I remember when I got my second dose of gardasil I blacked out in the waiting room after and woke up on the ground with rugburn on my face. I later learned I had fallen over and had what appeared to be a seizure.
I didn’t even know what it was I was being vaccinated for at the time, I was pretty young. I was a little peeved when I found out that, as a male, I didn’t even need the vaccine. Needless to say I’ve been skeptical of vaccines and the pharmaceutical industry as a whole ever since.
I'm sorry about negative experiences and/or regrets other commenters might have about their vaccinations. Measuring the risk/reward profile of vaccines seems far from simple, particularly in cases like this where the large benefits (no cancer) and risks (autoimmune problems) may both be quite rare for any individual. It is too bad if the study didn't fully capture possible risks in this case, and hopefully follow-up studies and monitoring can help better describe the risk profile.
It's worth noting the benefits of HPV vaccination do seem to be quite real, though. In the US, >20% of the female population has a high-risk HPV infection [1], and cervical cancer runs at ~12k new cases and ~4k deaths a year [2]. A follow-up study found women vaccinated before age 17 had about 88% reduction in cervical cancer, with around 53% for women vaccinated at 17-30 years of age [3] (presumably later-vaccinated women had a high chance of already having an HPV infection so the vaccine wouldn't be useful).
I think potentially saving >3.5k lives and >10k cervical cancer cases annually in the US is a pretty good return if we can get widespread HPV vaccination, though of course we should also work hard to study and minimize vaccine side-effects. I'm similarly hopeful of news about EBV as a cause of multiple sclerosis [4], which is another situation where preventing a widespread infection might prevent rare but serious illnesses.
HPV vaccine is exactly the type of vaccines that made me extremely skeptical of big pharma, well before the pandemic. For the record, both my kids are fully vaccinated with every non-optional vaccine, including the first shots of COVID vaccine. I now regret getting the COVID vaccine for them and feel very guilty about it.
When my children were infants, the doctors and nurses were pushing this HPV vaccine, saying it was safe. I questioned why infants should get vaccinated for a sexually transmitted virus including boys who can't get cervical cancer, and the response was that it was the moral thing to do. It sounded like nonsense to me, and I said if they get the vaccine, it will be after they enter puberty.
After a bit more investigation, it turned out that the chances of my daughter developing any type of problem from HPV infection was exceedingly low, and the chance of getting cervical cancer was even lower than that. So the idea that EVERY SINGLE CHILD in the US should get HPV vaccine smelled like big pharma trying to make billions by getting it added to the vaccine schedule.
Big pharma greed plus the laws protecting them from any lawsuits makes vaccines the perfect breeding ground for useless but potentially harmful vaccines pushed on hundreds of millions of people. The COVID vaccine post Omicron is another perfect example of this. This article just foments my opposition to anything new because big pharma is fundamentally untrustworthy and big pharma greed has done a huge disservice to the world because people are less and less apt to trust any new medications now.
True enough (modulo questions of how trans people are identified) but while HPV is best known for causing cervical cancer, it also causes cancers of the penis, anus, mouth, and throat.
I wrote what I did deliberately; I wasn't sure if any trials had tested the other cancers (although it would be incredibly surprising if they weren't similarly prevented).
Both my kids (and the entire family) got COVID before the kids' vaccine was available late 2021. I really didn't think that it was necessary for my kids to get the vaccine given the fact they already had been infected, but the school at the time insisted. I was getting ready to join some other parents to try to fight it but then decided to listen to my wife and just go with the flow.
Now given everything we know, the COVID vaccine truly was unnecessary. I crumpled to peer pressure and got my kids injected with a drug that was completely unnecessary, even though I knew scientifically what was being said made absolutely no sense at all.
I think like many other parents who felt lied to, the next time big pharm tries to convince me that my kids or I need some sort of medication, I will react much much more skeptically and stick to my guns unless it actually passes my smell test fully.
The COVID vaccine showed a positive impact in terms of disease severity and long term impacts.
Patients who experience long-term COVID impacts often demonstrate a range of major problems including lowered IQ, brain fog, increased risk of ischemic events, etc.
In my opinion you were absolutely correct to vaccinate your children, just as parents of boys should vaccinate them against HPV; not only for their safety, but for the safety of their partners.
> The COVID vaccine showed no efficacy for children
This is false. Please don’t spread misinformation here. Finally, please consider the possibility that your reasoning skills are not sufficient for the conclusions you’re making.
> Children and adolescents who received one of the main COVID-19 vaccines were significantly protected from the illness and showed no increased signs of cardiac complications compared to young people who were not vaccinated, according to a new real-world study led by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). When the Delta variant rose to prominence, the study showed that vaccinated young people were 98 percent less likely to be infected than their unvaccinated peers, and data indicated that the vaccine’s effectiveness decline slightly when the Omicron variant became dominant. The paper was published today in Annals of Internal Medicine.
At this point COVID mRNA vaccine fear mongering is just shameful. So many excess deaths in America in unvaccinated populations. I haven't looked at the data recently, but vividly recall mortality rates hovering around 10:1 during peak times.
By the time omicron became the prevalent variant, which is the time when the children’s vaccine became available, the notion of excess deaths for unvaccinated had vanished.
In terms of children specifically, overall the number of children who died from Covid was extremely small and almost all died because of underlying conditions not from Covid.
COVID mortality has always been correlated with age. Even so, excess deaths indicate that the official stats are an undercount. And vaccination mandates had broader positive effects beyond just child mortality. Children/teens don't typically die from the flu, but still benefit from flu shots. The people around them who would otherwise be infected also benefited from vaccination drives.
