By Jefferey Jaxen | The Highwire
A new study published in the open access Systematic Reviews journal titled Benefits and harms of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines: systematic review with meta-analyses of trial data from clinical study reports attempts to tackle the controversial vaccine.
Using clinical study reports obtained from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and GlaxoSmithKline from 2014 to 2017, study authors Lars Jørgensen, Peter Gøtzsche and Tom Jefferson set forth to assess the benefits and harms of the HPV vaccine.
The researchers looked at twenty-four of 50 eligible clinical study reports containing 58,412 pages of 22 trials and 2 follow-up studies including 95,670 participants: 79,102 females and 16,568 males age 8–72.
The newly published research from Gøtzsche and co-authors found more of the same shoddy research behavior reporting:
“Serious harms were incompletely reported for 72% of participants. Nearly all control participants received active comparators. No clinical study report included complete case report forms.”
Furthermore, the researchers found:
“the HPV vaccines increased serious nervous system disorders and general harms.”
The evidence and data analyzed in the clinical studies led the researchers to conclude:
“At 4 years follow-up, the HPV vaccines decreased HPV-related cancer precursors and treatment procedures but increased serious nervous system disorders and general harms. As the included trials were primarily designed to assess benefits and were not adequately designed to assess harms, the extent to which the HPV vaccines’ benefits outweigh their harms is unclear. Limited access to clinical study reports and trial data with case report forms prevented a thorough assessment.”
This new study is not the first scientific evidence or voices to question the HPV vaccine. An entire book has been written on the controversy, incomplete science and evidence of harms associated with the vaccine since its inception. The book, The HPV Vaccine On Trial: Seeking Justice For A Generation Betrayed, gives balance and deeper insight to the often tightly controlled, overly optimistic and one-sided discussion allowed by much of the media and the medical community regarding the vaccine’s safety.
While proponents of the vaccine have claimed it safe and effective, critics of the HPV vaccine have pointed to incomplete, unscientific and simply fraudulent trial study designs used to obtain licensing for the shots.
For example, in Merck’s 2006 pre-licensure study for its Gardasil vaccine injected its “placebo” group of nearly 10,000 healthy girls with Amorphous Aluminum Hydroxyphosphate Sulfate (AAHS) – a known neurotoxin which has no therapeutic benefit. The AAHS-injected group was later combined with the true placebo group [320 girls], one of the only ones in all pre-licensure vaccine studies comprising the CDC’s recommended schedule, to create a “control group” for the purpose of masking serious safety issues with Gardasil that should have prevented its licensure.
During a 2018 Cochrane review which extolled the HPV vaccine, all 26 trials used in its analysis were found to have used active comparators—either various aluminum adjuvants or hepatitis vaccines—rather than genuine inert placebos. Cochrane’s HPV review was quickly taken apart in a critique published in BMJ Journals pointing out evidence that it was influenced by reporting bias, biased trial designs and failing to identify trial limitations.
Wherever government-sanctioned HPV vaccination campaigns are activated around the world, associated harms, labeled and dismissed as anecdotal evidence, have followed. Countless parents and their teenage sons and daughters globally have told the same stories and displayed the same life shattering symptoms, often in the form of serious nervous system disorders, from the HPV shot only to be ridiculed and ignored by those in positions to help.
Recently, the World Health Organization signaled to the medical community and general public that it would be taking a stance to label all vaccine injury psychosomatic – in other words, any severe adverse reaction experienced is all in the person’s head. It is perhaps the first time in modern history a regulatory heath body has decided to render a large, growing pool of individuals invisible by victim-blaming their injuries and invaliding their suffering.
Studies like the recent effort from Jørgensen, Gøtzsche and Jefferson are desperately needed to bring balance to a conversation about harms, systemically and institutionally ignored, from a shot that is rapidly expanding into all age and gender groups.
Furthermore, in the U.S., massive legislative efforts are being attempted to race the HPV vaccine into the bodies of American children without parental consent or knowledge – in those as young as 9-years-old in many instances.
With the precautionary principle left behind years ago, a wayward medical community, whispering into the ears of politicians as they draft abusive legislation to remove the ‘barrier’ parent, is attempting to enact a mandatory market for Big Pharma’s highly lucrative and injectable product lines on the backs of American families. Record numbers of protests and pushback is happening in real time at capitol buildings across the country in strong opposition to all forms of legislation written to remove the impediments to vaccine-related profits margins. Meanwhile, courageous voices from the scientific and medical communities are now regularly publishing research and speaking out on the side of transparency, informed consent and true scientific discovery.
