UK boys and their parents are able to breathe a sigh of relief after the decision has finally been made on whether to vaccinate boys against the human papilloma virus (HPV). The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has been considering whether to include boys along with girls in the current vaccination program since 2014. There have been ongoing campaigns aimed at a ‘gender-neutral‘ approach to the vaccination, that would make sure that 400,000 school-age boys are able to access HPV vaccines. The committee made its recent decision based on their findings that it wouldn’t be cost-effective to vaccinate boys along with girls. Unlike the situation in the UK, in Australia there was no such deliberation and in 2013 we became the first country to extend our HPV vaccination program to boys. We cannot afford the luxury of relaxed breathing – in fact none of us can while the Gardasil vaccination program continues.
As I have written in Gardasil: Fast-Tracked and Flawed:
The roll-out of Gardasil was preceded by years of promotion by the manufacturer Merck (USA) and CSL Ltd, the New Zealand and Australian distributor culminating in a relentless propaganda campaign waged by both Australian and international mass media. Behind the Australian Gardasil campaign was the PR giant Edelman that worked with the Australian and New Zealand distributor CSL Biotherapies in promoting the vaccine to health professionals and the public. There were 974 pieces of media devoted to the campaign with over 40 hours of coverage available to the Australian audience of almost 24 million. The campaign engaged 21 women between the ages of 14–26 who were to be given the vaccination nationally. Gardasil was launched to the public on 28 August 2006 and Ian Frazer himself vaccinated the first woman at the Sydney launch.
In The Re-selling of Gardasil, blogger Lynn McTaggart has written: And now this vaccine with one of the worse track records in vaccine history, is being resold to boys. And when it comes to vaccines, where the US leads, the UK meekly follows. But this time UK has said no – for the time being at least. But it may be pressured to change this decision for as we know in the lead up to the introduction of HPV vaccines for young girls the media message was intense and scarcely a day passed without a cervical cancer story. This time the pressure is on to vaccinate boys against HPV for cancers linked to oral sex. But are young girls and boys and their parents making an informed consent to the vaccination? Are they informed that there are over 73000 reported serious adverse health effects occurring after HPV vaccination. These include death, seizures, paralysis, autoimmune diseases, chronic fatigue, pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrhythmias, infertility, cervical cancer and in boys there are now reported cases of erectile dysfunction following HPV vaccination. This would no doubt be of concern to young pubescent boys.
This current wave of re-selling Gardasil is being aided by the mantra of gender equality. Boys need HPV vaccine, too, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to the CDC every year in the United States around 11,000 men get cancers caused by human papillomavirus (HPV) infections. Scary reports of young men and throat cancer abound, but just as in the case of cervical cancer the human papilloma virus may well be present in many cancers but it may just be a passenger virus. According to the authors of ‘What if HPV does NOT cause cervical cancer?’ Norma Erickson and Peter Duesberg, the pieces of inactive HPV DNA that can be found in cervical cancers are from infections or warts that occurred 20-50 years before the cancer. There other factors at play. For example smoking and other environmental toxins may be the real causative factors. But once again the search for truth is forsaken when there is profit to be made.
As Lynn McTaggart concludes: We failed to lock up our daughters away from this terrible vaccine. But there’s still time to lock up our sons. Not in the United States, Australia and New Zealand where the boys are already being vaccinated.
