The Gardasil story is an interesting one. It beautifully illustrates how greed works, how our legislators work (and for whom), and to what lengths a pharmaceutical company will go to cover up side effects as damaging as the Gardasil side effects, and promote what can only be considered a defective drug anyway. Let's face it. It's the rare male legislator who can be made to take any positive interest in women's health at all, and it's even harder to get them interested in children's health. So the unprecedented attempt by the Texas State legislature to MANDATE Gardisil vaccinations for every girl in the state starting with 6th graders should have been everyone's first clue of something very rotten in Denmark -- or rather something rotten about Merck, Gardasil's creator. Gardasil is a vaccination that supposedly protects women from a few strains of the Human Papiloma virus (HPV), the very thing that accounts for some (not all) cervical cancers. Gardasil is administered in three separate doses. Since it's not effective against all cervical cancers and not even effective enough against the HPV-connected cervical cancers to preclude the need for annual pap smears after being vaccinated, many more cautious people didn't see any great need for this urgent promotion of this vaccine. But suddenly in 2007, after Merck's vaccine first came out, the Texas legislature, especially its Republicans, were absolutely hell-bent on not only helping all Texas women avoid that nasty ole cervical cancer, but INSISTING that they protect themselves against the several HPVs that Gardisil targets by mandating vaccinations for female children in the state starting at age 12 and up. Other state legislatures were considering similar provisions, but when Texas parents and the public started to push back on the mandatory vaccine idea, Texas Governor Perry, George Bush's successor, took matters into his own hands and signed an executive order mandating the vaccinations of his state's daughters, even as the District of Columbia and 20 states were reporting adverse reactions, some of them quite serious (e.g., seizures). Perry's ardent support for Gardisil was fueled, no doubt, by the thoroughly "coincidental" $5,000 contribution Merck gave him and five Texas legislators shortly before they all got busy on Merck's behalf. But Merck had yet another tie with Texas. Merck's main lobbyist had been Gov. Perry's chief of staff.. And why was Mercke being so generous with their lobbying money? Well, Merck stood to "generate billions in sales if Gardasil — at $360 for the three-shot regimen — were made madatory across the nation." You do the math. (Our elected officials in Washington and elsewhere are all so bought they don't even blanche at honest-to-God actual conflicts of interest any more, nevermind the appearance of same. They take the money and do the work asked of them by corporations, leaving The People for all practical purposes unrepresented. We The People are going to have to take our country back from BOTH parties, I'm afraid.) All this effort, all this hoopla, all this activity, and yet some dared suggest Gardisil wasn't even that effective: "Gardasil was NEVER proven to prevent cervical cancer. It was tested for 4 years. No one in the test group or control group got cancer. Merck ASSUMED an abnormal pre-cancerous PAP was an indication of future cancer. So the claim that Gardasil prevents cancer has NOT been proven. What they showed was: Gardasil prevents abnormal pre-cancerous PAP smears due to types 16 & 18 HPVs in women who had not been infected prior to receiving Gardasil." And that was just her warm-up on her concerns about Gardisil. Gardasil side effects? Oh, just the usual (or what is becoming "the usual" for side effects for women's drugs):* Blood clots: * Paralysis * Seizure * Bells palsy * Guillain-Barre syndrome (also see Gardasil linked to nerve disorder. ) * Death * Miscarriage /Spontaneous abortion Another class action suit attorney's site provides an overview of the adverse reactions reported to the FDA before the vaccine had even been out for a year while World Net Daily reported in an article well worth reading that, "Anaphylactic shock," "foaming at mouth," "grand mal convulsion," "coma" and "now paralyzed" are a few of the startling descriptions included in a new federal report describing the complications from Merck & Co.'s Gardasil medication for sexually transmitted human papillomavirus – which has been proposed as mandatory for all schoolgirls." In a stunningly, mind-blowingly xenophobic (or perhaps just fascist) move, the U.S. Government last November mandated Gardasil for all young women and girls hoping to become legal residents.. SOMEbody in the administration really has been watching out for Merck to the best of their ability. Merck has asked for approval by the FDA for boys who, after all, are co-carriers of said HPV virus, which would potentially nearly double Garadil's sales and profits. Merck, of course, denies any Gardasil side effects: "It's important to remember that the proven benefit of GARDASIL is that it helps prevent cervical cancer caused by the two virus types responsible for most cases of cervical cancer. Nothing is more important to Merck than the safety of our products and we carefully monitor the safety of GARDASIL on a routine basis. Experts at the FDA and CDC also continue to review data and, as recently as four months ago, said "GARDASIL continues to be safe and effective, and its benefits continue to outweigh its risks.NVIC [the organization raising a lot of noise about Gardasil] is not a medical organization and has a long history of raising concerns about vaccines that are in direct conflict with the opinion of leading medical experts [who can be bought, let's not forget]. We encourage consumers to get reliable information about the safety of vaccines from www.cdc.gov." But just how credible and trustworthy is Merck? Turns out, based on experience, not so much: Leaked documents show Merck knew of Vioxx dangers, yet hid them for years. According to the Washington Post (April 16, 2008), "The reports in today's Journal of the American Medical Association in effect accuse one of the world's biggest pharmaceutical makers of various forms of scientific fraud." Vioxx may have caused over 55,000 deaths before it was finally, finally recalled -- years after Merck itself knew without a doubt that Vioxx was a problem. There's something terribly wrong with our entire medical/pharmaceutical system, our marketing and "free market" system, and our judicial/justice system when a company can so callously and egregiously cause the deaths of so many people and continue to exist. A company like this should be given a corporate death sentence -- be deprived of its personhood, and that punishment should mean something (such as an end to its existence). When you weigh Merck's defense of Gardasil against the facts that it doesn't prevent the need for pap smears and hasn't even actually been proven to prevent cancer, plus all the adverse effects and real stories of real young women, it just doesn't add up. Gardasil is clearly too costly for the slender benefit it offers. Put another way: "Thousands of girls are reporting they are suffering Gardasil side effects. Ask any one of those parents with a daughter suffering if this is what they wanted for their daughter. Ask any one of those parents if they were warned this could happen. Ask any of those parents if they knew they were risking their daughter’s life to possibly avoid getting a cancer that is almost 100 percent preventable with routine pap exams and is 100 percent curable if identified and caught early." This mother's heart-breaking Gardasil side effects story and five others and even more articles on Gardasil here. Sign the petition to investigate Gardasil risks. : Another petition promoted by a touching video. . |