What Really Went Wrong with Gardasil

North Hollywood, CA, September 10, 2010 — On September 7, 2010, Shelly Dubois wrote an article for Fortune - on CNNMoney.com, titled: What’s Wrong with Gardasil. SANE Vax.org believes that the article discredits the thousands of families, who have suffered deaths and adverse injuries to their daughters in the name of financial numbers and award-winning marketing strategies. 


The article opens with: “There’s a liquid drug that women can get injected into a layer of muscle — three separate times over a six-month period — that can protect them from a kind of cancer. From a scientific perspective, that’s amazing. In terms of public health, it’s a breakthrough.

“But four years after Merck (MRK, Fortune 500) released this would-be top-seller, called Gardasil, it has proven to be a marketplace dud. In Merck’s second quarter, the company reported an 18% year-over-year drop in sales to $219 million and its stock is down nearly 3% to date. Analysts are pointing to Gardasil not as a savior, but as a risk for investors.”

Dubois comments on the reasons why this vaccine has now become a “marketplace dud” stating that Gardasil ran into two major roadblocks: consumer inertia and politics.

1) People are spending less on medicine in general.

2) Some parents aren’t comfortable vaccinating young children against a virus they can only get from having sex.

3) Merck didn’t properly prepare the right doctors.

4) Merck couldn’t counter the bad press.

Although Ms. Dubois does allude to one death from Gardasil she quickly covers her tracks by writing “no one linked Gardasil to the cause of death, but the drug was launched into the fierce debate over vaccine safety.”

It is appalling that the numbers of adverse reactions and deaths to Gardasil were not mentioned in this critique. That is what really went wrong with this vaccine.

The following adverse reactions and deaths have been reported to the Vaccines Advent Reporting System (VAERS) as of 9/2/2010:

Adverse Reactions

Gardasil - 18,461

Cervarix - 426

HPV Vaccines - 137

TOTAL - 19,024

Deaths

Gardasil 77

Cervarix 4

TOTAL - 81

In March of this year the number of reactions reported stood at 16,000. That means 3,000 more reports were made over the last 6 months - or approx. 125 reports a week. That is what went wrong with Gardasil.
SANE Vax would like to answer the question that Ms. Dubois raises about why girls aren’t completing the vaccines series. “The Centers for Disease Control reported in late August that while 44% of teenagers received the HPV vaccine in 2009, only 27% of them received all three doses of the shot. Unfortunately, there isn’t evidence to support that getting only one shot effectively protects against cancer. So why aren’t women finishing the series?”

According to the 2008 FDA Closing Statement on Gardasil, it was noted that 73.3% of girls receiving the vaccine would develop “new medical conditions.”  Just doing the quick math with only 27% completing the series and 73% getting some kind of “mystery illness’ undiagnosed by doctors - SANE Vax believes that the question answers itself.

What went wrong with Gardasil is not about the financial numbers, marketing strategies, consumer inertia, or politics - it is about destroying the lives of those it was supposed to save.