Part-Time Pundit: Crevical Cancer, Vaccines, and Deception

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July 13, 2006

Crevical Cancer, Vaccines, and Deception

It's one thing to have reframing in political discourse where blind partisanship reigns. It is an entirely different matter when reframing starts affecting medical information presented to patients. The recent acclaim for the cervical cancer vaccine is one such case of reframing the debate going drastically wrong.

One important fact about the cervical cancer vaccine is that it is not designed to prevent cervical cancer. There is no medical study or information that will refute this point. What this vaccine prevents in human papillomavirus (HPV) or genital warts. It just so happens that HPV is the leading cause of cervical cancer.

Saying this vaccine prevents cervical cancer is like saying prohibition prevented car accidents. Sure, less people got drunk and starting driving cars, but that's not quite the point. The vaccine does not attack cervical cancer directly.

Typically medical treatments are described by the condition they are directly treating. A polio vaccine prevents polio. The measles vaccine prevents measles. The question is why this HPV vaccine is being described as a cervical cancer vaccine.

HPV is a sexually transmitted disease, one that isn't effectively prevented from being spread by condoms or other birth control methods. As a result, tens of millions of people in the United States alone are carriers of the virus. This disease is in pandemic proportions. Instead of taming sexual behavior to deal with the risk of this disease, the medical community invents a vaccine so promiscuity can continue without consequences.

In an attempt to downplay the significance of HPV and the rates people have been infected by it, the medical community refuses to describe this vaccine by what it actually does. What is even more disquieting is the attempt to have this vaccine administered to young girls as a requirement to attend school even before it has been established that there are no harmful effects that this vaccine will cause to girls of that age.

If the government is going to require children to congregate in schools, it has the obligation to make sure that those children do so in an environment that is healthy. This should not be confused with free license for the government to usurp the medical decision-making rights of parents.

Requiring vaccines for communicable diseases like polio, measles, mumps, and the like makes sense. Those diseases spread through no action of children who are in the same classroom with one another. HPV is in another class. In order to transmit HPV, one has to have sex with someone infected with it. While sex education is schools has the affect of encouraging premarital and promiscuous sex, schools still generally look down on children actually having sex at school. Therefore, schools have no stake whatsoever in whether students are vaccinated for HPV.

Describing this vaccine as a cervical cancer vaccine makes it artificially "amenable" to parents when schools start requiring the vaccine. Who would be against preventing cancer? However, when one starts talking about preventing sexually transmitted diseases, other factors come into play.

For instance, the "conventional wisdom" of the school administrator and medical community elite is that abstinence education is harmful for children. Despite thousands of years of history that prove abstinence education works, these elites insist that children need to be taught not only the methods to prevent pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases, but be provided with those methods in schools despite parental objections. Parents who object should be overruled as acting against the children's best interests. Elites are using schools as a means of power-projection over children attempting to influence matters far beyond the scope of education.

The fact that government bureaucrats and medical professionals are calling the HPV vaccine a cervical cancer vaccine, with a clear eye towards mandating the vaccine for school children, should cause parents to stand up and take notice. This latest provocation against the authority of parents shows a bureaucracy not focusing on what it was designed to do, educate children, but ever expanding its power over children and families. Just who is serving whom?

Posted by John Bambenek at July 13, 2006 9:56 PM

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» HPV Vaccine from Papa Familias
John Bambenek has a post on the new HPV vaccine, recently approved and soon to be distrubuted to 12-year old girls in your local middle school. This reminds me of something else I heard on that On Point show I... [Read More]

Tracked on July 14, 2006 9:24 AM

Comments

Two points: one in support, one a half-hearted counter-point.

1. The half-fearted counterpoint. HPV is not a normal STD. It is passed through skin-to-skin contact. Therefore somebody who contracted the virus through normal sexual contact can pass it on through, er, non-normal, shall we say, Clintonian, sexual contact, and then it can be passed by more harmless behavior. It's not quite as innocent as the measles, but neither is it gonorrhea.

2. That said, this "vaccine" will only be effective against 70% of cance-causing HPV strains and is not guaranteed to be effective in preventing cancer. Estimates of its actual effectiveness in preventing cancer range from 20 - 60%, and that figure was from a very strong proponent of the vaccine. So 13 year olds will get this vaccine, think they are immune from this disease and will be less vigilant in protecting their bodies, and they will get cancer and die. This is another case of the "safe-sex" crowd endangering more and more lives.

Posted by: Chris at July 14, 2006 8:34 AM