Dr. Diane Harper, the lead researcher in human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine development and director of the University of Minnesota’s Gynecologic Cancer Prevention Research Group, was expected to promote the vaccines Gardasil and Cervarix at the 4th International Public Conference on Vaccination in Reston, Virginia, earlier this month.
Instead of promoting the vaccines, however, Dr. Harper the HPV vaccine developer pulled the covers off of what appears to be a highly bogus and ethically questionable scheme concocted by Merck to have young girls mandatorily vaccinated in public schools.
When asked why she had spoken out against the vaccines, Dr Diane Harper said it was a matter of conscience. “I want to be able to sleep with myself when I go to bed at night,” she told The Bulletin, a Philadelphia newspaper.
Dr. Harper explained that 90 percent of HPV infections resolve themselves after 2 years, and that the vast majority of those cases (70 percent) actually resolve unaided in under one year’s time.
Moreover, the number of cervical cancer cases in the United States is so low that vaccines and PAP screenings would not lower the cervical cancer rate unless 70 percent of the population was vaccinated. And even then, the cancer rate decrease would be minimal.
According to Dr. Diane Harper, preventative measures and traditional therapies have already cut the cervical cancer rate by 4 percent a year. With these current treatments, she said, HPV will be nearly eradicated in 60 years. Gardasil could not claim to do as much as traditional care is already doing, even if 70 percent of the women received vaccinations and booster shots in that same period of time, Dr. Harper explained.
Essentially, the risks of adverse side effects caused by the vaccine are much greater then the risks of developing cervical cancer.
Alarmingly, Merck never conducted any trials for Gardasil’s efficacy in girls under 15 years old, yet girls as young as 9 are often pressured to receive the vaccine.
Dr. Harper said in a 2007 interview that Merck’s push to have young girls vaccinated was actually “a great big public health experiment.” When Merck lobbied to make the vaccine mandatory in public schools, Dr. Diane Harper spoke out. She alleges that she tried to get television and print media to pick up the story, but no one was willing to air her concerns.
Since Gardasil was first unleashed on the population in 2006, more than 15,000 girls have reported adverse side effects to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Reactions that have been officially reported include brain inflammation, seizures, blood clots, paralysis, lupus, Guilliane Barre Syndrome, and several others. Forty-four deaths attributed to the vaccine have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
According to a news release from Glaxo-Smith-Kline, that company’s HPV vaccine Cervarix was just approved for use in the United States by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA), on Oct. 16, 2009. It is not yet in use in this country, but is in use in Australia and Europe. It has been linked to more than 2,000 cases of serious, adverse reactions since the U.K. government began administering it to schoolgirls last year. One of the worst cases involved 14-year-old Natalie Morton, who collapsed and died in school in England just one hour after receiving the vaccine.
