Sunday, December 24, 2017

Gardasil Revisited

Back in 2015, I wrote a post expressing my skepticism about Gardasil--I interviewed the most prominent experts I could find, in the "pro" camp, the inventor of the vaccine, and in what I regard as the cautious camp, a thoughtful physician who was involved in evaluating the vaccine for Merck. My thoughts on the vaccination have changed to the point where my thirteen-year-old daughter has received the first of the two vaccinations. With no ill effects, weeks later. Why?
•The doctors whom I trust believe the drug will protect her from cervical cancer.
•They have never seen a bad reaction--not in over ten years.
•Some types of cervical cancer are epidemic in people under the age of twenty. 
•Since I've now had cancer myself--unexpected, breast--I think my daughter may be at higher risk. 
I'm leaving up my earlier post for anyone researching this topic--I think the controversy hasn't evaporated. But I also now believe I've done the right thing. If anything changes--if, God forbid, she has a reaction to the second shot--I'll inform my blog readers. I'm interested in hearing from readers on this topic.

3 comments:

  1. Very glad to hear this. Anti-vaccine activists are the reason old diseases are rising -- measles, for example, is now fatal again. We are losing herd immunity. And the vaccine that protects women (and men -- teen boys should get it too) from HPV is a breakthrough. It is unfortunate that because of horrific racist experiments in America's past -- Tuskegee, c.f. -- many Americans of color will not get vaccinated.

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  2. And completely debunked idea that the shots at 18 months cause autism are making many mother's deny their children protection from whooping cough and measles. Lots of people won't even get a flu shot!

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  3. Both son (16) and daughter (19) received all three shots at 13. My daughter has an auto-immune disorder (in remission) but had a bit of an enlarged redness (1" x 3") two out of the three times but seriously who cares about that? The fainting by girls who had the shots were reported as vaccine reactions but that is complete nonsense. The vaccine itself, is a near perfect type, made up of virus-like particles that just have the outside of the virus, perfect to develop great, appropriate, protective immune responses. We should be so lucky that this type of vaccine was easily amenable to all viruses and we are so lucky that this vaccine protects against cancer!

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