Should Your Daughter Receive the HPV Vaccine?

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Gardasil works 90 percent of the time against two kinds of viruses that cause 70 percent of cervical cancers. Some people quite reasonably believe, despite Gardasil’s effectiveness, that such a safety net is too precarious to have them change their current detection and treatment practices in favor of vaccination. Even with the newest finding that Gardasil may also protect against vulvar and vaginal cancers, the FDA still recommends that even women and girls who are vaccinated continue to undergo regular testing. So the vaccine is recommended not as an alternative to current detection and treatment options but as an added protection. However, this added protection is neither necessary nor worth the risks inherent in any vaccination program.

Also the vaccine may be temporary; it is as yet unknown when its protections will wear off. Gardasil was tested for an average of three years and, while everyone hopes that immunity is permanent, there is no proof it will be. The vaccine may wear off in five, ten, or 15 years, and at some point everyone who was vaccinated will need at least a booster shot and undergo all the expense and risks that such shots entail.

Children vaccinated in the sixth grade (or as early as age 9 if recommendations made by Merck, the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and some politicians are followed) could potentially lose their immunity by the time they are seniors in high school.