Community | August 25, 2011 | 31 comments

Truth About Gardasil | 89 lives have been taken...

source: http://truthaboutgardasil.org/the-truth-about-gardasil/

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figgdimension
Gardasil is the HPV vaccine, touted to fight cervical cancer. What they are not telling you is that thousands of girls are having adverse reactions to the HPV Vaccines, some have even died -at last count, at least 89 lives have been lost. We have got to do newlittleribbonsomething about this. These girls need our help! These girls are having reactions such as; seizures, strokes, dizziness, fatigue, weakness, headaches, stomach pains, vomitting, muscle pain and weakness, joint pain, auto-immune problems, chest pains, hair loss, appetite loss, personality changes, insomnia, hand/leg tremors, arm/leg weakness, shortness of breath, heart problems, paralysis, itching, rashes, swelling, aching muscles,pelvic pain, nerve pain, menstrual cycle changes, fainting, swollen lymph nodes, night sweats, nausea, temporary vision/hearing loss just to name some of them!

There is no known treatment to help these girls, as they suffer in silence. The doctors, if they even admit the connection, have no idea how to help them. So they spend their days going from appointment to appointment, from specialist to specialist trying to find someone to help them. Many of these families have started looking for help outside of mainstream medicine, which in some cases, may bring minor relief. However, most insurance plans do not cover this type of treatment, and as a result, this route is out of reach for many girls.

As you look at the faces on this page, remember that these are just some of the thousands of girls whose lives have been affected by Gardasil. Sadly, one of the girls pictured above, Jessie Ericzon, passed away just two days after her third gardasil injection.


If you or someone you know is experiencing any side effects or you would just like to contact us, you can do so at moderator@truthaboutgardasil.org or you can log into our Gardasil forum to tell your story.
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31 comments // Truth About Gardasil | 89 lives have been taken...

  • savvy7
    • 0
      savvy7  

    • Why is Merck being allowed to use these young women as guinea pigs? The FDA is a joke with no punch line. Pull the damned thing off the market until it can be perfected. I smell a class action lawsuit in the works

    • 9 months ago
  • CalgarC
  • skybluskyblue
    • +1
      skybluskyblue  

    • pt 2 :In all fairness, I'll point out that Blaxill did admit that, for determining efficacy, using a carrier control or an aluminum adjuvant-containing control was the most appropriate. The evidence was strong enough that even Blaxill couldn't spin it to say that the HPV vaccine is ineffective. So instead, he tries to claim that the failure to include a saline-only control calls into doubt the safety of the vaccine:

      When it comes to the accurate measurement of adverse effects of Gardasil, there is little justification for reliance on a placebo with ingredients that are not inert. There is some limited value, perhaps, in comparing adverse events that are introduced solely by the addition of VLPs to the vaccine solution. But a truly rigorous safety assessment would investigate the full safety profile of the VLPs in combination with the aluminum adjuvant and compare that profile to the profile of an inert solution. After all, the adjuvant is present precisely because it is not inert.
      This is the sort of argument that sounds superficially reasonable on the surface--but only if you don't know anything about aluminum adjuvants or carrier solutions, which are used in large numbers of vaccines and have a long history of safe use, particularly. Even so, Blaxill undertakes a large number of contortions to try to demonstrate that somehow the overall results of the clinical trials used to demonstrate the safety and efficacy of the HPV vaccine are hopelessly tainted and actually show that Gardasil is dangerous. He fails. (Big surprise.) For one thing, testing the safety of aluminum adjuvant and the carrier solution was not the intent of the study. We already know the aluminum adjuvant and carrier solution are safe. Testing them again would be rather pointless and add unnecessary complexity and expense to the clinical trial.

      The first intellectually dishonest thing that Blaxil does is that he doesn't provide ready references to the five clinical trials whose data he "reanalyzed." The second intellectually dishonest thing he does is that, with one exception, he doesn't provide any sort of meaningful statistical analysis to tell an informed reader whether differences in groups were actually statistically significant. More importantly, Blaxill mixes and matches data from five different studies, comparing them in ways that are questionable at best and then not documenting what methodology he used, for example, this graph, which doesn't conform to the way graphs are done in scientific studies. It is inappropriate to do a line graph for data of this type; a bar graph would have been far more appropriate. Also, there aren't any data points; the data appear to be represented as continuous when they are not. And, of course, there are no statistical measures. Indeed, at another point in this "analysis," we are assured that "on a retrospective basis" (whatever that means in the context of these data) "all but one of the reduced risks for the carrier solution group were statistically significant." Unfortunately, Blaxill does not tell us what statistical test he used. My guess is that he didn't use the appropriate test (ANOVA with a post-test to correct for multiple comparisons) and instead used a series of t-tests between each complication and the control, the latter of which is virtually guaranteed to produce false positives.

      In any case, basically, Blaxill tries to argue that because the rate of local adverse events (pruritis, hemorrhage, etc.) is close to the same in the Gardasil groups and the aluminum adjuvant groups but lower in the "carrier control" group (which was only one clinical trial, contained several-fold fewer subjects, and was much younger than the other trials and therefore not really appropriately comparable to the other trials), that means the aluminum adjuvant is not an "inert placebo" and that it causes harm, meaning that the clinical trials comparing the two don't demonstrate the safety of the vaccine. Blaxill's logic is tortured at best, intellectually dishonest at worst, and at the very least the result of an utterly incompetent analysis.

      Of course, thus far, Blaxill has only been discussing relatively minor reactions, such as local injection site reactions, and trying to use them to imply that, if the aluminum adjuvant causes the same frequency of local injection site reactions, it must also cause the same frequency of serious adverse reactions, like death. So he harps upon what he sees as an excessively high number of deaths in the Gardasil clinical trials, even though there were no differences between the control and the Gardasil groups. Even though the majority of deaths in both groups were due to trauma, and the others did not have a history that was in any way suggestive of being caused by the vaccine. Then, like all good anti-vaxers, Blaxill mines the VAERS database for more deaths, none of which appear on the surface to be related to the vaccine.

      All of this "analysis" leads Blaxill to proclaim that Gardasil was not safe. He also claims that the clinical trials were done at a lowered standard of safety, which is simply not true; it's a claim based on Blaxill's ignorance of how clinical trials are done and what a valid placebo control is.

      When I started this post, I originally planned for it to be a quickie, a little post mentioning Blaxill's misunderstanding of what a valid placebo is and, quite frankly, making fun of it, especially given that Blaxill's post is basically a rehash of posts from a year ago. After all, there's the big Newsweek cover story out there about overdiagnosis and a truly annoying article elsewhere about how "everything you know about cancer is wrong," one of which I had planned on dealing with. But then I noticed that Blaxill's arguments were virtually identical to those of one of the crankiest anti-vaccine cranks out there, who posted the same sorts of arguments three years ago. Then I delved into the rest of the article itself and realized it to be an updated treasure trove of anti-vaccine crankery that I had somehow missed when it first appeared last year. As I wrote, I found myself being sucked in by its bad science, bad data presentation, and bad statistics, and you know how Orac can't resist such a "target-rich" environment.

      Oh, well. There's always tomorrow or Friday to deal with those articles, or maybe I'll do it at my other blogging location. In the meantime, I want to thank Mr. Blaxill for the yucks and the "teachable moment." It takes a rare talent to be able to combine a massive demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect with such a badly done "analysis." Truly it is not for nothing that Blaxill is the "scientist" at AoA.

    • 9 months ago
  • skybluskyblue
    • 0
      skybluskyblue  
    • Image

    • Rick Perry aside, the first part of Blaxill's article would be perfect for Prison Planet or Infowars.com, two of the premier sites favored by the tinfoil hat brigade. Basically, it's one big conspiracy theory. Besides, weighing in at nearly 16,000 words, Blaxill's "treatise" makes Orac look like the soul of brevity in comparison. Deconstructing it all would take multiple installments, and I doubt that even the connoisseurs of the longer Orac-ian screeds would be able to tolerate that. Certainly, I couldn't tolerate the level of burning stupid contained in that many Blaxill-scribed words. Although my neurons wear miniature asbestos suits to protect them from damage from the napalm-grade burning stupid that washes over them any time I have the poor judgment to wander over to AoA, that doesn't mean it doesn't cause them extreme pain.

      In any case, about a quarter of the way in, Blaxill asks, How stringent was FDA's safety review for Gardasil? Not surprisingly, his answer is, "Not at all." Even less surprisingly, Blaxill's reasons for coming to that conclusion reveal just how clueless he is. As an example, I'm going to cite two of his paragraphs in full and let you savor the Dunning-Kruger goodness for yourself without actually having to click over to AoA and figure out what passages I'm talking about. If you are a physician or a scientist involved in clinical research, you won't know whether to laugh or cry. If you are in any way an immunologist or do immunology research, I suspect you'll be leaning towards crying. You have been warned.

      As Kirk said in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, "Here it comes":

      When the FDA issued its approval of Merck's BLA for Gardasil on June 8, 2006, its decision was based on a review of Merck's data from five separate clinical trials, each of which included efficacy and safety assessments for Gardasil. Four of the five trials approached their efficacy and safety studies in similar fashion, comparing Gardasil against a "placebo" that contained an active ingredient, with one trial comparing Gardasil against what the CBER reviewers described as a "saline placebo." All together, these five trials examined a total of close 12,000 subjects who received at least one dose of Gardasil and compared their outcomes to roughly 10,000 subjects who received up to three injections of what Merck and CBER officials agreed to describe as a "placebo."
      But what is a placebo, really? One definition describes a placebo as "an innocuous or inert medication; given as a pacifier or to the control group in experiments on the efficacy of a drug." The operative term here is the word inert. But in four of the five trials, Gardasil placebos contained a substance called an adjuvant, "a substance which enhances the body's immune response to an antigen." According to one of the trial publications, most of the Gardasil trial placebos actually contained an "amorphous aluminium hydroxyphosphate sulfate adjuvant... and was visually indistinguishable from vaccine." So although the majority of the placebo treatments in the Gardasil trials did not include Gardasil VLPs, they were by no means inert. In control populations representing nearly 95% of all "placebo" recipients, the study subjects received a formulation that actually included an immunologically active (and potentially harmful) aluminum adjuvant.

      Yes, indeed. Here you have someone who is neither a scientist nor a doctor perseverating over a single word in one definition of "placebo" that he found. In actuality, Blaxill completely misunderstands what a valid placebo is. Heck, even Wikipedia provides a pretty reasonable definition of what a placebo is, specifically "a substance or procedure... that is objectively without specific activity for the condition being treated." Note the phrase "without specific activity for the condition being treated." Under this definition of placebo, an injection that contains everything except the HPV antigens used in the vaccine to provoke an immune response against the virus is, in actuality, the most appropriate placebo to use for a clinical trial of such a vaccine. The scientists who did these trials chose exactly the most appropriate placebo. Of course, it's obvious that Blaxill is trying to call these trials into doubt because he thinks the aluminum adjuvant is harmful when in fact it is not. Even more amusing, Blaxill appears to me to have--shall we say?--appropriated this argument wholesale from a three year old article by anti-vaccine loon Cynthia Janak. (Judge for yourself if you don't believe me; each and every argument that Janak uses, Blaxill also uses. He just turns them into graphs.), In any case, we've met Janak before, and her understanding of science is, at best, challenged.. So it's not even original crankery, and Blaxill doesn't give any credit to Janak for having come up with this fallacious argument first.

      But Blaxill did put it on steroids and pump it up to 15,000+ words.

      In any case, Blaxill amplifies the display of his ignorance even further when he complains about one of the trials in particular, as though he had found a "Gotcha!" moment, in which, rather than a "saline control," he found that actually a "carrier control" was used. he then tried to find out exactly what was in the carrier and was disappointed that he couldn't do so easily. However, he did infer it from the Gardasil package insert:

      It is possible, however, to infer the composition of the carrier solution from Merck's Gardasil package insert, which lists the vaccine's immunologically inactive ingredients. These include: "yeast protein, sodium chloride [table salt], L-histidine [an amino acid], polysorbate 80 [an emulsifier], sodium borate, and water for injection." At least one of these chemicals, sodium borate, is a chemically reactive toxin, one that has many industrial uses as an active ingredient. These include applications as: a replacement for mercury in gold mining; an insecticide and fungicide; and a food additive that is now banned in the United States.
      Oh, noes! It's teh toxins! I've actually written about anti-vaccine loons trying to label L-histidine, polysorbate 80, and sodium borate as dangerous and why their arguments are a load of fetid dingo's kidneys. After all, histidine is an amino acid used in small amounts. Polysorbate 80 is only harmful in rats at high levels; there's no evidence that in the doses given in vaccines that it has any harmful effects. Sodium borate is often used as a buffer. In any case, once again, Blaxill is, as anti-vaccine activists are wont to do, completely ignoring the principle of "the dose makes the poison." Sometimes I wonder if Blaxill is a homeopath. He seems to think that diluting ingredients like Polysorbate 80 makes them more toxic.

      http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/08/better_late_than_never_the_dunning-kru...

    • 9 months ago
  • skybluskyblue
  • Incredulous
    • 0
      Incredulous  
    • skybluskyblue:

      So, excuse me for my impertinence, but, where is the actual proof that these things are NOT due to the vaccines? The onus for proof used to reside with the pharmaceutical company bringing a product to market, but lately, it certainly does appear that the population is the proving ground, and if pharma happens to screw up, first they deny it, second they try to pin the cause elsewhere, and finally, and only after many lives have been lost or destroyed, they recall a product that they did not do proper clinical trials with.

      Even when they do precede release with a set of clinical trials, there is always that percentage of risk factor that is written off as acceptable risk...but if it was your 12-year old daughter who died from this vaccine, would you really consider that an acceptable risk?

    • 9 months ago
  • skybluskyblue
  • Incredulous
    • 0
      Incredulous  
    • skybluskyblue:

      thanks, but unfortunately, I know a bit more than you care to give me credit for about how it's all done, actually a whole lot more. I worked in a research institute, and collusion is not hard to prove, it just doesn't pay.

    • 9 months ago
  • cherry5000
  • Leen61
    • 0
      Leen61  

    • Once again, big pharma killing us. They never stop finding new ways to do this and it's all about making money. This is also what happens when the FDA is gutted. There is nobody there to protect the comsumer. I feel sorry for these young women. Thank you for this post, figg. This story about Gardisil needs all the attention it can get.

    • 9 months ago
  • chew_chew
  • moodyblue
    • +3
      moodyblue  

    • When this drug was first introduced I remember the push to get young girls vaccinated.. I decided against giving it to my daughter and was told by some that I was just crazy and overprotective.. ya know what, maybe I am, so what. Im so glad I listened to my gut and not a bunch of nit wits trying to push this drug on my child.

    • 9 months ago
  • cherry5000
  • artemis6
  • inge4art
    • +3
      inge4art  

    • Just awful! Outrageous that this medication is still on the market. Of course those poor girls don't get the treatment they need because of no coverage, this country has some serious problem with health care, all those young beautiful girls are left to suffer or to die. Thank you figgdimension.

    • 9 months ago
  • squarethecircle
  • figgdimension
  • attilatheblond
  • Hardytoo
    • +4
      Hardytoo  

    • At first I was gung-ho about this vaccine.Even had an argument with my own daughter about her not giving her approval to have her daughter receive the vaccine at school (free of charge). But it's apparent that they rushed it to market, neglecting to do adequate testing - which is the same thing they did for the stop-smoking drug, Chantix (now responsible for suicides and suicidal ideation among users). My kid said "I told you so" and I cheered for her. These "serious reactions" and actual deaths began awhile back; usually there will be a few bad situations, but the data re Gardasil is overwhelming, not only in the real-life tragedies but in the statistical sense. There's no doubt that the problem is Gardasil - it can't be blamed on any other medical conditions of the recipients of the shots.

      We NEED a good vaccine to prevent HPV and now, anal cancer (HPV works for that too) - but not at the expense of anyone's life. What in HELL are they doing... and now the 'thuglicans want the FDA abolished?? W T F, says I.

    • 9 months ago
  • figgdimension
  • Vic_Romano
    • +5
      Vic_Romano  
    • Image

    • And a little more dirt on the evil clown....

      "Why in early 2007 did he sign an executive order mandating that 11- and 12-year-old girls in Texas be given the vaccine Gardasil?"

      "Gardasil was developed to prevent the human papillomavirus (HPV), the most commonly transmitted sexual disease in the United States. In June 2006, the Food and Drug Administration approved the drug, which is made by the pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. The treatment was initially hailed as a breakthrough in protecting against four strains of HPV that are responsible for 70 percent of cervical cancer cases and 90 percent of genital warts."

      "In January 2007, Gardasil was put on the "recommended" immunization schedule issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control. Merck immediately mounted a massive lobbying effort of state legislatures around the country to get Gardasil added to their respective lists of state-mandated vaccines."

      "But in Texas, Gov. Perry chose to bypass the legislature and on Feb. 2, 2007, he issued an executive order making Texas the first state in the country requiring all sixth-grade girls to receive the three-shot vaccination series (which cost about $120 per shot). The move generated a fierce public debate. Conservatives slammed Perry for promoting what they saw as an intrusion by the state into private health decisions of parents and their children. Some also complained that the mandate would encourage promiscuity among teenagers."

      http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/06/04/rick_perrys_gardasil_proble...

      http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6197/6045430577_9e849eb1f9.jpg

    • 9 months ago
  • figgdimension
  • KB723
  • figgdimension
  • figgdimension
    • +7
      figgdimension  
    • Image

    • some of the girls who fell victim to this drug my heart goes out to the families and friends of these young ladies and hope this can raise some awareness about this drug

    • 9 months ago
  • Incredulous
    • +7
      Incredulous  
    • Image

    • One More Girl is a documentary about the stories of anguish and travesty, futures destroyed, and families reduced to financial ruin by medical costs brought on by a vaccine, Gardasil. The vaccine is designed to prevent Human Papillomavirus (HPV).

      Pre-production is in process right now and we are raising funds so that we can begin production this summer with a tentative 2012 release date.

      We are two brothers that were motivated to make this documentary when our sister had experienced several serious side-effects after her first injection of the Gardasil vaccine. Her adverse reaction demanded further investigation which led to the startling discovery that thousands of young girls were having serious reactions to the vaccine, including death. At last count, there have been 89 confirmed deaths as a result of Gardasil.

      http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1995527181/one-more-girl-documentary?ref=vid...

    • 9 months ago
  • figgdimension
  • Incredulous
  • figgdimension
  • Hardytoo
  • figgdimension
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