First, when a vaccine is tested and approved, only hundreds to at most thousands of study participants are involved. If a vaccine causes an adverse event one time in 10,000, that event will be invisible during testing. It will only emerge during what is called post-marketing surveillance, the observation of vaccine effects in hundreds of thousands to millions of people. It is possible Gardasil has adverse effects not previously recognized. Even if so, since the adverse events reported number in the hundreds while 20 million doses of the vaccine have been administered, it is likely the benefits far outweigh the harms.
But there is another at least equally plausible explanation. When tens of millions of people are exposed to a vaccine, some of them will develop pancreatitis, or migraines, or MS, or die--simply because such things happen to people from time to time. The vaccine and the adverse event may be true, true, and unrelated.
Thus far, the FDA is denying that there is new cause for concern about Gardasil. That is not gospel, and does not rule out actual adverse effects. Post-marketing surveillance should continue, and any patterns that emerge should get careful scrutiny.
But we should avoid a rush to judgment. All of my daughters received the Gardasil vaccine, and I am a long way from regretting that.
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