Personal Injury Law

One More Drug, One Less Choice

I've seen the One Less commercial. The one for Gardasil. I guess you know it too, If you're in the US and have a television, you can't help having seen it. The one that talks about being one One Less

One less what? I wondered, until I finally sat down and made myself pay attention.

Then what struck me most when I actually heard this commercial was how indefinite it was.

It begins aggressively, with strong girls who have definite opinions. They are very certain they want to be One Less. (One less woman to battle cervical cancer.) Well, okay. No one WANTS to have cervical cancer.

But the commercial gets very indefinite when it starts talking about this miracle drug.

Gardasil. The commercial says "It is the only vaccine that MAY guard..(it doesn't say that it DOES guard, just that it may) ...

May what? eliminate the disease? No, nothing so solid. It MAY help protect. You see, it doesn't actually protect, eliminate or prevent. It just MIGHT help.

What might it protect from? It might help protect your daughters from the 4 types of hpv. Ok, that should be a good thing. And this is especially good because hpv causes 70% of cervical cancer. And then, the ad goes on to say, it might not fully protect everyone from 70%. I won't get started on talking about the side affects that are mentioned in the commercial. I'm more worried about the side affects that come afterwards for a drug that "might protect some girls against some of the causes" of cervical cancer.

And now we hear how some people have died after taking it.

Is this a drug that we should be requiring ALL girls to take?

I would understand if it were a vaccine that works across the board like some of the others. Like the vaccine against polio that actually DOES work to make everyone's (uncompromised) immune systems able to resist polio. But this is something else...a vaccine against a virus which might protect some girls against a percentage of some viruses that cause some cancer.

I really don't know how smart this is to require all girls to take this drug, especially when there's some interaction that has caused several deaths related to Gardasil test cases and it only protects a percentage of some girls against some of the virus that causes some of the cancer.

What if Gardasil causes some unknown thing down the road? The way that there already seems to be some unknown thing--some drug, or food, or additive, or who knows what?-that causes some children to develop autism?

Shouldn't we know more about what this drug is going to do to our precious daughters ten years down the road?

Girls have died from taking this drug. Girls have been found with Guillain-Barre Syndrome that showed up after vaccination. The highest incidence of GBS is when the drug was administered in conjunction with more than one type of vaccine - i.e., Gardasil with menactra, or other combinations.

Okay, statistically, the numbers sound like scare tactics. Three deaths out of how many? More importantly--since those deaths seem to have been related to pre-existing conditions like heart disease, what about girls who have undiagnosed heart disease? Is this drug going to kill off all girls with undiagnosed heart disease? Or was it an interaction with something they were taking? And how is this vaccine going to affect girls in ten years? Can the drug developer's scientific research guarantee that--for example--that a percentage won't develop Guillain-Barre Syndrome as the result of some interaction? Or a percentage bear autistic children as a result? or some other unknown consequence?

A note: Boys don't have cervixes but they get HPV too. Don't some of them deserve protection from some HPV also? If not, why not? This is a disease that is spread thru sexual contact. If this drug is safe enough for girls to take, why is it ok for boys to be carriers?

People. Let the scientists work on this one until it's ripe before we start requiring it across the board. Do we have to fall for a drug company's lobby to make their product mandatory?

I want to be one less.
One less parent feeding my daughter an incompletely researched drug in the hopes of finding a magic bullet.

At least leave the decision in my hands. Does everything have to be a government mandate?

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Full post as published by The Brockovich Report on November 04, 2007 (boomark / email).