Study Says Merck's Gardasil Is Safe, Vexing Media and Activists

(MoneyWatch)  The CDC studied 370,000 doses of Merck's Gardasil vaccine for HPV and cervical cancer, and found that the drug is not linked to the risks that the media and conservative activists say it is. The news will come as a frustration to the growing body of Americans who believe that vaccines are either poisonous to children or a socialist plot against freedom of choice; and the journalists who get readership traffic by writing about them. (Check out the nascent backlash here.)

The study looked at girls injected over two years and didn't find any evidence that the vaccine is dangerous. This comes on top of eleven and a half years of trials on Gardasil and its competitor, GlaxoSmithKline's Cervarix. Gardasil alone has been through more than 16 million doses. From all that, there are currently only 10,326 adverse event reports. Of those, only 6 percent are serious. And of those, only 27 were deaths. Drilling down further, we find that only three -- 3!!! -- of those fatalities were unexplained. All the others occured in people with drug problems, had heart failure, meningitis, etc.

About 15 percent of American girls and younger women have now received the shot, so an epidemic of side effects should have shown up by now. It has not. Certainly it is true that the CDC should not always be taken at its word. But the big Gardasil adverse event scandal is increasingly conspicuous by its absence.

Thus it is time for all those reporters, lawyers and activists to start explaining to their audiences that perhaps, just perhaps, this is one vaccine that isn't actually harmful. Let's identify a few of them:

• Sharyl Attkisson of CBS authored two reports that detailed thousands of unexplained illnesses suffered by girls after receiving the shots. Doubtless she will rush a corrective update onto the air as soon as possible.
• Only two lawsuits have been filed over the drug as of July, suggesting that some lawyers have been wasting their money on web sites suggesting that the FDA has "refused" to study Gardasil's side effects.
• Let's not forget Deborah Kotz of U.S. News & World Report, who said "No one knows, either, what sorts of side effects are associated with the vaccine." Well, Deborah, now they do. I'm enthusiastic to see your column saying so.
• The National Vaccine Information Center, an anti-vaccine site, said "a new vaccine may be causing health problems that could be important." Or not!
• WebMD quoted a sensible-sounding doctor who said that until we have all the peer-reviewed safety data, "we don't have the gold standard of evidence for safety and efficacy." Time to get back to that doctor and see what she thinks of the new numbers.
• And last but not least, The New York Times' Elisabeth Rosenthal, who said there was an "Evidence Gap" regarding the drug, and who quoted a family whose daughter fell ill after getting the drug in an anecdote that suggested maybe Gardasil was to blame, even though the family itself said on the record that they don't have evidence of that. Suggested headline: "Evidence Gap Filled."

Don't hold your breath waiting for any of these correctives.