According to a paper in the Annals of Medicine, Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine policy and evidence-based medicine: Are they at odds?: “At present there are no significant data showing that either Gardasil or Cervarix (GlaxoSmithKline) can prevent any type of cervical cancer since the testing period employed was too short to evaluate long-term benefits of HPV vaccination.”

In the US, France, Spain and Denmark, more than 250 court cases are being mounted over HPV vaccinations. Damages have been won in the US and France.

However, the UK medicines watchdog, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and Public Health England say that the HPV jab is the most effective way to protect against cervical cancer, which kills 900 UK women each year and the American government’s CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) recommends the Gardasil vaccine, made by Merck Pharmaceuticals, for all females between 9 and 26 years to protect against HPV.

This conflicts with safety statements made by the American government’s Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) recalled by theWashington News which reported adverse reactions:

”26 new deaths between September 1, 2010 and September 15, 2011 as well as incidents of seizures, paralysis, blindness, pancreatitis, speech problems, short term memory loss and Guillain-Barré Syndrome”.

In 2014 6m dollars in compensation was paid and only half the cases had been heard.

The Japanese government withdrew its recommendation of the HPV vaccine in 2013, after highly publicised cases of alleged adverse events in girls who had been vaccinated. 63 women are separately suing the government over claims that the jab causes serious neurological conditions and vaccination rates in the country have collapsed from 70% to less than 1%. In December last year, the Financial Times reported that Shuichi Ikeda, dean of the school of medicine at Shinshu University, one of a group of doctors suggesting a link between the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine and neurological illness, is suing Dr Riko Muranaka, a lecturer at Kyoto University’s school of medicine, for libel as she claimed that he had fabricated research results.

In July this year, a British health professional, whose daughter had been ‘severely disabled by obvious adverse reaction to the HPV vaccine’ for six years, wrote in the BMJ:

“There is ZERO evidence that Cervarix and Gardasil will ever prevent a single case of cancer. The manufacturers, GSK and Merck, only ever state they are ‘intended to’ or ‘expected to’.

Though The Times reported in August that Simon Harris, the Irish health minister, has renewed his drive for girls to receive the vaccination, an online search on the words ‘death’ or ‘disability due to the HPV vaccine’ will bring up many cases reported in the mainstream press – and the precautionary principle may be invoked, according to the European Commission, when a phenomenon, product or process may have a dangerous effect, identified by a scientific and objective evaluation.

There remains such great uncertainty about the safety of this vaccine, surely further investigation is warranted before continuing to administer it.