Alison Campbell • Jul 08, 2019 •
New Zealand’s measles outbreak keeps on ticking along. So do the media stories about it. (The FB posts associated with each article aren’t moderated and I suspect this is partly because they generate so many clicks.) A couple of days ago, TVNZ’s Breakfast show carried an interview with a doctor, on the importance of Gardasil, a vaccine that … Read More
Grant Jacobs • Feb 19, 2019 •
Vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks are happening everywhere. Measles is on the rise worldwide, including in Europe and the USA. Over 900 have died in Madagascar alone since October 2018.[1] Most will be infants. Japan’s rubella epidemic has prompted traveller warnings. 367 cases have been reported this year. Venezuela has considerable problems, not helped by diphtheria coming back. Read More
Helen Petousis Harris • May 12, 2018 •
There appears competition to claim discovery of HPV syndromes. Another in a list of attempts at assassinating the safety of HPV vaccine has been retracted this week. This time from Nature Scientific Reports. Grant Jacobs has provided a commentary on another just a day earlier. That one is a real doozer, an author with a fake name … Read More
Grant Jacobs • May 11, 2018 •
When the author and the core claims of the paper aren’t real, you’re faking HPV vaccine claims in more ways than one. A new paper in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (IJME) claims that the HPV vaccine causes an increase in cancers in some patients. It’s first problem is that the author is fake. A fake author Yes, you … Read More
Helen Petousis Harris • Feb 21, 2018 •
There exists a sustained brouhaha around the nature of the placebos used in the clinical trials for Gardasil. The notion that some of the most rigorous vaccine trials ever conducted are questionable on account of their well thought out placebos is ill conceived at best. This is after over 270 million doses and huge epidemiological studies from all over the … Read More
Helen Petousis Harris • Feb 19, 2018 •
In the clinical trials for HPV vaccines cervical cancer was not a primary endpoint. An endpoint in a clinical trial is a disease or a symptom of interest. I want to explain why cancer was not an endpoint these efficacy studies. Instead surrogate endpoints were used. Why not, given that is what the investigators wanted to prevent? Because you can’t … Read More
Helen Petousis Harris • Nov 13, 2017 •
The perception of risk is greatly influenced by the media and related to the relationship between hazard and outrage, or Risk = Hazard + Outrage (Sanderman). Basically, the risks that can kill you are often not the risks that get you all alarmed. I am a bit scared of things with at least six legs but genes dictate it … Read More
Guest Author • Mar 30, 2017 •
By Dave Hawkes, University of Melbourne The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine was introduced in Australia in 2007 and New Zealand in 2008 to prevent cervical cancer. It was free for women up to age 26 in Australia and to all women under 20 in New Zealand. This is because 99.7% of cervical cancers are associated with the sexually transmissible … Read More
Helen Petousis Harris • Feb 20, 2017 •
Gardasil was assessed in Double Blind Randomised Placebo Controlled Trials that used the fully formulated vaccine and compared it with two different placebos, the aluminium adjuvant and a saline solution. What is a placebo? A placebo is a substance as similar as possible to the active drug except it has no therapeutic effect. It does … Read More
Helen Petousis Harris • Feb 14, 2017 •
As we enter a new year and school-based vaccination programmes get cracking the recycled crazy myths raise their ill-founded serpent heads again. This week it is the notion that Gardasil causes infertility by inducing Primary Ovarian Failure/insufficient (POF). It is popping up on social media – again. The fact is that Gardasil does not cause infertility. By infertility I refer to the … Read More