Mandatory cancer vaccine for girls....

[seanx]

I'm not against vaccines, in general, however this one is being made by the company Merck, which just got sued over knowingly putting Vioxx on the market even though it caused all sorts of problems (they have the inter-company documents)......and in the test cases I've checked on they say that 14 of the test cases died (these are girls between 11-14) and of course none of the deaths had to do with the vaccinations, "they were related to other complications." Also I don't like the idea of a not fully tested small dose of cervical cancer getting put into my kid's body. Anyone's thoughts? Other info on this? (besides from the governments' website....since now citizens can no longer sue the companies that make and distribute these vaccinations).

Texas Requires Cancer Vaccine for Girls

Associated Press | February 2, 2007
LIZ AUSTIN PETERSON

AUSTIN (AP) -- Gov. Rick Perry ordered Friday that schoolgirls in Texas must be vaccinated against the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer, making Texas the first state to require the shots.

The girls will have to get Merck & Co.'s new vaccine against strains of the human papillomavirus, or HPV, that are responsible for most cases of cervical cancer.

Merck is bankrolling efforts to pass laws in state legislatures across the country mandating it Gardasil vaccine for girls as young as 11 or 12. It doubled its lobbying budget in Texas and has funneled money through Women in Government, an advocacy group made up of female state legislators around the country.

Details of the order were not immediately available, but the governor's office confirmed to The Associated Press that he was signing the order and he would comment Friday afternoon.

Perry has several ties to Merck and Women in Government. One of the drug company's three lobbyists in Texas is Mike Toomey, his former chief of staff. His current chief of staff's mother-in-law, Texas Republican state Rep. Dianne White Delisi, is a state director for Women in Government.

Toomey was expected to be able to woo conservative legislators concerned about the requirement stepping on parent's rights and about signaling tacit approval of sexual activity to young girls. Delisi, as head of the House public health committee, which likely would have considered legislation filed by a Democratic member, also would have helped ease conservative opposition.

Perry also received $6,000 from Merck's political action committee during his re-election campaign.

It wasn't immediately clear how long the order would last and whether the legislation was still necessary. However it could have been difficult to muster support from lawmakers who champion abstinence education and parents' rights.

Perry, a conservative Christian who opposes abortion rights and stem- cell research using embryonic cells, counts on the religious right for his political base.

But he has said the cervical cancer vaccine is no different than the one that protects children against polio.

"If there are diseases in our society that are going to cost us large amounts of money, it just makes good economic sense, not to mention the health and well being of these individuals to have those vaccines available," he said.

Texas allows parents to opt out of inoculations by filing an affidavit stating that he or she objected to the vaccine for religious or philosophical reasons.

Even with such provisions, however, conservative groups say mandates take away parents' rights to be the primary medical decision maker for their children.

The federal government approved Gardasil in June, and a government advisory panel has recommended that all girls get the shots at 11 and 12, before they are likely to be sexually active.

The New Jersey-based drug company could generate billions in sales if Gardasil _ at $360 for the three-shot regimen _ were made mandatory across the country. Most insurance companies now cover the vaccine, which has been shown to have no serious side effects.

Merck spokeswoman Janet Skidmore would not say how much the company is spending on lobbyists or how much it has donated to Women in Government. Susan Crosby, the group's president, also declined to specify how much the drug company gave.

A top official from Merck's vaccine division sits on Women in Government's business council, and many of the bills around the country have been introduced by members of Women in Government.

[Mickulz]

ugggh...Again I am agreeing with you.

This is just weird, but wait until the religious right gets a hold of it. Because the who situation deals with sexual active girls. If you believe your daughter is not sexual active, then you are not going to want to have this shot for her.

I see a very slippery slope ahead on this one.

[seanx]

....yeah, this whole situation is fishy.....and the number of test cases that died is actually 17.....finally, the percentage of females getting cervical cancer is less than 1% of the population of women, and we are vaccinating mass amounts of young women for this? ......... interesting considering when themarisol (mercury) was taken out of hep and other vaccines, the cases of children born with autism dropped over 60%....this is proven fact.....and they knew this info beforehand and made a conscious decision to continue with the mercury (even though it has also been proven that the mercury does nothing to help the patient).....

[seanx]

Furor on Rush to Require Cervical Cancer Vaccine

NY Times | February 17, 2007
STEPHANIE SAUL and ANDREW POLLACK

Racing to embrace a new vaccine, at least 20 states are considering mandatory inoculation of young girls against the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer.

But a roaring backlash has some health experts worried that the proponents, including the vaccine's maker, Merck, have pushed too far too fast, potentially undermining eventual prospects for the broadest possible immunization.

Groups wary of drug industry motives find themselves on the same side of the anti-vaccination debate with unexpected political allies: religious and cultural conservatives who oppose mandatory use of the vaccine because they say it would encourage sexual activity by young girls.

Even some who support use of the vaccine question the rush and the vaccine's high cost — about $400 for the three-shot course. “The decision to make this mandatory this early has created a significant controversy over things that have nothing to do with the vaccine,” said Dr. Joseph A. Bocchini, chairman of the committee on infectious diseases of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Like most other public health experts, Dr. Bocchini advocates the vaccine's use. But many say the rush toward mandatory inoculation could prove counterproductive.

Most of the proposals call for vaccinating girls before they enter the 6th grade, a group that would include about two million girls nationwide annually if all states imposed the requirement.

In Texas, Gov. Rick Perry recently issued an order that girls be vaccinated. But some legislators are trying to overturn the order, with some opponents complaining because the governor's former chief of staff is now a lobbyist for Merck. State lawmakers are scheduled to hold a hearing Monday on a bill to rescind that order.

And in Illinois, a bill introduced by a legislator who had the virus the vaccine is intended to prevent prompted a conservative group's blog to speculate that she had been promiscuous.

“I'm offended by their ignorance, but if I have to take a hit to educate people, I'm willing to do it,” said the bill's sponsor, Debbie Halvorson, the Democratic majority leader in the Illinois Senate.

Ms. Halvorson is also a director of Women in Government, a national association of state legislators that has embraced the fight against cervical cancer and has received funding from Merck. The group has posted model mandatory vaccination legislation on its Web site, www.womeningovernment.org. The rush for mandatory inoculation — most of the state proposals have been introduced since the beginning of the year — is unusual. It was only last June that federal regulators approved the vaccine, called Gardasil.

Typically new vaccines, like the one for chicken pox in the mid-1990's, have been rolled out gradually in this country, with public health officials endorsing mandatory use only after several years of experience have shown the new products to be generally safe and effective.

“Generally the mandates have been enacted over years,” said Dr. Janet R. Gilsdorf, the director of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Michigan.

An advisory panel of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended last summer that girls and women ages 11 to 26 be vaccinated with Gardasil. But members of the committee say that such a recommendation is not equivalent to calling for mandatory vaccination.

Even before the vaccine's approval, though, Merck had begun laying the political foundation in state legislatures to promote widespread vaccination of young girls.

Gardasil and another vaccine under development by the drug maker GlaxoSmithKline are aimed at the human papilloma virus, or H.P.V., which is known to be the cause of cervical cancer. Analysts see a potential $5 billion a year market for H.P.V. vaccines, and some say that Merck is intent on inoculating as many girls as possible before the introduction of Glaxo's product, which could become available this year.

Merck's president for vaccines, Margaret McGlynn, acknowledged a sense of urgency. But she said it was motivated by the need to eradicate the disease.

“Each and every day that a female delays getting the vaccine there is a chance she is exposed to human papilloma virus,” Ms. McGlynn said.

The company, which said it had shipped two million doses of Gardasil by the end of 2006, has begun advertising in many parts of the country. Merck declined to disclose its lobbying and advertising budget for the vaccine.

Gardasil protects against two strains of H.P.V. that cause about 70 percent of the cases of cervical cancer as well as two other strains that cause genital warts. In approving the vaccine last June, the Food and Drug Administration said that in the United States each year there were an average of 9,710 new cases of cervical cancer and 3,700 deaths attributed to it.

The disease's toll is higher in other parts of the world than it is in the United States, where most women get routine Pap smears to detect early precancerous changes in the cervix. Worldwide, cervical cancer is the second-most-common cancer in women. It causes more than 470,000 new cases and 233,000 deaths each year, according to the F.D.A.

Merck's main partner in the vaccination campaign, Women in Government, also receives funding from Glaxo, as well as Digene, a company that makes a test to detect the presence of H.P.V. Over the last two years, Women in Government has been holding a series of luncheons and conferences nationwide to discuss its fight against cervical cancer, including the use of vaccines.

Opponents of mandatory inoculation include anti-vaccine activists, who argue that the vaccine has not been tested in enough young girls and who have listed various side effects reported among users, which have included dizziness, nausea and fever. Others include conservative Christian groups who oppose mandatory H.P.V. vaccination on moral grounds, and those who are generally distrustful of the pharmaceutical industry.

“It's a very messy thing to be promoting right now,” said Fran Eaton, editor of the conservative blog in Illinois where one writer attacked Senator Halvorson's morality. “If you're a conservative, you're going to be worried about parental rights. If you're a liberal, you're worried that the pharmaceutical companies are taking over the United States.”

One activist who frequently criticizes pharmaceutical companies, Vera Hassner Sharav, and a co-author suggested that the H.P.V. vaccine stood for a campaign to “Help Pay for Vioxx” losses. Vioxx, the painkiller taken off the market in 2004 because it was linked to cardiovascular problems, was also made by Merck.

Lawmakers in Indiana have been targets of e-mail campaigns from out of state, according to Connie Lawson, a Republican Senator who sponsored the mandatory vaccine legislation pending in that state and who is the chairman of Women in Government.

“Accusations were being made,” Senator Lawson said. “I don't even think I should repeat some of the things that were said.”

The controversy worries public health experts like Dr. Bocchini, who is also the chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center. He is concerned that the outcry might make the public mistrustful of a vaccine that would otherwise be to its benefit.

“If the public had enough experience with the vaccine and had enough knowledge about H.P.V., the question about whether to get the vaccine or give it to their daughters wouldn't be an issue,” Dr. Bocchini said.

Some of the bills, despite calling for compulsory vaccination, have “opt out” provisions, letting parents citing religious or moral grounds to choose not to have their daughters inoculated. Those provisions also have raised concerns among public health experts.

“A lot of us are concerned that if you allow people to opt out of one vaccine, they will opt out of other vaccines that are due at the same time,” said Dr. Mark Myers, executive director of the National Network for Immunization Information (www.immunizationinfo.org).

Several lawmakers have said that their motivation in supporting mandatory H.P.V. vaccines was to ensure widespread inoculation and to erase economic disparities in cervical cancer, which is most common among low-income women who are the least likely to have Pap smear screening.

The chairman of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University, Dr. Willam Schaffner, said that when mandates were in place, racial and economic disparities in who was vaccinated virtually disappeared.

The first effort to mandate H.P.V. vaccinations for school girls began last fall in Michigan, where a bill, introduced by a leader in Women in Government, was defeated amid opposition from an anti-vaccine group.

But the main legislative thrust began this year in what appeared to be a coordinated effort. The National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks such legislation, reports that at least 31 states are deliberating bills that would require vaccination, funding for vaccinations or the distribution of information about H.P.V. A synopsis of the bills is listed at the national conference's Web site (www.ncsl.org/programs/health/HPVvaccine.htm).

Groups on both sides of the debate appear to have been energized by the executive order of Gov. Rick Perry on Feb. 2 mandating vaccination. Opponents have pounced on Gov. Perry's ties to Merck and Women in Government. His former chief of staff is a lobbyist for Merck in the state and his wife, a nurse who has worked to promote health, once spoke at a Women in Government conference on cervical cancer.

“I looked at all of this and said, someone is playing politics,” said Cathie Adams, president of the Texas Eagle Forum, a branch of Phyllis Schlafly's national Eagle Forum, a conservative group that calls itself “pro-family.”

Citing various reasons, the Texas Medical Association is not currently supporting mandatory vaccination.

Dr. Carol Baker, a professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said that two other vaccines for adolescents that were approved in recent years — against meningitis and whooping cough — have not yet been mandated in Texas. “To mandate just one, in my view, is a little odd,” she said.

The American Academy of Pediatrics is not advocating mandatory Gardasil vaccination, either. One source of opposition from pediatricians is cost. Buying enough H.P.V. vaccine for 100 girls would require a practice to lay out nearly $40,000 in advance. Many doctors say that the insurance reimbursement for giving the vaccine is not adequate to compensate them for administering it.

Dr. Bocchini of the American Academy of Pediatrics also said too much of the Gardasil focus was being placed on 11- and 12-year-olds, when legislatures should be focusing on trying to obtain funding to vaccinate girls and women in the 13-to-26 age group, many of whom are not covered by the federal vaccine programs aimed at children.

“A number of people are just not going to be able to get this vaccine,” he said.

[seanx]

Would this be an attempt to force more heavy metal toxins into our population?.......Did anyone see the NASCAR fiasco with vaccinations about a month ago?

If you can' suppress the population through financial and political means.....just poison 'em..........:

news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071204/ap_on_he_me/spoiled_vaccine


Vaccines ruined by poor refrigeration By MELANIE S. WELTE, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 40 minutes ago



DES MOINES, Iowa - Every year, thousands of American children go through the tearful, teeth-gritting ordeal of getting their vaccinations, only to be forced to do it all over again. The vaccines were duds, ruined by poor refrigeration.


It is more than a source of distress for parent and child. It is a public health threat, because youngsters given understrength vaccines are unprotected against dangerous diseases. And it accounts for a big part of the $20 million in waste incurred by the federal Vaccines for Children program.

"This is a substantial problem that needs to be addressed through prevention, and when problems are discovered, often times through revaccinations," said Dr. Lance Rodewald, director of immunization services at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

By CDC estimates, hundreds of thousands of doses of vaccines against such diseases as flu, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, polio, mumps, measles, chicken pox and the cervical cancer virus are thrown out each year because of poor refrigeration at clinics, hospitals and doctors' offices.

In one recent case in Sioux City, Iowa, more than 1,000 families were notified by letter and telephone that they needed to get their children revaccinated. State officials found that the refrigerator at the clinic that administered the shots repeatedly dropped below freezing over a 17-month period in 2005 and 2006, potentially ruining the vaccines stored there.

"We just didn't notice it," said Dr. Ray Sturdevant, president of the Prairie Pediatrics and Adolescent Clinic.

Poor refrigeration has been blamed for similar problems elsewhere around the country over the past 2 1/2 years:

• In St. Cloud, Minn., a clinic had to revaccinate 8,600 patients, most of them children.

• In Lane County, Ore., 500 children and adults had to get another shot.

• In western Florida, it happened to about 250 kids.

In Sioux City and other cases, the spoilage resulted from a combination of factors: The refrigerator malfunctioned or was not set or maintained at the proper temperature — a problem that can be caused simply by leaving the door open for a while — and the workers responsible for regularly logging the temperature did not seem to recognize when the readings were off.

"We do everything we can to advise and to make people aware that this is very expensive vaccines they're dealing with and we really want to handle it properly and store it properly to prevent these things from happening — but they do," said Charles Alexander, chief of immunization with the Florida Health Department.

Inadequate refrigeration can cause vaccines to lose their potency, although experts say spoiled childhood vaccines are not dangerous in themselves if given to a youngster.

And there are no known cases of children contracting a disease because they had been given a vaccine rendered ineffective by poor refrigeration. But it could happen, and "that's why we're concerned about it," Rodewald said.

Since 2000 the CDC has pushed state health departments to visit clinics and check their refrigerators. Most states require clinics to use refrigerators with reliable thermometers that can be monitored, and staff members must know what to do when temperatures are above or below the proper range, Rodewald said.

Waste costs the $2 billion-a-year federal Vaccines for Children Program about $20 million a year, and the biggest single problem is improper refrigeration, Rodewald said. Other causes: The vaccines expire or were damaged in shipment.

Rodewald had no breakdown of how much in waste is attributable to poor refrigeration. But he emphasized that the losses amount to an extremely small percentage of the childhood vaccine program.

"The childhood program saves $10 billion each year in direct health care costs by preventing disease among children," he said. "Although preventing vaccine wastage is a priority, the amount wasted should be placed in the context of the overall program economic benefits."

Altogether in 2006, there were 32 instances in Iowa in which vaccines were not refrigerated correctly, said Dr. Patricia Quinlisk, state epidemiologist. Quinlisk would not say how many patients were affected, but estimated $750,000 worth of vaccine in the Vaccine for Children Program was wasted.

"We will get months and months and months of vaccine refrigerator logs where the refrigerator is out of the temperature and nobody has done anything except every day mark down it's out of temperature," she said.

In the Minnesota case, the refrigerator was not kept at the proper temperature and there were gaps in documentation, said Jill Marette of the Minnesota Department of Health.

"It's stressful to vaccinate your children in the first place — just the idea of giving them all those shots. Then you have to think about getting revaccinated," Marette said.

Of greatest concern is the chickenpox vaccine. It must be kept frozen at an average temperature of 5 degrees or lower and should be kept in the dark. Children who receive an ineffective vaccine could easily become infected because the disease is fairly common in the U.S.

Dr. Joseph Bocchini, chairman of the Committee on Infectious Diseases with the American Academy of Pediatrics, said his group and others have issued clear recommendations about storing vaccines, and refrigerators can be equipped with alarms that sound when the temperature goes out of range.