Government Intrusion

Am I the only one who sees in this Gardasil case the echoes of Vioxx?

As reported last week and this week by Star staff writer Despina Williams, a young woman and her adopted mother are fighting a Sisyphusian battle to have the Port St. Joe High School senior earn her citizenship despite government mandates she undergo the Gardasil vaccine.

Gardasil is designed to prevent cervical cancer and protects against a certain sexually-transmitted disease.

And it is part of the series of vaccines now required of female immigrants wishing to enter and stay in this country.

But here is a young woman of sincere and deep faith, who openly touts a philosophy of no sex before marriage and who wants to control what goes in to her own body.

And there is Gardasil, which is a vaccine largely voluntary to all naturalized citizens and which has been heavily advertised and promoted with a series of advertisements in magazines and newspapers and on television.

The advertising budget for Gardasil maker Merck & Co. must be enormous, just as it was for the maker of Vioxx, which, surprise, happened to also be Merck.

Remember Vioxx?

For months it was advertised as the new panacea for pain relief. Non-narcotic, lacking acetaminophen which is linked to liver problems and long-lasting, Vioxx was prescribed for hundreds of thousands of patients and considered a boon in the fight against chronic pain.

Then folks starting dying from the adverse reactions and in time it was found that there was a link between heart problems and Vioxx, the link so strong and so threatening that the product was pulled from the market, no longer to be found on any pharmacy shelves.

And all those patients who were prescribed Vioxx in good faith by their doctors had plenty to worry about, especially those with existing heart issues, and the class-action lawsuits followed.

Now we have Gardasil, commercials for which are beginning to outnumber those for medicines designed to, shall we say, provide men with more functionality during intimate moments.

Of course, after relaying all the positives of Gardasil, there is a lengthy list of those who should not consider the medicine, the infamous fine print of such commercials, and the potential adverse affects.

At no time during these commercials are women considering the vaccine informed that more than 40 deaths have been linked to adverse effects of the vaccine. Serious adverse effects have been reported in 7 percent of those females who have received the vaccine.

Nowhere in those commercials does it inform consumers that the life span of effectiveness is about five years, so suggesting that females as young as 11 receive the vaccine, meaning it will be ineffective by the time they are 16 and more likely to become sexually active, is as close to nonsensical as one can get.

In fact, those agencies which regulate such vaccines and requirements for immigrants entering the country do not seem to be on the right page.

One of the top researchers of the drug has questioned its long-term effectiveness.

The Journal of the American Medical Association has called for long-term studies of Gardasil, which begs the question how this drug has made it to market and been heavily marketed without such studies.

The author of the piece in the Journal said the benefit of the vaccine to a woman is “uncertain.”

And after an advisory council charged with making recommendations for the U.S. population recommended the vaccine for girls 11-26, the Centers for Disease Control latched on to that recommendation to require immigrant females in the same age group to have the vaccine.

This mandate issued despite the fact that the CDC in a report noted the limitations of its own trials in identifying potential adverse reactions to the vaccine.

 But this young woman and her mother have been put through a wringer because of 1) their concern about adverse effects and 2) because of her faith and belief that she should not be forced to have a vaccine not mandated for the general population.

And we are not talking about H1N1 or leprosy or HIV or any of an assortment of contagious and potentially dangerous viruses or diseases. No one is going to develop cervical cancer because this young woman chooses not to have the vaccine.

Thus far the government has turned a deaf ear, denying a waiver based on the fact that the young woman did not have an issue, faith-based or otherwise, with vaccines, per se, only with Gardasil, which makes as much sense as Vioxx as pain relief panacea does now.

The government’s stance, and its appeal process of a waiver, has this young woman at a standstill in life, unsure of her future because of a vaccine touted by a drug company with millions of dollars invested in Gardasil.

But overriding all of that is this: government intervention in a personal decision about what one does with their own body.

How does the government decide that immigrants, or at least the ones who choose a legal route in to the country, must have a vaccine that it does not mandate for the population as a whole?

How does the government determine that, despite evidence of potentially serious adverse side effects, despite this young woman’s deeply-held faith – including the chastity ring she wears at all times – she should be denied citizenship because she would rather not take a vaccine that may or may not have any benefit to her whatsoever?

This is the height of government intrusion into daily lives, of government deciding what is and is not good for us, of government determining when a young woman will be sexually active.

To call it, as the young woman’s mother does, “terribly inappropriate” is an understatement of the first order.

The case of Gardasil has all the makings of the events that surrounded Vioxx, a drug pushed to market over an ineffectual Food and Drug Administration, advertised tirelessly as some sort of panacea for which it may or may not be and, in the case of the vaccine, mandated for legal immigrants by a policy with a shaky foundation.

I was prescribed Vioxx for months for chronic back pain due to degenerative discs which will ultimately need to be replaced.

I wonder now whether my heart will go before my back finally does due to those months on Vioxx.

And I also wonder if there is an end to this kind of scattershot government intervention, or laissez faire attitude, or both, when it comes to people’s ability to take personal control and responsibility for their own bodies.