But what is worse and should instill greater outrage is that we are not dealing with a pharmaceutical company with a relatively clean and innocent record--if such a pharmaceutical entity actually exists--but we are facing Merck. In the case of Toyota, there is reason to consider the automaker a first time offender. Until the recent recall, Toyota had a near unblemished reputation for manufacturing safe, reliable and popular vehicles for many years.
Merck on the other hand has proven itself to be a notorious repeat offender. One would expect that any drug maker steeped in a well-documented record of criminality and fraud would immediately raise a red flag to federal health officials when one of its products shows every indication of threatening the health and lives of young American girls over the course of four years. Usually when a crime is committed, repeat offenders are among the first to be investigated.Â
There should be no hesitation in viewing Merck as the pharmaceutical industrial complex's most dangerous serial killer. Vioxx alone accounted for over 44,000 deaths and 120,000 serious medical injuries behind a trail of deception and corporate cover-ups by withholding clinical information and documents confirming Vioxx's adverse effects. The company has been charged with intentionally hiding the liver-damaging effects of its cholesterol drug, and intentionally withholding the release of clinical data that revealed failures of another cholesterol product. It has dumped vaccine waste and toxic chemicals in water supplies. In 2008, it paid out $650 million for over-billing Medicaid. An Australian civil suit has been filed against the company for publishing fake medical journals; the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine and six others were simply phony surrogates for Merck advertising. Finally, the drug giant was caught in a huge scheme of scientific fraud when it was discovered that in-house writers were secretly being used to compose so-called "independent" studies to support their research in peer-reviewed medical journals.Â
However, we should never underestimate the depth of Merck's pockets and its power and influence to persuade our federal regulators and elected officials to comply with its financial bidding and lobbying demands. Clearly Merck is a leader in the pharmaceutical cartel and a major force in the drug lobbying industry, if not the entire American medical regime.Â
In the shadows of Merck's lawsuits and payouts, Merck has been in dire need of a blockbuster drug. In order to position itself as the first to bring an HPV vaccine to market, Merck commenced with a marketing campaign founded upon misinformation and deception. It hired the world's largest advertising master of deception, the PR monster firm Edelman, best known for its early misinformation campaign for its client R.J. Reynolds on behalf of the tobacco industry. Another major Edelman client is Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the principal lobbying organization for the pharmaceutical industry that helped leverage Obamacare to care more for Big Pharma's revenues and shareholder interests than the health of the nation's citizens. According to Bloomberg News, Merck spent over $840,000 to infiltrate the internet with information leading to the launch and advertising of Gardasil to parents of daughters and young adult women. Their intention was primarily twofold. First, it was necessary to educate the American public about the dangers HPV as the single leading cause of cervical cancer. And second, it was not in Merck's commercial interests to offer the nation with factual statistical science that would guide parents to make informed decisions on whether to have their daughters vaccinated or not; rather it was a disinformation campaign, piggy-backing on previous success campaigns related to STDs and HIV, to instill fear about a dreaded HPV killer, disguised in the veneer of being a distinctly "sexually transmitted" viral disease.Â
This is how the mother of Britanny Bell understood the ads about Gardsil and how she was persuaded to relieve her fears by having her 12-year old daughter vaccinated. Two months after receiving the vaccine, the former cross country runner collapsed and now suffers paralysis in her legs. And how did Merck respond to the growing number of incidences of paralysis in vaccinated girls? One Merck spokesperson, responded to the media with expected corporate sociopathic logic: since paralysis is not one of Gardasil's adverse effects and it is not a listed complication on the package insert--so the logic goes--the tragic events of paralysis could not be related to Gardasil.Â
Since the FDA's standard for vaccine approval is so remarkably low, and there is no financial reason or incentive for the vaccine industry to raise the bar on conducting safety trials, serious vaccine adverse effects may take a while, even years, to be officially investigated and confirmed. For example, ever since Gardasil's 2006 launch upon the public, there have been incidences of girls having seizures. At the time, seizures were not listed as an adverse effect on the vaccine's product packaging and labeling. As seizure rates increased, Merck eventually conceded to include it; but it was not until mid-2009 that they did so, and during the previous three years pediatricians were blind and unknowingly administering a vaccine related to seizures.Â
In the wake of all the evidence confirming Gardasil's serious life-threatening risks, how are we to understand Merck's adamant stance on the health benefits of its vaccine, and the CDC's and FDA's commitment to HPV vaccines being "safe and effective and the benefits outweigh the risks?" How scientifically valid are these claims?Â
Merck's Gospel of Twisted ScienceÂ
Cindy Bevington is an investigative reporter who won acclaim for bringing attention to the whistleblowing facts behind the HPV vaccines after interviewing Dr. Diana Harper. During Bevington's interview, Dr. Harper stated that "giving [the HPV vaccines] to 11 year olds is a great big public health experiment." Dr. Harper is highly qualified to know the truth. She is a world expert in HPV virus, having studied over 100 strains of this particular virus for 20 years. During her professorship at Dartmouth School of Medicine, she was the principal investigator for the clinical trials conducted for both Merck's Gardasil and a competitor vaccine, Cervarix, manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline, which was approved in the US in late 2009. As the principal investigator, Dr. Harper was responsible for the research, the recruiting of participants into the trials, and the review of the clinical data for interpretation and publication.Â
First, in contradiction to what we are being told through Merck's advertising campaign, Gardasil is not a cancer vaccine. There are no clinical studies whatsoever proving that the vaccine prevents cancer at all. In fact the National Institutes for Health states that the virus does not lead directly to cervical cancer. What HPV does is influence cellular abnormalities, which if not detected via a pap smear, could potentially turn cancerous. However, according to Dr. Harper, 70 percent of HPV infections resolve themselves in one year, and 90 percent resolve themselves in two years without treatment. A recent study from New Zealand indicates that 95 percent of HPV infections naturally disappear due to the body's immune system.Â
This is not to suggest HPV infections are rare; in fact, 80 percent of women by the age 50 will have been infected with one of many strains. Gardasil only protects against two of those strains--types 16 and 18--that account for approximately two-thirds of cervical cancers. But HPV infections are not in any way associated with the alarm and fear promulgated by Merck and our federal and state health agencies. In fact, HPV infection is easily treated and cervical cancer prevention has been statistically proven to be more effective with regular pap smear exams instead of a vaccine. Dr. Anne Szarewski at the Cancer Research UK conservatively told the British newspaper The Telegraph that "a [pap smear] screening program is as effective as a vaccination program;" equally important, nobody ever died or was physically disabled from a pap smear, which is also far cheaper and more cost-effective. Cindy Bevington has further reported that the vaccine makers' own clinical studies show that unless a girl is tested negative for HPV at the time of her vaccination, HPV vaccination can actually backfire and increase her risk of a current infection progressing towards cervical cancer.Â
During a special April 29 Progressive Radio Network broadcast about the dangers and politics of Gardasil and GlaxoSmithKline's Cervarix HPV vaccine, Bevington outlined Merck's and the CDC's fabrication of a mythology to instill fear in parents leading to mandatory vaccine enforcement. What is not being told to the public, according to Bevington's research, "is that anyone can get HPV. It is not a sexually transmitted disease even though that's what the government tells you and that's the first thing on the CDC's website.
Professional journal articles and studies have shown documented cases of babies testing positive for HPV as well as nuns who have never had sex, as well as adolescent boys who happen to have it under their fingernails. That is because HPV is transmitted via the skin. [Merck's and the CDC's] vaccine campaigns simply highlight the easiest most common mode of transmission, which is sexual."Â
The question of whether or not girls as young as 9 years old, which is the minimum age approved by the FDA, should receive the vaccine is the most disturbing. Dr. Harper has categorically stated that no efficacy or safety trials have ever been conducted on girls under age 15. Furthermore, young girls don't get cervical cancer. So is there any credible rationale for vaccinated girls at such a young age other than increasing revenue streams?Â
In her lecture to the 2010 Vaccine Conference sponsored by the National Vaccine Information Center, Dr. Harper lectured that the safety issues with Gardasil are so serious that the rate of serious adverse events is greater in the US than the incidence rate of cervical cancer. The incidence of cervical cancer is so low, there is almost no supporting evidence to conclude massive vaccination would lower the rate. In her analysis of Harper's findings, Bevington states, "in the US to even touch cervical cancer rates in this country, you would have to vaccinate every single 11 year old in the US every year for 70 years to even drop [the cervical cancer rate] by one percent."Â
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