NPR does hit piece on HPV Vaccine

[elfs]

NPR's article yesterday on the risks of the HPV vaccine has to be one of the most irresponsible piece of journamalism I've heard on NPR in a long while.

It starts off with this quote:

There's a new report on health problems associated with the vaccine against HPV - that's the human papillomavirus, which can lead to cervical cancer.

And then it goes on, paragraph after paragraph, sound bite after sound bite, to show how there is no discernable pattern of risk evident in the data, and overwhelmingly, the lives saved by the HPV vaccine far outweigh the risk of vaccination. Cervical cancer kills 4000 women every year, and the CDC says that two deaths from the vaccine are "suspect." Cutting deaths down by a factor of 2000 is a huge, huge benefit to the population.

These are the gold standards of vaccination deployment. They're the kind of results vaccine researchers look for: a lowering of risk factors by at least one order of magnitue (and in this case, three orders of magnitude), and no discernable causal pattern of risks related to vaccination. Gardisil's risk profile is exactly the same as other childhood vaccinations-- a point Wilson never raised.

Brenda Wilson, the reporter, chose to end her piece with this comment:

To put things into perspective, Dr. Halsey reminds us that people of all ages have health problems and all people die, even young people the age of those who got the vaccine.

That's the sort of, "Well, kids die sometime. Yours might. It might be the vaccine's fault, but researchers are just gonna shrug their shoulders anyway."

The Christian Right hates Gardisil. They hate it with a passion because it's the first vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease. For them, sex ought to be risky. It ought to be frightening. Focus on the Family's "position of the HPV vaccine" is that Gardisil will convince young women that sexual intercourse is socially acceptable and will encourage promiscuity, whereas if young women know they're at risk for cervical cancer they'll be more likely to abstain. It's all about controlling women with fear; technological alleviations of fearful sex are an abomination before their god.

Nothing in Wilson' piece supported the opening sentence. The presentation, the opening fnord and the overweening de-emphasis on the nature of science, the lack of comparison of these results to those of the polio vaccine, the rubella vaccine, or the meningitis vaccine-- all vaccinations that save lives-- all lead up to an enraging piece of journamalism that feeds into the Christian Right's agenda.

And yes, I've complained to NPR about this crap.

Comments

[tehrasha.livejournal.com]

Isnt comparing 4000 cervical cancer deaths per year to two 'possible' vaccine induced deaths and calling it a change of 2000 in risk factor a bit of hideously bad math as well? Did no women die of cervical cancer this year, and only those two vaccinated?

Of those that got the vaccine, how many will still get cervical cancer and die sometime in the next, what... 60 years? (based on getting the vaccine as early as 12) We wont really know this or any other vaccine's risk factor, until all those being studied have died and become a valid statistic.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

We encouraged our teenage daughters to be vaccinated with Gardisil as soon as it became available. There was just no question it was a sensible thing to do.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

if young women know they're at risk for cervical cancer they'll be more likely to abstain

That's what they *want* to believe. However, they're so blinded by their own dogma they haven't noticed that abstinence-only education has had the *opposite* of the desired effect.

Focus on the Family has ideas based on faith for what works and what doesn't. Us pinko liberals on the other hand, actually know what works and what doesn't. And what doesn't work, is ignorance and fear.

Nevermind the fact that people still take up smoking (and, uh, people of the same age as the people FoF is trying to scare) in spite of the fact that they know full well that it means they'll get cancer. When they're much older.

[urox.livejournal.com]

While I think it is an excellent effort to find a vaccine for HPV, I'm incredibly glad that my daughter has a good 9 more years to go before we'd consider it for her. Two years is *not* sufficient time to know the problems with a vaccine. It's only within the past decade that a live rotavirus vaccine was created and then taken off the market due to discovered complications. And the HPV vaccine has aluminum... something that I think should get a LOT more press out there about the dangers of. Now, before you classify me as a whack job because of aluminum, I would have thought the same thing until I read about a study of FDA limits of aluminum in IV drips (not vaccines) which caused some kind of internal damage. Now we space out our daughter's vaccines so she doesn't get near those damaging doses.

And different sources are reporting differing death counts. One source I saw said 10 out of 15 were confirmed not related. Over the radio I recall hearing 5 as well.

I also strongly object to them trying to give the virus at an earlier age. There are a host of problems with that, the number one being people who undendingly question why a child isn't fully vaccinated yet. We chose to delay the HepB they normally give at birth and when we had to take our daughter to the ER within the first month (not a drug user, not having sex, not around HepB infected people), we were suspiciously questioned by the triage nurse on why. We're responsible parents and shouldn't be forced to the schedule that is early for no reason other than they think people are less likely to get them at a later age.

[christinaathena.livejournal.com]

I'm not convinced that abstinence-only education has failed their true criteria. I don't think they care about reducing teenage pregnancies, STDs, etc. I'm not even convinced that reducing SEX is their chief goal (they'd certainly like to do that, but I'm not convinced it's their number one goal). I think they're more concerned with making sure people don't get away with "sexual immorality". And by that criterion, abstinence-only education is a smashing success. Kids are still having sex, but they're not "getting away with it" as much as they would with sensible birth control. They're suffering the "proper" consequences of premarital sex.

I'm not saying they're consciously saying "Let's make sure kids don't get away with sex", but that is, I think, the idea that's driving their emotions. I think it scares them more to consider someone having consequence-free sex than it does to consider a kid getting pregnant.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

There's no known health risk from aluminum. Some results of years ago that purported to find aluminum in the brains of Alzheimer patients were later found to be a laboratory artifact (the aluminum came from lab chemicals used in the analysis.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

I'm not convinced that abstinence-only education has failed their true criteria.

"Their true criteria," would be men having complete control over women, and demonizing any woman who they cannot control.

[christinaathena.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that too. And by that criterion, it's also been fairly successful, certainly more so than comprehensive sex ed would be.