GARDASIL STUDY FUNDED BY MERCK - ARE RESULTS BIASED?

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CBCD Raises Doubts
This study was funded by Merck, the manufacturer of Gardasil. Many scientific papers argue that the public should not trust any industry funded research.

Rochester, NY (PRWEB) February 08, 2012

The Center for the Biology of Chronic Disease (CBCD) has learned that Merck recently funded a study conducted by Dr. Chun Chao from Kaiser Permanente. USA Today reported: “Study: No link between HPV vaccine and autoimmune disorders” on January 28, 2012. In the opening paragraph, the story says that “The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine Gardasil does not trigger autoimmune disorders.”

Should the reader believe the report? Is it possible that the researchers, who conducted the study, are biased?

According to USA Today, this study was funded by Merck, the manufacturer of Gardasil. Many scientific papers argue that the public should not trust any industry funded research.

For instance, a paper published in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics says that, “Empirical research indicates that much of the evidence required for the practice of evidence-based medicine cannot be trusted. The research agenda has been hijacked by those with vested interests within industry and academia, determining what research is funded and how it is done and reported.” It went on to say, “Many well-reported randomized controlled trials are designed to deceive by their choice of comparators and outcomes….”

Another paper published in the American Journal of Orthopedics says, “…industry-sponsored clinical trials have traditionally been associated with more positive results.”

Yet another paper published in Science and Engineering Ethics says, “Pharmaceutical companies fund the bulk of clinical research that is carried out on medications. Poor outcomes from these studies can have negative effects on sales of medicines. Previous research has shown that company funded research is much more likely to yield positive outcomes than research with any other sponsorship.”

Finally, a paper in PLoS ONE quotes Dr. Daniele Fanelli as writing, "about 2% of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once –a serious form of misconduct by any standard– and up to one third admitted a variety of other questionable research practices including “dropping data points based on a gut feeling”, and “changing the design, methodology or results of a study in response to pressures from a funding source”.

What do these papers say in simple terms?

When a company pays for the study, beware. The results usually show what the company wants them to show. In other words, those who have the gold, somehow, determine the results.

In this case, the company with the gold is Merck, and the product is Gardasil. It is certainly within Merck’s interests to disprove any connection between their vaccine and autoimmune disorders. And lo and behold! The results promote Merck's interest.

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SANEVAX ASKS SECRETARY OF HEALTH RESCIND APPROVAL OF GARDASIL

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By Norma Erickson, President

According to a recently published, industry-sponsored study conducted on 12,852 young women, HPV vaccination was found to reduce HPV-16 infections a mere 0.6% in vaccinated women versus unvaccinated women. At the same time, other high-risk (carcinogenic) HPV infections were diagnosed in vaccinated women 2.6% to 6.2% more frequently than in the unvaccinated women. The increased rate of infections caused by carcinogenic HPV types other than those targeted by Gardasil^® in vaccinated women is 4 to 10 times higher than the reduction in HPV 16/18 infections.^[1]

These statistics are not exactly encouraging when it comes to demonstrating efficacy for Gardasil^®. In fact, quite the opposite – these figures seem to indicate that women who receive Gardasil^® may indeed increase their risk of developing cervical cancer from high-risk HPV types that are not targeted by the vaccine.

Medical consumers cannot afford to take the chance of increasing their risk of contracting a disease that has been virtually eradicated by good gynecological care in the United States (cervical cancer) by taking a series of HPV vaccines and hoping they will find out decades later the vaccine worked. It is certainly not a risk children should have to take.

Armed with the knowledge that any drug approved under the FDA’s accelerated approval process using a surrogate endpoint, such as Gardasil^®, requires post-marketing studies “to verify and describe the drugs clinical benefit and to resolve remaining uncertainty as to the relation of the surrogate endpoint upon which approval was based to clinical benefit…[2],” the SaneVax Team felt compelled to appeal to the person in charge of FDA/CDC oversight, Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services.

On 31 January 2012, SaneVax Inc. sent an open letter to Ms Sebelius[3] asking her to rescind approval for Gardasil^® based on the lack of efficacy demonstrated in the ATHENA study referenced above.

If the Department of Health and Human Services is truly interested in public health and safety, they will do the right thing and rescind Gardasil^® approval until the manufacturer can provide scientifically sound data proving this new drug is actually effective.

In the meantime, medical consumers around the globe have a choice. Is poke and hope good enough for you and your children? Or, are you going to demand scientific proof of efficacy before submitting to HPV vaccination?

GARDASIL - BIG PHARMA KILLING US SOFTLY

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By Gary Null PhD and Nancy Ashley VMD | January 25th, 2012

With complete disregard for the welfare and safety of the people who take their products, the pharmaceutical industry has made a habit of putting profits above all else. Despite a track record of bringing us drugs that kill and maim, such as Vioxx, AZT, Fen Phen, and Thalidomide, there is never an apology, never a commitment to improve, never even an acknowledgement that they have done anything wrong. Now, as if we have learned nothing from history, the drama is unfolding yet again, this time with Gardasil.

Gardasil, the human papillomavirus vaccine produced by Merck, was brought to market in 2006 with great fanfare, widely proclaimed as the first ever anti-cancer vaccine. Merck created a market for Gardasil out of thin air with deceptive and dishonest advertising,^[1] and thereby planted fear in the mind of consumers: fear of an enormous, yet unknown health crisis, an invisible time bomb waiting to explode and harm women everywhere. When criticized for their aggressive marketing, Merck countered that they were performing a public service by raising awareness about the human papillomavirus and weren’t selling anything.^[2] Really?

This lie became public as Merck was caught lobbying the 50 states for mandatory Gardasil vaccination before it had even secured FDA approval![^3] The fact is that there was never a need for Gardasil in the first place: regular Pap testing had already lowered the incidence of cervical cancer by 80% in the US to a few thousand cases a year and the vast majority of all HPV infections resolve of their own accord.[^4]

But by lining the coffers of such groups as Women in Government (WIG), and, of course, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Merck was able to influence legislation such that almost immediately after the vaccine was approved, it was part of the vaccine schedule recommended for all girls.^[5] If it hadn’t been for Governor Rick Perry’s blunder of trying to mandate Gardasil for school attendance in Texas in the face of huge conflict of interest and a $50 million contribution to his presidential campaign, Gardasil might have gone even further.^[6]

There is something deeply wrong with a giant pharmaceutical company spending hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate women and influence legislation in order to generate a revenue stream of billions of dollars a year for themselves at the expense of a gullible public. Because what is wrong with Gardasil isn’t just that it is unnecessary. Gardasil is possibly the most dangerous vaccine on the market with the potential to injure, maim, or even kill the children who receive it.

The program of coercion to vaccinate every 11 to 26 year-old girl with Gardasil is relentless. This vaccine is given not just in doctor’s offices, where doctors have been known to “fire” non-compliant patients, but in schools and colleges, where the pressure on girls and their parents to conform can be extreme. These institutions all have quotas — sometimes including financial rewards — and they are anxious to prove high rates of compliance.^[7]

But there is no informed consent prior to vaccination, so most of these girls and their parents have no idea what they are risking by agreeing to vaccination with Gardasil. While Merck, the FDA, the CDC and the medical establishment all deny that there have been serious, life-altering adverse events associated with Gardasil, the fact is that compared with the mandated vaccines which are given with greater frequency, Gardasil still has the most adverse events reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) of any vaccine. And since reporting of adverse events is not mandatory in the US (although outbreaks of so-called vaccine-preventable illness are), it is likely that only 10% even get reported!^[8]

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HPV VACCINE & EVIDENCE BASED MEDICINE-ARE THEY AT ODDS?

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Natural News

Wednesday, January 11, 2012
by: Rosemary Mathis, Vice President of Victim Support, SANE VAX, INC.

Written by Norma Erickson & Leslie Carol Botha

On January 12, 2011 the Annals of Medicine published a ground-breaking peer-reviewed paper titled, Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine policy and evidence-based medicine: Are they at odds?, 1written by renowned researchers Lucija Tomljenovic, Ph.D., and Christopher Shaw, Ph.D., with the Neural Dynamics research Group, University of British Columbia, in Vancouver. 2.

The article points out to the medical community what most consumers now know about the fraudulent global health agency policies in combination with the pharmaceutical companies lack of science based evidence demonstrating the safety and efficacy of Gardasil and Cervarix before they were unleashed on unsuspecting parents of adolescents.

Clinical Trials on Healthy People vs. Mass Vaccination Campaigns

Tomljenovic and Shaw clearly state the obvious in their abstract by stating that vaccines represent 'a special category of drugs generally given to healthy individuals and therefore a small level of risk for adverse reactions is acceptable.'

Merck's clinical trials were flawed because they used an aluminum adjuvant as a 'placebo' and only used saline as a comparative for minor, non-serious adverse reactions. With serious adverse reactions, they pooled the results from the saline group and the aluminum 'placebo' group. By doing this, they concealed the true rate of serious reactions.

If FDA approved drugs and vaccines were as safe and effective as Pharma would like consumers to believe the risk level should be negligible to none. The FDA removal of drugs after they have been on the market and damaged desperate people looking for cures who then have to file lawsuits to recover damages is simply unacceptable.

Medical Ethics Questioned

The authors also point out the myth of informed consent - basically a waiver signed by medical consumers that they have been 'educated' about the risk vs. benefit ratio of the drug about to be administered. Tomljenovic and Shaw open their paper citing that 'medical ethics demand that vaccination be carried out with the participant's full and informed consent' and not just the handing out of the HPV vaccine Patient Product Insert - prepared by none other than the vaccine's manufacturer.

What the authors do not cover in this paper is what happens to informed consent when governments grant children the right to consent to medical procedures, such as California's recent passage of AB 499 - basically granting parental rights of children ages 12 and older to the state for the treatment of STD's. Is it really because the 'state' knows better - or is it because legislatures have been paid off by the pharmaceutical companies?

The authors go on to state:

"What is more disconcerting than the aggressive marketing strategies employed by the vaccine manufacturers is the practice by which the medical profession has presented partial information to the public, namely, in a way that generates fear, thus promoting vaccine uptake.........It thus appears that to this date, medical and regulatory entities worldwide continue to provide inaccurate information regarding cervical cancer risk and the usefulness of HPV vaccines, thereby making informed consent regarding vaccination impossible to achieve."

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