The current sales pitch for Gardasil from Merck and Cervarix from GlaxoSmithKline (the only two available vaccines against HPV) is that they will protect your daughters against cervical cancer and both your sons and your daughters against anal-rectal and throat cancers caused by HPV. So you might ask me, “How could you be opposed to any vaccine that prevents cancer?” I turn the question completely around by asking, “How could you be in favor of administering a vaccine to eleven-year-old girls and boys that is effective against only two (and at most, seven) of the thirteen or more viruses known to cause cervical cancer, which has not been proven to last beyond five years, and which has, however rarely, been the cause of serious neurologic events, permanent infertility, and, though rarely, death?”
Perhaps the greatest indictment of the attempt to vaccinate all children against HPV is the recent study in the medical journal Pediatrics. The study first makes the claim that HPV vaccination is “highly effective” in preventing HPV infection due to the demonstration of a 69 percent decrease in the number of reported cases of HPV in vaccinated women as compared to unvaccinated women. Yet in the unvaccinated group of women, there was also a significant decrease in HPV rates (49 percent) which the authors attributed to a concept known as “herd protection”—in essence, they believe that the reduced acquisition of HPV in unvaccinated women is due to the fact that other women and children have been vaccinated as well, and that this somehow leads to improved immune protection in the unvaccinated group. While this concept of herd protection has been proven with other vaccines (polio, rubella, influenza), there is no rational application of this theory to HPV, given that HPV is exclusively sexually transmitted and not by airborne particulates. Would it not be more prudent to assume that the unvaccinated women simply were more cautious in their approach to their own sexual activity?
Most troubling about this study in Pediatrics was the under-reported finding that, “the prevalence of nonvaccine-type HPV … increased significantly among vaccinated, but not among nonvaccinated women, a finding that could be consistent with type replacement.” Put in plain English, there was an increase in the cancer-causing HPV types that are not included in Gardasil in the women who had received this vaccine! Remember that there are at least thirteen types of HPV known to cause cervical cancer, and both Gardasil and Cervarix only protect against two of these (types 16 and 18)—while Gardasil also protects against two of the low-risk HPV types (6 and 11), which may cause genital warts.
I had raised this concern at the 2006 meeting of the North American Society for Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology but was quickly dismissed by the speaker as having only a hypothetical concern. Yet here we have the fact that vaccinating young girls and women against but two of the thirteen known high-risk types of HPV leads invariably to an increased risk of HPV infection from the other strains, thereby ensuring that we will likely be vaccinating and revaccinating boys and girls against any number of HPV types for years and year to come Merck and company! (At the time this book is being printed, Merck is rolling out “Gardasil 9” which targets 5 more high risk types of HPV – just as I predicted!)
Again we see how this great nation of ours has embraced a policy that fails to observe one of the basic principles of medicine, that of informed consent! How many parents of these young children have been told that their daughter or son can only acquire HPV through sexual activity? Or that HPV often clears itself from the genital tract with no intervention? Or that the use of oral contraceptives, tobacco, and continued promiscuous sexual activity all increase the risk of progression to cervical cancer twofold to threefold?
John Littell, MD 