Challenging compulsory vaccination with Gardasil

Compulsory Vaccination

A letter to Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott

By Elizabeth Hart, Adelaide, Australia

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s recent edict making vaccination compulsory for children of all ages for financial incentives means vaccination with the Gardasil HPV vaccine product will also be compulsory.

See below my letter to Prime Minister Abbott challenging compulsory HPV vaccination (4 July 2015).

A fully referenced version of this letter is accessible via this link: http://bit.ly/1CThwXW

For more details please see my “Say No to Compulsory Over-vaccination!” campaign: http://over-vaccination.net/

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Dear Prime Minister

In my letter dated 22 June 2015, I suggest your edict for compulsory vaccination contravenes the obligation for ‘legally valid consent’ before vaccination, as outlined in Section 2.1.3 of The Australian Immunisation Handbook.

People are being pressured, coerced and manipulated into having vaccination for children to access financial benefits, and are not being allowed to properly consider “the potential risks and benefits of the relevant vaccine, risks of not having it and any alternative options”.

In my letter I referred to questionable vaccines and repeat vaccinations on the Australian Federal Government’s National Immunisation Program Schedule. The process for adding vaccine products to the schedule lacks transparency and accountability owing to the secrecy surrounding possibly conflicted vaccination committees, as I outline in my letter to you dated 21 January 2015. I suggest public confidence in the ever-increasing national vaccination schedule is at risk of being undermined by the addition of vaccine products of questionable value.

It is now time for an open re-evaluation of what level of disease risk justifies taxpayer funded mass vaccination, and a revision of the National Immunisation Program Schedule.

For instance, the Gardasil human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine (3 x doses) is listed on the schedule for all adolescents aged between 12 and 13 years, and you have decreed this vaccine will be compulsory to access financial benefits from 1 January 2016.

I suggest that Gardasil HPV vaccination should not be on the taxpayer funded schedule, and that the fast-tracked implementation of this vaccine product in 2006 should be subject to an investigation.

The basis for mass vaccination with the experimental Gardasil HPV vaccine is highly questionable, as the risk of cancer associated with the HPV virus is very low, as admitted by Professor Ian Frazer, the co-inventor of the technology enabling HPV vaccination.

In an article on the Australian government and university and CSIRO-funded The Conversation website, titled “Catch cancer? No thanks, I’d rather have a shot!”, Professor Frazer states:

“Through sexual activity, most of us will get infected with the genital papillomaviruses that can cause cancer. Fortunately, most of us get rid of them between 12 months to five years later without even knowing we’ve had the infection. Even if the infection persists, only a few individuals accumulate enough genetic mistakes in the virus-infected cell for these to acquire the properties of cancer cells.”

If only “a few individuals accumulate enough genetic mistakes in the virus-infected cell for these to acquire the properties of cancer cells”, I question whether it is justifiable to compel children to have HPV vaccination.

A Cancer Australia Fact Sheet acknowledges that cervical cancer is uncommon, and that “since the introduction of the National Cervical Screening Program in 1991, the number of new cases of cervical cancer for women of all ages almost halved to 2005, and mortality also halved from 1991 to 2006”.

The Australian National Cervical Screening Program (NCSP) website notes: “Most people will have HPV at some time in their lives and never know it…Most HPV infections clear up by themselves without causing any problems. Infections can cause cervical abnormalities, which, if they persist, can lead to cervical cancer.” The NCSP website notes that: “It is important to remember that most women who have HPV clear the virus and do not go on to develop cervical cancer” and “For most women, their immune system will clear the virus, similar to getting rid of a common cold.”

Gardasil Consumer Medicine Information approved by the TGA in Australia acknowledges Gardasil will not protect against all HPV types, and women will need to continue to follow their doctor or health care provider’s instructions on regular Pap tests. (Cervical screening is scheduled to change to 5-yearly HPV testing from May 2017.)

There is a welter of material in the ‘peer-reviewed’ literature supporting HPV vaccination. However, much of this material is conflicted by industry funding and authors’ associations with vaccine manufacturers. 

A recent review published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases includes this interpretation: “Our results are promising for the long-term population-level effects of HPV vaccination programmes. However, continued monitoring is essential to identify any signals of potential waning efficacy or type-replacement.” (My emphasis.)

How many children and their parents are being properly informed of the low risk of cancer associated with the HPV virus, and the possibility of waning efficacy or type-replacement with the use of HPV vaccines, and the implications this may have? It is my strong suspicion that in many instances ‘legally valid consent’ is not being properly obtained before this medical intervention, and that children and their parents are unaware that they are being used as guinea pigs for this still experimental vaccine product. The long-term consequences of this vaccine product are as yet unknown.

A recent article in the UK media about girls suffering adverse experiences after HPV vaccination, includes comments from British epidemiologist Dr Tom Jefferson, a global authority on vaccine trial evidence associated with The Cochrane Collaboration. In the article Dr Jefferson says “The HPV vaccine’s benefits have been hyped and the harms hardly investigated…The reason for introducing vaccination against HPV was to prevent cancer…but there is no clinical evidence to prove it will do that. We have to tread a very careful line, weighing the potential benefits and harms that a vaccine may cause. With HPV, the harms have not been properly studied…It is extremely difficult to publish anything against HPV vaccination. Vaccines have become like a religion. They are not something you question. If you do, you are seen as being an anti-vaccine extremist. The authorities do not want to hear ‘side-effect’”. (I suggest Dr Jefferson’s comments are relevant to both the Gardasil and Cervarix HPV vaccines.)

The article notes Dr Jefferson is “highly critical of the drug company funded clinical trial data that is used to justify the use of mass vaccination” and adds that “pharmaceutical companies may hide negative results deep in their trial data and hugely inflate the benefits”.

Prime Minister Abbott, Gardasil HPV vaccination was fast-tracked in Australia under very questionable circumstances when you were Federal Health Minister in 2006. The Gardasil HPV vaccine was originally rejected by the Australian Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC) but this decision was overturned after interference by then Prime Minister John Howard. According to an article by Matthew Stevens published in The Australian newspaper at the time it took just 24 hours for John Howard to deliver “sparkling prime ministerial endorsement to Gardasil” along with a clear direction to you Mr Abbott, “that the immunisation program should proceed. And pronto.”

Professor Marion Haas provides some commentary on the Australian Government’s interference with the PBAC’s initial rejection of Gardasil, noting Prime Minister Howard “intervened personally by announcing that the drug would be subsidised (i.e. listed) as soon as the manufacturer offered the right price. The PBAC subsequently convened a special meeting and recommended that Gardasil be listed on the PBS”.

Professor Haas notes government reaction which results in reversal of PBAC decisions has “the potential to send signals to manufacturers and lobby groups that a decision made by the PBAC may be reversed if sufficient public and/or political pressure is able to be brought to bear on the PBAC…this may undermine the processes used by the PBAC to determine its recommendations and hence the perceived independence of the PBAC.”

After the Australian Government’s interference in this matter, other countries adopted HPV vaccination, resulting in billions of dollars’ worth of sales for the makers of the HPV vaccines, i.e. Merck (Gardasil) and GlaxoSmithKline (Cervarix), and royalties for entrepreneurial scientist Ian Frazer from sales of HPV vaccines in developed countries, and for CSL which receives royalties from sales of Gardasil .

Prime Minister Abbott, the addition of the Gardasil HPV vaccine to the Australian taxpayer funded national vaccination schedule is highly questionable. It is wrong that children will be compelled to have this vaccine product to access financial benefits. I request that taxpayer funded mass HPV vaccination be subject to an urgent review.

Sincerely
Elizabeth Hart
http://over-vaccination.net/