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Dusty:Starlight:Culture



Now, they're honest?
2007-02-28   7:36 a.m.

Merk stands to make an unbelievable load of money given than many states are considering requiring - mandating - that their Gardasil vaccine be administered to girls in public school.

Since Gardasil prevents contraction of the STD HPV, which is at near epidemic proportions, easily contractible, and is likely to develop into cervical cancer in women once contracted, this sounds like a good thing. Add to that the stat that 3700 women die every year of cervical cancer - a high percentage of them in Texas, oddly, where this issue is really heating up - and it seems like the best thing.

The usual suspects came out of the woodwork on this issue: fundamentalists who argue that given such a vaccine, all teens will do is have sex - as if the only thing stopping them is fear of contracting HPV (but wait, given the policy of abstinence-only discussions in Texas schools, do teens even know what that is?). If this sounds eye-rollingly familiar, it's because it's the same gun that was dragged out to argue against public distribution of birth control in high schools.

All of THAT has prompted another round of usual suspects: women's rights/health advocates who accuse opponents of mandating the vaccine of prioritizing their version "morals" over the health of women, something they see as a typical pattern indicating how little we value women's lives in this culture.

I don't disagree with women's rights advocates, but I will say this: this vaccine is somewhat new. Merk says it's been "extensively tested and is very safe", and many women's health coalitions back Merk's statement, insisting that any info to the contrary is just propaganda by the conservatives to prevent mass/mandated vaccination.

But wait! That's putting a whole lotta faith in a pharm. company - one that's got a particularly nasty record on ethics. Do we take them at their word? I want very badly to believe that this vaccine is safe and effective, especially given how much we have marginalized "women's diseases" in medical research, indicating that somehow, they're less important.

Texan teenage girls, wealthy or poor, aren't guinea pigs. To trust a pharm. company implicitly is one of the most naive things we could do at this point, especially in the wake of recent lawsuits and attention brought to the unfair practices or questionable ethics pharmaceutical companies pursue to profit. And this might be the worst kind of anti-woman move: rushing to vaccinate without considering long term health effects or complications. They're women, many from rural poor areas, so who cares about all of that? If it were a group of teenage boys, who are the future of our society, that'd be a different story...

xoxo