On Guard Against the Gardasil Juggernaut

by George Delgado, M.D., F.A.A.F.P. is the Medical Director of Culture of Life Family Services in San Diego, CA.  He also is a Voluntary Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the UCSD School of Medicine.

This article originally appeared in the San Diego Union Tribune, as part of a debate on the merits of Gardasil. That paper has gone downhill so badly, that you can not find this article on-line anywhere. I am pleased to offer this article to Ruth Institute readers. We plan to give it a more permanent home on our website.

A word about our guest columnist, Dr. Delgado: he is a very respected member of the San Diego area pro-life community. His organization, Culture of Life Family Services, is a full scale pro-life medical clinic, providing free pre-natal care, ob-gyn services, counseling and all the rest. Dr. Delgado delivers the babies and takes care of their moms. COLFS is worthy of your support.

~Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse 

On Guard against the Gardasil Juggernaut

No one likes the feeling that something has been shoved down his or her throat. Merck, the pharmaceutical giant is looking like a bully in how it thrust Gardasil, the first genital human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine, on the US market.
You might imagine genital HPV infection being like an iceberg. The small tip represents those infections that lead to cervical cancer. Below the water is the vast majority of the infections, those that do not transform into cervical cancer because they are cleared by the body.

Gardasil has received some renewed uncomfortable publicity in the August 19, 2009 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, commonly known as JAMA. Two articles and an editorial explored the safety and the marketing of Gardasil.

While safety is always a huge issue, I believe that the bigger story with Gardasil was the unprecedented publicity campaign that won Merck an industry award for the pharmaceutical brand of the year for “building a market out of thin air” according to the trade publication, Pharmaceutical Executive.

According to the JAMA analysis by Sheila Rothman, PhD and David Rothman, PhD, Merck took to heart the difficult introduction of its hepatitis B vaccine about twenty years ago. With Gardasil, Merck was armed and formidable. It funded professional organizations like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Society for Colposcopy and Cervical Pathology (ASCCP), the society of Gynecological Oncologists (SGO), and the American College Health Association (ACHA) so that they would produce educational and awareness initiatives.

Rothman and Rothman especially highlighted the roles that ASCCP, SGO and ACHA played in the promotion of Gardasil. Through educational presentations, mostly directed at health professionals and public health announcement programs these professional organizations were essentially minions in supporting what became the Merck juggernaut that led to widespread coverage and acceptance of the new vaccine.

The other problem the authors describe is that Gardasil has been promoted as a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer. In its studies Merck only proved that it can prevent some of the precancerous changes that may lead to cervical cancer. Saying that it prevents cervical cancer is a huge assumption; especially since, at this point, we do not know how long the vaccine effects will last. We won’t know if it prevents cervical cancer for at least another twenty years because that’s how long it takes the disease to develop.

Read the rest of this article here.