Motley Moose – Archive

Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

HPV vaccine – can we talk?

I am not anti-vaccine and just want to make that very clear from the get-go.

What I am is dubious about the safety of new vaccines and I’d like to explain my reasons and would like to ask for anyone who reads this to read it with an open-mind.

I’m very open to being told that I am wrong, btw.

Years ago, when I was in my early-30s, and this was way before the Internet and home PCs, I decided to research Hormone Replacement Therapy to try to make an informed decision of whether or not I would do HRT upon hitting menopause.

I worked for a large corporation and worked with lots of women.

Frequently I heard complaints from women both from work and in my social sphere about HRT and their regrets at ever starting on them.

Besides the weight-gain, there were other problems in which the women just didn’t “feel right” or “feel like themselves” and that’s what prompted me to research libraries and book stores about the subject.

To be fair, there were a few women, very few, who absolutely loved HRT as it stopped the dreaded HOT FLASHES.

The thing for women who despised HRT was that they were not easy to quit.

There was a weaning off of the hormones and the weaning off was difficult and made those who tried feel crazy.

There were warnings back in them days about cancer, but more, there was the promotion about HRT preventing bone loss or osteoporosis.

After researching HRT, I decided that I would refuse hormone therapy when the time came, and little did I know that the time came rather early for me – in my mid-30’s.

The doctors at my HMO were relentless in pushing HRT onto me, but I stood firm in my convictions.

I had doctors yell at me for my stupidity, but I was not cowed.

Roughly 10 years into the ‘change’, doctors did an about turn because HRT was found to cause cancers of the breasts and uterus, and the positives from preventing osteoporosis was minimal.

Suddenly, HRT was frowned upon and my doctors would ask me if I was on HRT and when I replied “no” they said good because I wouldn’t have to go through the misery of weaning off them.

Now, things are changing again, so I’ve read online, because the pharmaceutical companies are losing millions of dollars, so doctors are once again pushing HRT onto women.

In my research all those years ago, one of the things that stood out for me was when actual doctors and clinical researchers who authored the books stated that women were being used as guinea pigs when it came to HRT.

And that leads me to HPV and my wondering about that new vaccine.

Do they know the side-effects or actual results for say ten, twenty years down the line?

Or are young girls and women simply being used as guinea pigs once again?

The HPV vaccine does not affect me at all, but if I was younger and had a 12 year old daughter, I think that I’d research the HPV vaccines before having my child immunized.

Am I wrong?


Categories: General.

/ 33 Comments

33 comments

  1. Stipes

    My daughter is 12 years old now, and my ex-wife and I have been having this discussion about the vaccine for about a year now.  We’re probably going to fall on the side of doing it eventually, but research and discussion about this new vaccine is very prudent in my mind.

    And you’re correct.  Nobody knows the long term risks of this vaccine.  Those unknown risks should be knowledgeably weighed against the potential benefits of this vaccine, which admittedly look significant.

  2. canadian gal

    i think you have the right idea, in that researching your medical choices is a wise idea. the problem however is that with the era of modern communication and its memes, what’s true can often get mixed with lies, fraud and other dangerous and faulty information.

    take for example, the case of british doctor and researcher andrew wakefield, whose findings on autism have been trumpeted all over the world.

    not that this stopped the jenny mccarthy’s around the world from repeating this over and over, but the problem is, he is a putrid liar.

    Deer told the Star that around the time of his own MMR study Wakefield was serving as a paid expert to lawyers who were preparing a lawsuit against MMR manufacturers, and he eventually received more than £400,000 for his services, payments that he did not disclose to The Lancet.

    i spoke with a behavioural therapist about this several months ago, she told me that the consensus amongst health-care workers who focus on autism is that this ass put back autism research back about 20 years.

  3. jsfox

    HRT is not a vaccine. And as to it’s efficacy you may want to read this:

    http://www.webmd.com/menopause…

    HPV vaccine is done to protects against several forms of the human papillomavirus (HPV), which are behind most cases of cervical cancer. It and has been deemed safe for girls between the ages of 9 to 26. After 26 it’s efficacy diminishes.

    And then there is this:

    Arthur Caplan, bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania: “Yes. The data show that the vaccine is safe and effective. Mandates ensure money is there to pay for access. And mandates still permit people to opt out if they don’t want their child vaccinated, as we have for all other ‘mandates’ – a fact somehow lost in the ignorant comments from GOP candidates about HPV vaccines [last night].”

    Dr. Paul Offit, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia: “I think it shouldn’t have to be [mandated]. I think anybody who knows what this virus could do, and what this vaccine can do, would get the vaccine every time. But there’s so much misinformation out there that leads people to make the wrong choices for themselves and their children,” Offit said.

    [snip]

    Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine: “The HPV vaccine is a wonderful advance in the prevention of cancer – for girls and women certainly, but also for boys and men.

    I hope that all young girls will be vaccinated. Whether all girls should be mandated to receive the vaccine is best left to the public in each state where the issue can be discussed and debated.  My prediction is that, slowly, state by state, such mandates will be enacted because the vaccine is safe – and who does not wish to prevent as much cancer as they can?”

    http://www.myhealthnewsdaily.c…

  4. Chris Blask

    I live (almost belligerently, to be honest) on the Side CG is espousing.

    I have three kids and two girls up for HPV shots before long. All the recommended vaccines for their age have been shot into their bodies so far, and my understanding of the state of the HPV needle do not disincline me from this one.

    My dad had Polio as a kid, I had Rubella. A third of my grandmother’s siblings and both her parents died of malaria.

    The global climate is warming and vaccines are generally safer than the alternative. Arguments to the contrary are valid to voice – a tiny change of being right is more than none – but I place my bets on the likely winners.

  5. trustno1

    CG is very right – that there is a lot of bad information (or worse, half-information) floating around out there, especially in the internet era.  

    Yes, you should weigh benefits and risks before you undergo novel therapies.  (Hopefully by now, we should accept that, say, the polio vaccine is okay.)  Such benefits and risks are personal.  What is the patient’s family history?  Lifestyle? For example, the HPV vaccine can also prevent some oral cancers. (http://oralcancerfoundation.org/hpv/index.htm)

    You would need to do some risk/benefit analysis.

  6. John Allen

    that will not be resolved until enough time passes to understand the long term risks. All a person can do is weigh the known risks versus the known benefits. Each year, 4000 women die from cervical cancer. More than 12,000 are diagnosed and have to go through treatment. If we delay the implementation of universal vaccination for 20 years while we study the long term effects then we could be condemning 80,000 women to death. Are the risks really so great that this is a reasonable choice?

  7. spacemanspiff

    In medicine 2 + 2 does not always equal 4.

    Don’t know if that makes any sense, but that’s my take on this.

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