No parents, no VAERS reports on Gardasil

Governor Jerry Brown’s failure to veto California’s new anti-STD law—allowing clinics to give Gardasil shots to children without their parents’ knowledge or permission—could have a dangerous side effect.

Say your kid started having seizures. If you didn’t know he’d been given a vaccine, it wouldn’t even cross your mind to file a VAERS (vaccine adverse event reporting system) report. Nor would you think to contact the vaccine manufacturer.

VAERS is already notoriously fallible. Although those searching it are wont to say, “Look! It says on VAERS that x number of people have—died, acquired a seizure disorder or an autoimmune disease, whatever— from Gardasil!” that’s rarely the case. Doctors and individuals report anything they believe MIGHT be a side effect or adverse event related to the HPV vaccine, and the scientists of VAERS and the FDA are supposed to follow up and try to determine patterns that bear investigation. Many ‘side effects’ are reported. Some will inevitable turn out to have nothing to do with a vaccine, or not as far as the FDA can determine at this point, anyway.

Equally, events that could be related to Gardasil frequently go unreported because a doctor refuses, or sees no need, to make a report. Or maybe a parent fails to connect the dots and ask questions. Look at Jenny Tetlock’s case—her parents turned up two rare and virtually identical cases that hadn’t been reported. Like I said, VAERS is fallible.

And are these busy clinics really going to monitor the health of the kids they are merrily giving the shot to? For months, a year, more? File VAERS reports on anything that seems odd so that the FDA's records are complete? Doesn't seem likely, does it?

I can't think of any other vaccine that has been gifted with such potentially lax oversight.

Here I should say that there is as yet no official link between seizures and Gardasil yet, although the anecdotal evidence is mounting and the FDA is apparently beginning to investigate it more thoroughly (see here).

But how can the FDA even properly begin to make possible connections between Gardasil and seizures, or Gardasil and autoimmune disease, or Gardasil and blood clots, when VAERS reporting is limited even more?

Oh, wait….