Note to mainstream media: Get it right! This is NOT a cancer vaccine!
I’m not quite ready to let go of this one…
When the American Academy of Pediatrics revised HPV vaccine recommendations to include boys 11 years of age and older, AAP official Dr. Michael Brady told Reuters Health: “What we are hoping will come out of this is that we can push this as a cancer vaccine.”
Well that’s a stunning moment of honesty. But I’m sure Dr. Brady knows that nobody can push Gardasil as a cancer vaccine. Not officially, anyway.
Gardasil MIGHT help prevent SOME of the HPV infections that MIGHT cause cancer. And at BEST, that’s all it does. So the FDA isn’t going to allow Merck, the CDC, the AAP or anyone else call it a cancer vaccine.
But when a Gardasil “pusher,” such as Dr. Brady, chats with a media outlet, such as Reuters Health, he can casually toss around the phrase “cancer vaccine” all he wants. Then when it gets printed, it blurs the message, letting consumers know that — wink wink — “HPV vaccine” is code for “cancer vaccine.”
Years from now, many of the boys who received the shots will still develop oral, penile and anal cancers. And girls will fare even worse if they’re lulled into a false sense of security and fail to get regular tests for cervical cancer — a highly treatable disease when caught in the early stages.
Whatever scant good Gardasil could possibly do, in the long run it has the potential to make men and women who survive the shot even more vulnerable.
