Cervarix - Armed for life? United Kingdom says ‘NO’ as they battle false advertising

31 August 2010, France banned advertising Gardasil as an anti-cancer vaccine in their country. Activists from the United Kingdom are battling the same problem with the advertising campaign for GlaxoSmithKline’s HPV vaccine, Cervarix.

Jan 06, 2011 – It appears false marketing claims are not limited to a single manufacturer and/or distributor of HPV vaccines.

2 February 2010, investigative journalist, Christina England, wrote an article entitled, “Cervarix HPV vaccine adverts are untrue and should be banned.” At the time, she was talking about advertisements plastered on the sides of buses used for transportation along every school route in West Sussex and the route to a local hospital. The advertisements proclaiming Cervarix would ensure you were ‘armed for life’ against cervical cancer were also posted inside the buses and on bathroom doors in local cinemas.

According to Christina, and scientists around the world, giving medical consumers the impression of lifelong protection from the possibility of contracting cervical cancer was an out and out lie. Christina felt compelled to file a formal complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).

Apparently, they agreed with her. By 03 March 2010, the ASA had resolved the matter informally and West Sussex Primary Care Trust was required to remove the offending advertisements.

The Advertising Standards Authority demanded that the words “arm yourself for life” must be changed or removed. The complaint against West Sussex PCT was resolved and the results posted online with no mention of the vaccination programme. (See Grace Filby’s article, “Truth about Cervarix, a modern history lesson” for more information.)

Subsequently, the UK Department of Health advertising campaign was halted and the advertisements almost completely removed from the internet. The only references now found are on personal websites, such as the two referenced above.

However, websites do not come under the purview of ASA in the United Kingdom. Grace Filby recently discovered websites sponsored by Westminster Primary Care Trust which ignore the order to remove the words, “arm yourself for life,” and make misleading claims.

Grace responded by going to the source of the offending advertisements. She contacted Westminster PCT and demanded the ads be modified or removed, and that the National Health Service Westminster make a public statement regarding said changes.

Her contact at Westminster PCT has indicated it will take approximately 25 working days to ‘sort things out,’ and that their decision will be ‘guided by the Department of Health.’

On behalf of medical consumers around the world, the SaneVax Team would like to thank Christina England, Grace Filby, and all activists in the United Kingdom fighting to make sure the truth is told. It is high time pharmaceutical companies were required to print the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about their latest ‘medical miracles.’

If pharmaceutical companies must depend on marketing spins and distorting the truth to convince medical consumers to buy into their campaigns, then perhaps their medical miracles are not such miracles after all.

Sources:

* For more info, see: http://vactruth.com/2010/02/02/cervarix-hpv-vaccine-adve ...

* For more info, see: http://gracefilby.blogspot.com/p/truth-about-cervarix.html

# # #

Please visit our site at http://sanevax.org/


SaneVax believes only Safe, Affordable, Necessary & Effective vaccines and vaccination practices should be offered to the public. Our primary goal is to provide scientific information/resources for those concerned about vaccine safety, efficacy and need.