More HPV Follies

The Cato Institute has a great story about the HPV vaccine that our political heroes are trying to make mandatory for all little girls. It is far from clear that the vaccine will have the beneficial impact that Merck claims, and it may even have the opposite result. The vaccine has had no long-term testing so we really have no idea what will happen a few years down the road.

Risk assessment is not easy, particularly when, as is the case with Gardasil, the long term effects of a vaccine are totally unknown. Women who participated in the drug trials were followed for an average of less than three years. Consider this totally hypothetical example: what if 90% of all school age girls are vaccinated within the next five years and then ten or twenty years from now it is discovered that the vaccine made them sterile or actually caused them to get a different type of cancer than what they were vaccinated against? Or worse yet, because of the difference in sample size, once millions of 9 and 10-year olds were vaccinated instead of just a couple of hundred, one percent of the girls had side effects severe enough to cause brain damage or death? MORE