaluation of possible cause and effect is to be entirely too trusting of vaccines.
lucia, I don't think anyone, least of all me, is saying don't evaluate.
ReplyDeleteWhat we are saying is the evaluation must be more than A preceeds B therefore A cuases B.
Even in your example of your son, you list 3 specifics, plus an etc of etc.s
If you blame the sugar without looking at the freshness of the fruit and veg you run the risk of missing the cause.
All the best scientific analysis does not show a causative effect with gardasil and deaths.
Remember, Andrew Wakefield condemned hundreds, if not thousands of children to death and yet evn now he has his supporters. Why? Because the evidence does not fit his prejudices.
Please don't let your prejudices affect your attitude to gardasil.
One other point. You say
ReplyDeleteTo say that just because the unusual event is an injection, that it doesn't warrant that same sort of evaluation of possible cause and effect is to be entirely too trusting of vaccines.
As already pointed out, there have been investigations and no ling can be proven.
But your last phrase worries me the most - I detect you may have a mistrust of vaccines, but without vaccines what do we have?
Polio?
Measles?
Mumps?
Rubella?
Smallpox?
Whooping Cough?
Yes. Let's ditch those vaccines, we can't trust them, and all swallow homeopathic sugar pills since they, at least, do nothing.
The Polio disease has an interesting history, LRO.
ReplyDeleteAt the same time the vaccine was released, Doctors stopped getting paid to report it. Furthermore, the symptoms of the disease disease were "refined" and this caused a "reclassification" of new cases.
“Paralytic cases were not distinguished from non-paralytic cases until a recommendation was made by the Dominion Council of Health in 1949- The LCDC figures provided from 1952 and onward represent this administrative change: recording only those cases adhering to the requirements for a diagnosis of paralytic poliomyelitis. In a report released in June of 1959, another administrative change was recommended by the Dominion Council of Health, further altering the way in which apparent cases of poliomyelitis would be reported. All non-paralytic cases of poliomyelitis were to be henceforth recorded as “meningitis, viral or aseptic,” a disease which itself only became reportable in 1952.” These two administrative changes effectively reduced the apparent incidence of poliomyelitis. In particular, since the latter change is temporally correlative to the introduction of the polio vaccines, the vaccines appear to have been responsible for a reduction in poliomyelitis cases when it is entirely possible that the administrative changes are primarily responsible.”–Catherine Diodati MA (Immunization History, Ethics, Law and Health p116)
The success of the polio vaccines were over-hyped. Indeed, in the early days, adverse reactions from the vaccine created more cripples than it prevented.
It baffles me me when the standard reaction from the doctor who administers the vaccine, to discover the person having a severe fit within an hour of receiving it actually has the arrogance to say "it's a coincidence" without any proof, which is the case with several reported incidences of adverse vaccine reaction.
ReplyDeleteAnd then for others to parrot it.
It seems to me to represent the height of blinkered thinking. It would be the most likely cause of the seizure, until proven otherwise. That is not to say that it isn't another cause, but you go with the clues.
This is one of the reasons I am convinced adverse vaccine reactions are under-reported and consequently, miscounted. Note that I am not saying that this would alter the overall safety factor significantly, but hundreds of victims could still move into triple figures across large numbers of vaccines are distributed.
It's also the reason the brothers above decided to research this issue - the doctor suggested it was a coincidence when their sister had an adverse reaction shortly after receiving the vaccine. Such was his blinkered and indoctrinated ability to think.
There is a story in the paper today of a local girl who fell and broke her arm.
She turned up at the hospital and the Doctors took 6 hours before finally providing pain relief. Lets use her real example to underscore the weakness in the above counter arguments:
"My girl fell and broke her arm, the one sticking out at an odd angle"
"Well, that is anecdotal evidence. We don't know it is broken and we don't know if the fall caused it.
Frankly, I doubt it."
"Well, can you x-ray it?"
"Yes, that would scientifically prove your mere anecdotal evidence, but don't expect your anecdotal story to be vindicated."
"How about something for the pain"
"You mean something for the story we are hearing that your daughter apparently has pain?"
"Yes, that story"
"I suppose, but lets wait for the evidence shall we. You think it is all to do with the broken arm, but I'm betting its something else entirely.
"But she was climbing a tree and fell out. I saw it."
Actually, here's a theory: did she come in contact with poisonous snake or jelly fish in that tree?"
Zen, it's not just one person. You can't look at one case in isolation when more than 20 million people have received the vaccine.
ReplyDeleteIf someone falls from a tree and breaks their arm you conclude the fall broke it because falling from trees breaks arms. If that same person said they fell just after drinking a bottle of water you'd probably disregard that information since water is unlikely to make you fall out of trees
I disagree. You can't keep looking at 20 million people and saying to the person right in front of you who collapses immediately after receiving a vaccine that "this is unrelated because the percentage chance is low" when the evidence is right before you.
ReplyDeleteEven a person with half a brain might go "sh*t, maybe it's a a bad batch"
It's the same reason that administering anti-biotics or anesthetic to a particular person and then noticing an adverse reaction doesn't have those doctors going "but anti-bitoics are safe, this can't be happening."
Because adverse reactions DO HAPPEN even with those "safe" products. The only difference is the mindset of assuming BY DEFAULT the reaction is unrelated.
Adverse reactions do happen, yes. I guess we could say that if this one person got seriously messed up by a vaccine, maybe we shouldn't have given it to those other million people and instead just learned to live with the disease - but we don't. That might be a tough thing to say to the parents of that one person who has the adverse reaction, but I expect it would be somewhat more tough to tell the parents of someone dead from a disease that you could have vaccinated them against it but there was a one-in-a-million chance they would have had an adverse reaction.
ReplyDeleteNot "just one person", but yes, but that was I suspect the assumption that was brought into this conversation. That people who raise the issue of adverse reactions are implying that the vaccine should therefore be taken off the market.
ReplyDeleteBut sometimes, the people involved just first and foremost want acknowledgment that an AE after receiving a vaccine shouldn't automatically result in the line "oh, it's unrelated because vaccines are safe"
And then secondly to acknowledge that it might be important to ensure the risks are not minimised.
As a contrast, I just heard on the radio the story of a person who had overdosed on drugs and left largely paralyzed and speechless. He spends his time convincing kids to be careful of bad side effects of drugs.
Maybe, compared to the total number of recreational drugs consumed world-wide, the chance of an overdose (which is often used generically to include any adverse reaction) might be fairly low, but we allow people the latitude to campaign against recreational drug use based on their anecdotal stories, and would deal out more respect to this person than the film maker above.
Yet some stats indicate recreational drug taking might cause less deaths than prescription drugs, if we are going to revert back from anecdotal evidence and look at stats.
More than 700,000 people visit U.S. emergency rooms each year as a result of adverse drug reactions. And, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), adverse drug reactions from drugs that are properly prescribed and properly administered cause about 106,000 deaths per year, making prescription drugs the fourth-leading cause of death in the U.S.
PS: Some stats on the vaccine:
There are 10,326 total adverse events captured on the VAERS Register in the USA for HPV vaccines, with 8% tagged as serious adverse reactions, so the numbers aren't staggering compared to the 20M total vaccines distributed (I always wonder what the average stock figures are when they list distribution numbers versus the likely number taken)
Of the 31 cases of death listed in the latest report I saw, they only had reviewed 20 cases, and 7 had an unknown cause (they don't know why they died aside from an Adverse Reaction), and 13 had other factors that may have contributed, such as a viral illness.