The Wall Street Journal ran an article on states requiring girls to get the HPV vaccine. Notice how the effort at the state level urging mandatory vaccination corresponds to Merck Pharmaceutical’s lobbying efforts. Merck has a monopoly on the Gardasil vaccine, a series of three injections that is the most expensive vaccine ever marketed.
From the article:
Bills being drafted in some 20 U.S. states that would make a cervical-cancer vaccine mandatory for preteen girls are sparking a backlash among parents and consumer advocates.
The bills coincide with an aggressive lobbying campaign by Merck & Co., the maker of the only such vaccine on the market. If the state bills become law, they would guarantee the drug maker billions of dollars in annual revenue from the vaccine.
I’m not one of those unibomber types that lives in the woods and refuses to comply with mandatory vaccination laws for my children. But, let’s be clear here — this vaccine is not needed to stop a readily communicable disease. The disease in question, HPV, is spread by sex. It sometimes causes cervical cancer. And the vaccine does not even prevent all strains of HPV. Again from the article:
Merck says cervical cancer is the second-leading cancer among women around the world, but the disease’s prevalence is actually low in the U.S. The American Cancer Society estimates that 11,150 women will be diagnosed with cervical cancer and 3,670 will die from it in the U.S. this year. That’s equivalent to 0.77% of cancers diagnosed in the U.S. and 0.65% of U.S. cancer deaths each year. By comparison, the society estimates that 178,480 American women will get diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007 and 40,460 will die from it.
I think a responsible parent might want to get the vaccine for their daughter. But I don’t think it is sound public policy to be forcing the profit stream of a pharmaceutical company onto an unwilling public when the company has a monopoly on the drug and seems clearly to be behind the efforts to get these laws passed.
Lastly, the drug just came out. Do we really want to forcibly treat school girls as guinea pigs for Merck when the majority of them probably will never even need the vaccine or get the disease the vaccine hopes to prevent? And Merck does not even know if booster shots will be needed later in life. The drug is that new. In fact, it hasn’t even been fully tested on children and, the risk of pelvic disease has doubled in those who have had the vaccine. Oh, and boys aren’t getting the vaccine even though they can supposedly contract the virus.
This gives me the creeps. With the 100th anniversary of eugenics being remembered in the country, it just gives me the creeps that we might be forcing teenagers to serve as lab rats for a new drug held monopolistically by Merck that probably is not needed for most of them.
The lobbying by Merck behind the proposal and the fact that the drug is so new and prevents a virus that is not nearly as communicably infectious as standard mandatory vaccines gives me pause. No doubt we might all decide that this is sound public policy. But why rush into with the lobbyists pushing for it when we can, right now, educate parents and let them decide. What's the hurry?