Side effect fears stop parents from getting HPV vaccine for daughters
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While more young women are receiving the HPV vaccine, there's a growing concern that more parents are stopping their children from receiving the shots because of unwarranted safety concerns.
A new study published online on March 18 in Pediatrics shows the number of 13 to 17-year-olds who were not up to date with their HPV vaccinations dropped from 84 to 75 percent from 2008 to 2010.
However, out of the parents whose daughters were not up to date on the vaccine, 44 percent in 2010 said they had no intention for their child to receive it. That number climbed 4 percent from 2008.
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The information was gathered from the 2008-2010 National Immunization Survey of Teens, which consisted of families who had children between the ages of 13 to 17.
HPV, or the human papillomarvirus, is a virus spread through sexual contact. It is the most common sexually transmitted infection.
HPV can cause many cancers and other health problems. Each year in the U.S., there are 12,000 new cases of cervical cancer and 4,000 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In addition, there are 15,000 HP-associated cancers in the U.S. About 1 in 100 sexually active adults in the U.S. have genital warts at any given time. In American men specifically, there are 7,000 new HP-associated cancers each year.
Experts believe the HPV vaccines can prevent many of these diseases. The HPV vaccine is a series of three shots over six months given to protect against HPV infection and other problems that HPV can cause. Two kinds of vaccines are currently available, Cervarix and Gardasil. Cervarix is only available for women and can protect against cervical cancers. Gardasil is available for men and women and can give protection against genital warts and anal, vaginal, vulva and cervical cancers.
The CDC recommends that HPV vaccines are given to boys and girls who receive all three doses before they are sexually active, which is why they advocate for the vaccines to start at 11 or 12 years of age. They also add that older children who did not get the vaccine when they were younger can receive "catch up" vaccines until the men are 21 and the women are 26. The vaccine is also recommended for gay and bisexual men (or any man who has had sex with a man) through the age of 26 if they did not receive the vaccine at an earlier age.
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One of the main reasons parents said they didn't want their children vaccinated against HPV was because of safety concerns. In 2008, only 4.5 percent of parents listed that. The number skyrocketed to 16 percent in 2010.
HPV vaccine found to be safe in new study
"I'm not sure what has gone into that increase," lead researcher Dr. Paul Darden, a pediatrician at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City said to HealthDay. "Why would safety concerns almost quadruple in a couple years?"
Darden added to HealthDay that the concerns over safety seem to be only rooted around the HPV vaccine. Parents had no problems with the Tdap vaccine against tetanus, diphtheria and whooping cough or the MCV4 vaccine which guards against bacterial meningitis. Only 1 percent of parents said they were concerned over safety for those two vaccines.
Side effects for the HPV vaccines include pain and redness or swelling at the injection site. In addition, other mild reactions can include dizziness, nausea and headache, the CDC reported. Fainting is also a side effect, but it is important to note that it can occur because of any vaccine or injection. There was also an increase of blood clots of the lungs reported compared to young women around the same age who had received other vaccines, but 90 percent had a known risk factor for blood clots, including taking oral contraceptives, otherwise known as birth control pills.
In total, 23 million doses were administered as of June 2006. Out of 12,424 cases of adverse events by that date, only 6 percent were serious and 32 deaths were reported. However, none of the deaths had a discernible pattern that would suggest that the vaccine was the cause of death.
An additional 17 percent of survey takers said the vaccine was not necessary and 11 percent said that their daughters did not need the vaccine because they were not sexually active.
HPV vaccine doesn't lead to promiscuity: study
"We thought perhaps many parents would think the HPV vaccine would give kids permission to have sex, and therefore not allow their children to get it. But that wasn't it," Darden told CNN. "They seemed to be skeptical of its safety, which is odd, because it's shown to be effective with few side effects. We have a vaccine that protects against cancer. Why not vaccinate your child? I don't get it."
Very few families brought up cost as an issue, but most insurance plans and the government's Vaccines for Children program offer the vaccines for free. Only 9 percent of parents said they did not vaccinate their daughters because their doctor did not recommend it.
"It's particularly concerning that parental worries about safety have increased, given that evidence for the safety of HPV vaccination has increased over the same time period," Gregory Zimet, a professor of pediatrics and clinical psychology at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, Indiana who was not involved with the study, said to USA Today. "In fact, the evidence is overwhelmingly persuasive that HPV vaccines are quite safe."
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Page 13, Title: "Concerns Regarding Primary Endpoint Analyses among Subgroups, 1. Evaluation of the potential of Gardasil™ to enhance cervical disease in subjects who had evidence of persistent infection with vaccine-relevant HPV types prior to vaccination."
"The results of exploratory subgroup analyses for study 013 suggested a concern that subjects who were seropositive and PCR-positive for the vaccine-relevant HPV types had a greater number of CIN 2/3 or worse cases as demonstrated in the following table:" Table 17 shows that the efficacy rate for anyone who were seropositive and PCR positive for vaccine related HPV types to be -44.6%.
From
Page 14, Table 19, "Study 013: Analysis of efficacy against vaccine-relevant HPV types CIN 2/3 or worse among subjects who were PCR positive and/or seropositive for the relevant HPV type at day 1." Table 19 shows that the efficacy rate for this group to be -33.7%.
Page 22, Table 32. "Detailed Safety Population: Number (%) of subjects who reported systemic adverse reactions of 2% or greater in the 15 days following receipt of study vaccine." Table 32 shows that the number of subjects reporting systemic adverse reactions was 3591. That is a percentage of 59.2% of the participants.
So, to clarify, a NEGATIVE efficacy number means the vaccine led to an INCREASED risk of disease in the subgroups mentioned.
Vaccines aren't supposed to make diseases more likely. FDA tried to skirt this problem by recommending approving the vaccine for young girls under the assumption they are seronegative/PCR negative, but girls aren't tested before vaccination to confirm such.
The 59% systemic adverse reaction rate is incredibly high, this in spite of testing the vaccine against an ingredient known to be reactive rather than against a true placebo.
For these reasons alone, the vaccine should not have been approved. Instead it was fast-tracked.
This article is pure statist propaganda fuelled by Big Pharma and the medical industry. It is well proven that these vaccines are the primary cause of infant mortality and autism - and people know it.
This is not a matter of the vaccine not being recommended enough; it is a matter of the public waking up after thousands of children have died at the hands of these money hungry enterprises born out of the Eugenics movement and Mengele's experimentation. I might add that these Nazi science experiments were readily endorsed by the US before the war, and when we defeated the Nazis, their patents and research were sold to Merck and other Big Pharma companies that are behind this whole scam.
There are thousands of studies in print from Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize winners that directly support my position, and hundreds of websites / support groups for parents that refuse these vaccinations - look them up. The downturn is nationwide and for a good reason. The public is not as ignorant as you think they are, treat them with some dignity and report the news instead of corporate and state funded propaganda.
BMC Infectious Diseases is an open access journal, so you can easily get it yourself: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2334/11/13
I would just like to emphasize that it is really important to get your facts straight before making such damning statements.
Darden and his study co-authors, who between them have financial ties to vaccine makers Pfizer, Novartis and Merck (maker of Gardasil), really ought to stop pretending to be surprised that at least a sliver of the public still uses good judgment and exercises what's left of their medical free will.
A current tally of CDC-VAERS data from February of this year, 7 years beyond the initial 2006 data discussed in the article, shows almost 30,000 adverse events reported, including 130 deaths, over 500 serious events, almost 1000 cases of disability, over 10,000 ER visits, and most significantly 61 cases of cervical cancer and 700 cases of abnormal pap smears or cervical dysplasia. Residual vaccine-strain HPV-16 VLP DNA has been found in the post-moretem blood of girls who died 6 months after vaccination, still bound to its aluminum adjuvant and possibly converted in vivo to a form known to cause autoimmune and genomic disease.
The original clinical trials, which led to fast-track approval by FDA, showed that when given to women who already had been exposed to HPV, the vaccine INCREASED the risk of cervical cancer by 40%. This is why it is given to young girls and boys, under the assumption that they have not been exposed. There is evidence, however, that infants can be exposed during the birth process, and no testing is done before vaccination to find out.
So we have a vaccine with a high rate of side effects including permanent disability and death, the efficacy of which has been measured only for about 5 years (will it even still work by the time they are older and sexually active?) and the failure rate of which hasn't ever been measured, against a disease (HPV) that more often than not clears up on its own or is treatable, and which may in fact increase the risk of cervical cancer in certain recipients.
The only thing surprising here is that uptake is as high as it is.
So, we have a vaccine with low rates of mild side effects, excellent efficacy, and which prevents an infection that causes most cases cervical cancers in thousands of women in the U.S. and hundreds of thousands worldwide. Also, it in no way increases the risk of cervical cancer in anyone.
I realize that skepticalmom will not be swayed by science or reason, but I could not let her false statements stand, in case others happen to read them.