When the U.S. introduced the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine in 2006,
cervical cancer rates had been steadily declining for several decades, in large part due to successful and routinized cervical cancer
screening. A similar trend also was underway in Europe, including in Scandinavia. Within that region,
Sweden stood out as having the lowest levels of cervical cancer.
Sweden now appears poised to lose this
distinction. Sweden’s Center for Cervical Cancer Prevention reported in
2017 that the incidence of invasive cervical cancer has reversed course
and is climbing in nearly all counties. The increase was particularly
steep (20%) over the two-year period from 2013 to 2015. Neither the
Center, health authorities nor the media offered any explanation for the
turnaround in the country’s long-established cervical cancer trends.
An independent Swedish researcher decided to take a closer look. On
April 30, 2018, the researcher proposed in the
Indian Journal of Medical Ethics that the HPV vaccine may be
causing rather
than preventing cervical cancer in some women. This assertion directly
threatens the status quo marketing of HPV vaccines as universally safe
and effective. For this reason, the author chose to publish under a
pseudonym—in the belief that “the use of his real name would have
invited personal repercussions from those opposed to any questioning of
vaccines”—but did not inform the journal that the published name and
affiliation were fictitious. A week later, this omission became known to
the journal’s editors, who were affronted and immediately published a
correction.
However, the editors also took the unusual and courageous step of
keeping the article on the journal’s website because “the issues raised
by it are important and discussion on it is in the public interest.”
Young women and the HPV vaccine
As a first step in assessing the
unexpected uptick in Sweden’s cervical cancer incidence, the anonymous
researcher’s simple analytic strategy was to parse, by age group, the
same national data that informed the 2017 report. When the researcher
compared cervical cancer rates in younger women (ages 20-49) to rates
for older women (over age 50), he found that age made a big difference: “
The increase in the incidence of cervical cancer was shown to be most prominent among women 20–49 years of age while
no apparent increase was observed among women above 50” [emphasis
added]. When he compared changes in invasive cervical cancer incidence
in 2006 versus 2015, he again found that the increase mostly affected
younger women—and especially women in their twenties. Why should this be
the case, when we are told that HPV-induced cervical cancer “often
takes
years, even decades, to develop after a person gets HPV”?
As one answer, the Swedish researcher
points out that the slow-simmer timeline does not apply to all women who
get cervical cancer. In fact,
rapid onset characterizes roughly
25% of cases,
with “a short interval of less than 3 years from negative…screenings to
finding of cancer.” This means that an increase in cervical cancer
incidence could very well be discernable within the short period of time
observed in Sweden:
- The country approved the Gardasil vaccine in 2006.
- By 2010, about four-fifths (80%) of 12-year-old
girls were given the vaccine, and about three-fifths (59%) of
13–18-year-old girls were vaccinated through a “catch-up” program.
- By 2012-2013, “most young girls were vaccinated.”
- By 2015, the oldest girls in the “catch-up” group
(ages 15-18) had reached their early twenties and thus were “well
within” the 20-29-year-old cohort that displayed the greatest increase
in cervical cancer incidence.
Gardasil vaccination in this subgroup produced a higher level of premalignant cell changes than did placebo.
Disease enhancement and viral reactivation
The Swedish researcher offers two
additional (and potentially overlapping) explanations for the surge in
invasive cervical cancer in younger women. First, he explains that seven
in ten cases of cervical cancer are linked to just two “target” HPV
strains (HPV 16 and 18), and the vaccine is useless—and even damaging—to
individuals who have been exposed to those strains prior to
vaccination. In fact, he shows that the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) recognized this problem in its clinical review of
Gardasil in 2006, which euphemistically described the “
potential for disease enhancement”
in Gardasil-vaccinated individuals who had been exposed to HPV 16/18
before vaccination compared to individuals with no HPV 16/18 exposure
(p. 359). Gardasil vaccination in this subgroup produced “a higher level
of premalignant cell changes than did placebo.”
To account for the differential subgroup
effects, the researcher points to the phenomenon (well recognized in
the peer-reviewed literature) of vaccine-induced viral “
reactivation,”
whereby a vaccine triggers a latent virus to manifest “severe
reactivation symptoms.” With over 200 known strains of the ubiquitous
human papillomavirus (and over a dozen that are associated with cervical
cancer), it is fully plausible that the HPV vaccine could reactivate
cancer-causing HPV strains (both “target” and “non-target”) in
previously HPV-infected young women. The Swedish researcher concludes:
“The increased incidence among young
females, the possibility of virus reactivation after vaccination, the
increase in premalignant cell changes shown by the FDA for women who
were already exposed to oncogenic [tumor-inducing] HPV types
and the time relationship between the start of vaccination and the
increase in cervical cancer in Sweden could support [the] view” that the
HPV vaccine is “caus[ing] an increase in invasive cervical cancer
instead of preventing it among already infected females.”
An appalling record
From their inception, the two HPV vaccines (Merck’s Gardasil and, outside the U.S., GlaxoSmithKline’s Cervarix) have been
aggressively marketed, with their potential benefits oversold and their many risks disguised, particularly through the use of
inappropriate placebos. It has been left to independent researchers to critique the regulatory apparatus’s
whitewashed evidence. Recent letters published in the
British Medical Journal (BMJ) have brought forward some stark numbers that illustrate the vaccine’s appalling record:
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…from an individual
perspective, “a healthy 16-year-old is at zero immediate risk of dying
from cervical cancer but is faced with a small but real risk of death or
serious disability from a vaccine that has yet to prevent a single case
of cervical cancer.”
One group of Indian researchers
argues that
from an individual perspective, “a healthy 16-year-old is at zero
immediate risk of dying from cervical cancer but is faced with a small
but real risk of death or serious disability from a vaccine that has yet
to prevent a single case of cervical cancer.” From a programmatic
perspective, they state that “there is no data in the literature to
suggest that vaccination can replace cervical cancer screening. For any
population coverage, cervical screening will always detect more
pre-cancers and cancers than vaccination can prevent. Cost-effectiveness
analyses have shown that cervical screening is more cost-effective than
either vaccination alone or vaccination with screening.”
Returning to Sweden, researchers at the Uppsala Monitoring Center have
described how
easy it is for risks to “escape epidemiological detection.” The
implications, according to this group, are that “case reports and case
series can no longer be discarded simply as ‘anecdotes’ or
‘coincidence,’ and their contribution to the evidence base should not be
‘trumped’ by the findings of an epidemiological study.”
The bottom
line is that a corrupt vaccine approval process should not be allowed to
sacrifice young women on the altar of industry profits.
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