HPV Scare Isn’t Only Caused by Anti-Sex Crowd
By Haley Swenson - Jul 11th, 2008 at 2:37 pmWhile I agree with Kay (and feministe) that the recent reports about the potential unsafe nature of the HPV vaccine Gardasil are actually greatly unfounded and overstated in the media, I do have some issues with her explanation for this hype:
The reason people get so alarmist about Gardasil is because it involves parents thinking about the fact that one day their girls will become sexually active.
While this may be one reason people are uneasy about Gardasil, there are many others which do not involve fear about women’s sexualities, some of them being expressed by young women themselves.
I spent my last year of college interviewing college-age women about their opinions of the vaccine. While many had already gotten it, and some were planning to get it, there was a crowd of women who were completely comfortable with their current or future sexual activity who were also skeptical of Gardasil and hesitant to seek out vaccination.
Most of their reasoning centers on a sophisticated level of media savvy. While we are constantly inundated with new advertisements for new drugs we just must have, we also lack any active or visible public health infrastructure to provide a non-profit driven perspective on these drugs. Merck’s advertising campaign for Gardasil has been one of the biggest ever for any medical technology, and when young women want more information about the drug they visit their doctors, only to be handed a pamphlet produced by, you guessed it, Merck. Within this context of the medical-industrial complex and the complete annihilation of a public health campaign, it’s not unreasonable that even young women would find reason to doubt the effectiveness or necessity of receiving Gardasil.
“While we are constantly inundated with new advertisements for new drugs we just must have, we also lack any active or visible public health infrastructure to provide a non-profit driven perspective on these drugs.”
Amen, sister. I hope this continuing discussion on Pushback is the catalyst for creating such an infrastructure.
July 11th, 2008 at 3:08 pmYes, finally, someone talks about the underlying problem of for-profit pharmaceutical companies seeking ever greater profits to please their Wall Street backers. What does this mean for the American public? More drugs at greater doses are pushed upon us in advertising campaigns. Prozac gets repackaged as “Sarafem” to “heal” your PMS. Wake up, people!
July 11th, 2008 at 4:16 pmHaley actually makes a really great point here, and I’m glad she called me out on it. The opposition to Guardasil isn’t just from conservative parenting types. I remember when some of these early reports on women getting sick came out. A feminist listserv I was on exploded with controversy. A lot of opposition also came from older feminists that remembered the early days of birth control and how it got a lot of women sick from the high hormonal dosages. A lot of women just don’t trust conglomerates that sell drugs we have to have. By no means did I intend to make my post a resounding endorsement of companies like Merck that stand to make a substantial profit from requiring the vaccine. I appreciate you catching that, Haley.
July 11th, 2008 at 5:25 pm