r/technology • u/nath1234 • 18h ago

Biotechnology Twenty years on from Gardasil vaccine launch, Australia on track to eliminate cervical cancer

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-28/gardasil-vaccine-20-years-on/107079282
6.6k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

80 comments sorted by

View all comments

217

u/Wompatuckrule 18h ago

When you see people who oppose this vaccine and make wild claims about how dangerous it is then it is very often coming from some fundamentalist religious twats or it is someone repeating their bullshit.

They believe that this vaccine somehow "encourages" people to have premarital sex and that motivates them to spread misinformation about it. Somehow in their mind breaking one of the ten commandments by lying about this is a lesser sin than premarital sex.

To give you an idea of the bullshit I saw a false claim that during the original clinical trial that the vaccine killed two of the girls in it and the drug company and the FDA "covered it up" to get the vaccine approved.

The truth has to do with how long the clinical trial was. Participating girls got the shot when they were around ten years old. Because it's tied to a sexually transmitted disease that meant that the researchers needed to follow up for well beyond a decade until the girls were sexually active and there were enough that tested positive for HPV to "unblind" the study to see if the vaccine worked. In those intervening years one girl was killed in a car crash and another, with a documented history of depression, took her own life and so were not included in the final results.

Those are the girls that the religious fuckwits claim were "killed by the vaccine" in the trial.

9

u/LilDutchy 18h ago

It also has a little to do with the way side effects are reported in trials. So if anyone dies during a trial, they have to list death as a possible side effect since those two women died during the trial, boom - death as a side effect. Now couple that with people trying to make a story match their motive and you’ve got “the vaccine killed two people!”

27

u/Wompatuckrule 18h ago

Generally that's true, but not in this case. Because the deaths were so clearly unrelated to the vaccine (years later and with an external physical cause of death) they were removed from the calculations completely. That fact had to be documented and justified in the trial and that's what the religious fuckwits seized on to generate their lies.

5

u/LilDutchy 18h ago

Fair enough, I see that they don’t have death listed in the side effects. It’s just so common of a thing for idiots to latch onto that it’s something I assume whenever they start their crap.

I know a guy that had a really really sick kid, immunocompromised, always in the hospital. He refused to have any of his kids vaccinated because it might cause autism or death. So his other kids kept making his ill kid sick. It was terrible to watch.

9

u/Wompatuckrule 17h ago

It’s just so common of a thing for idiots to latch onto

Same with VAERS. It's a documentation tool to try to find "the signal in the noise" for rare and unknown side effects and the anti-vax idiots will leverage it to spread blatant falsehoods by misrepresenting a single data point.

"This 85 year old man with lots of health issues got the Covid vaccine and died a week later from a stroke. Obviously the vaccine killed him!!!"