Nikki Haley, Governor of South Carolina, made headlines on Tuesday by vetoing a bill initiated by the Democrats which would provide sixth graders with government-sponsored information encouraging parents to get the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine for their children as well as one free HPV vaccine for seventh graders. Haley has received a barrage of criticism for her actions, and charges of hypocrisy for having previously sponsored a bill in 2007 that would have mandated the HPV vaccine in South Carolina, even though she ultimately withdrew her backing because the bill did not contain an opt-out provision. While the current bill had broad bipartisan support, Governor Haley rejected it as unnecessary and because it would be a precursor to a vaccine mandate entirely dependent on government funding. More importantly, however, Haley was quoted as saying her previous support of a human papillomavirus vaccine mandate was a mistake: now that she has a 14 year-old daughter she feels differently about “what I am going to do as a parent and what I want for my child.”1
While we support Governor Haley’s courage in standing up for a parent’s right to determine the health care given to their children, which is laudable, we would offer Governor Haley, along with every governor in America, every state and federal legislator, and every pediatrician, pharmacist, and nurse, a reality check. Mandating, or even encouraging or supporting, the human papillomavirus vaccine is tantamount to promoting a public health fraud, and intentionally and with malice aforethought, placing millions of young girls’ and boys’ lives at risk for debilitating injury, including death. Our public health policies, including vaccination, have been formed not by independent, qualified scientists, but rather by lobbyists who have paid for access to politicians at the state and federal levels, bringing forth hand-picked, highly compromised scientists and physicians to promote a fallacy and make it codified by law that the HPV vaccine will prevent cervical cancer and save countless lives when, in fact, independent science shows just the opposite. Therefore, we are offering you an opportunity to review actual scientific evidence that would convince any responsible and reasonable parent, politician, or physician that this vaccine should be banned, not mandated. While the Democrats in South Carolina moan about lost opportunities to save lives and to cut back on health care costs, what they seem clueless and grossly irresponsible about are the facts; once again allowing ideology to trump science. Even Governor Jerry Brown of California, demonstrated his unbridled promotion of the Gardasil vaccine by signing into law in October 2011, a bill which gives 12 year-old children the right to choose the HPV vaccine not only without parental approval, but without even parental notification!2 The scientific facts are that the HPV vaccine is dangerous, even deadly. The major HPV vaccine in question is of course, Gardasil, Merck’s premier product that has lifted it out of the financial doldrums since the ignominious removal of Vioxx from the market in 2004. We spoke with Cindy Bevington, an investigative journalist, who says we should all be very concerned about these repeated attempts to force Gardasil on our children because there is absolutely no proof that using this vaccine will lead to the prevention of cervical cancer. Bevington broke the story in 2007 that Dr. Diane Harper, the lead investigator for the clinical trials of both Gardasil and its competitor, Cervarix, considered the HPV vaccine to be not only unnecessary, but “a huge public health experiment.” Dr. Harper revealed to Bevington that the current rate of cervical cancer in the US is so low, that every single 12 year-old girl would need to be vaccinated for the next 60 years to reduce the rate of cervical cancer at all.3 The news was a disappointment to the legislative campaign to mandate Gardasil across the nation to 12-year old girls, which was being heavily pushed by Merck together with ALEC and their spokespeople, Women in Government. Since then, despite all the advertising, Gardasil is nowhere near as successful as Merck was hoping for. During the push to require Gardasil for children in Indiana, Bevington went to the hearings and observed Indiana legislators actually weeping, begging for the vaccine to be mandated as they spoke about lives lost to cervical cancer without it! Why have we become such an anti-scientific nation? We have been misled scientifically into believing that this vaccine will save lives when in fact the opposite is true. The remarkable claims of Gardasil’s benefits to women in the war on cancer are quite simply ridiculous, inaccurate, fraudulent, and are not supported by the science -- even that science funded by Merck itself. We could ask where is the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, CBC, Fox, or CNN? Where are the journalists and the resources they have at their disposal to uncover these facts? Is this a truth they do not want to know because they would then be forced to report it? The Gardasil story is just one example of the bias in official media, both conservative and liberal. Here, then, are 10 facts that would seem that no Governor, Federal official, or legislator has taken the time to study. If so, we would have a different approach to mandating Gardasil in the 50 states.
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April 26, 2013 
