Don’t believe the HPV hype

One week last September, the headlines exclaimed to the parents of young children that it was imperative to get their daughters, and even their young sons, vaccinated against human papillomavirus (HPV).

Behind the headlines was a seemingly weighty scientific paper, published in the journal Clinical Reviews of Infectious Diseases, headed by one of the world’s leading HPV experts, Prof Suzanne Garland of the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. Supporting her were 14 other HPV experts.

The newspapers echoed various snippets, including that the study involved 187 to 205 million or more doses of HPV vaccines in 129 countries.

What the media didn’t say was that Prof Garland and her 14 colleagues had all declared their vested interests, as every single one of them had some association with the key vaccine makers Merck, GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi Pasteur. And very few reported that data was collated from just nine countries – 120 shy of the 129 quoted, the latter referring to all the countries where HPV vaccines had been administered, a figure absent from the paper itself.

The media enthusiastically chirruped the gleeful figures of 85-95 per cent reductions in HPV infections and their markers, genital warts and cervical lesions. But closer reading of the actual paper revealed that these were figures cited only in the Abstract (the part of the study that is usually the only part that most doctors and health professionals actually read), whereas the actual reductions found in the 58 studies reviewed were often half those quoted rates or less.

But perhaps the most serious assertion of the paper was that 100 per cent of the apparent decline in HPV infections observed over the 10 years since the HPV vaccine was unleashed was due entirely to the HPV vaccine.

In addition, the report assumed that this reduction would translate directly to reductions in HPV-related cancers. But this is simply not the case, as an individual’s immune system, genetics and environment all come into play, significantly affecting the incidence of cancers even when HPV infection from one or more strains is involved.

Furthermore, one of the most contentious issues related to the HPV vaccine has been the extensive reporting of side-effects – yet these were dismissed by the authors in one short paragraph.

A week later, there were yet more headlines and stories about pharmaceuticals. This time, it’s the statins, the class of drugs that has been rapidly losing favour among the public as well as increasing numbers of health professionals. The study appeared in The Lancet, and its lead author was Prof (Sir) Rory Collins, the undisputed ring leader of mainstream medicine’s ‘statin-therapy-is-the-answer-to-heart-disease’ lobby.

Collins had with him an even heftier list of co-authors, including 27 from universities such as Oxford, from which he hails, Cambridge, Bristol, Sydney, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and others. Like Garland’s HPV vaccine propaganda piece, no new data were presented – just a re-sorting of preexistent data after removing the data that messed up their version of the facts.

There were other tell-tale signs revealing similarities with the earlier HPV media hype. While side-effects were not entirely dismissed, they were nearly so – and this despite the more than 2,000 cases of compensation paid out to victims of statin therapy who suffered long-term muscle pain and weakness, strokes and/or diabetes, all solidly proven and predictable side-effects affecting susceptible individuals.

Whether we’re looking to protect our young ones from future risks of HPV-related cancers or our older populations from the risks of heart disease, the evidence points to a very wide range of evidence-based preventative strategies that can be successfully used.

Garland and her team couldn’t bring themselves to discuss prevention, including social and familial strategies to support protected sex or abstinence among very young adolescents. Equally, why did Collins and his colleagues say nothing about smoking less, eating better-quality food and exercising – all of which come with much less shaky science than statins have?

The reason for these conspicuous omissions can only, in my opinion, be related to a deliberate strategy to prop up highly profitable vaccination and drug-pushing programmes among the masses. The declarations of interest are there to reveal the money trail, yet somehow, these are ignored by the media, and not considered by the peer-reviewed journals that publish these papers to be ‘conflicts of interest’ that might invalidate any findings or conclusions.

The good news is that the public is rapidly waking up to the cronyism that has settled deep within the fabric of our mainstream medicine. This means that more and more people are actively seeking out the growing number of doctors and other health professionals who have elected not to be party to the system. Indeed, this process is key if we are to genuinely have true freedom of choice in healthcare for our future generations.

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