Consultants paid by Merck and the Gates Foundation want to give HPV vaccines to infants and toddlers. Meanwhile, in a trial that has no unvaccinated control group and a safety monitoring window of just three days, Merck is testing Gardasil on children ages 4-8. Lucija Tomljenović, Ph.D., author of more than a dozen peer-reviewed papers on the vaccine, called the trial “completely useless for any meaningful evaluation of HPV vaccine safety.” (A thread 🧵)
Consultants paid by Merck and the Gates Foundation are publicly advocating to administer HPV vaccines to children as young as 12-24 months — an age group in which the vaccine has never been tested and for which no safety data exist.
The push to vaccinate younger children comes as Merck — maker of Gardasil, the only HPV vaccine marketed in the U.S. — partners with major universities to run clinical trials of its HPV vaccine in children ages 4-8 in the U.S. and Gambia.
Merck’s Gardasil vaccine is designed to protect against human papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted disease. In the U.S., the drug is approved for children starting at age 9 — well before children are sexually active.
Conflicts of interest ‘so thick’ they obscure the science.
In the conflict-of-interest statement at the end of the IDSA op-ed, Franco disclosed that he is a vaccine consultant who also holds a patent on a cervical cancer test.
“The conflicts are so thick it’s impossible to tell if this is a serious immunization policy suggestion, or a fact-pattern of Merck publishing Merck recommendations to use more Merck products,” said Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist for Children’s Health Defense (CHD).
Read the full article below from The Defender⬇️
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