I understand, Wellard... but if the government pays, it's still not free. You're paying for it in some other way.... through taxes, most likely. So be prepared to raise your taxes to pay for all the free vaccinations.

Someone, somewhere, is paying.

life should not have a price ;)

but if cold hard cash is important to you when discussing health .....

This will be an investment for the future. It will be a lot cheaper than giving free health care to all the women with cancer. Win - Win for everyone :D

Life should have a price. After all, that's what work is for, for those of us that can. However, that doesn't mean that the populace should be compelled to make rich people richer. I suppose that all the "contributions" made by lobbyists could be applied to pay for mandated treatments, and that would be a definite win/win.

Color me a capitalist [img]smile.gif[/img]

Don't get caught up on the cash aspect, Wellard. As you should see from my posts above, I'm in favor of mandating its use. If I can rule out a form of cancer for my daughter, I'll do it. I'm all for saving lives.

My point, however, is that people make the logic jump from "It's free" to "There's no cost". The correct logic jump is from "It's free" to "Someone else will pay the cost". TANSTAAFL. Someone, somewhere, has to subsidize it for it to be "free".

That doesn't mean I support the position that if you can't pay for it, you can't have it and you get to live with the threat of this cancer. Not at all. I've got no problem subsidizing it for those too poor to be able to pay for it.

Here in lovely west Michigan, kids have to have their vaccinations for various childhood diseases before they're allowed in the public schools.

You've got three options for these: your doctor, a local med center, or the County health department. Each one charges different amounts, with the county being cheapest. It's partially subsidized, and perhaps completely subsidized for the poorest among us.

Interestingly, those vaccinations aren't really mandated. You don't *have* to get vaccinated; you don't *have* to attend public schools, either. It's similar to what the US government did in the 1970s with lower speed limits. States didn't *have* to comply... they just wouldn't get federal highway funds if they didn't.

A number of pharmacies around here have started offering basic children's prescriptions for either free or a minimal charge of $4. It started with Wal-Mart, and it's continuing with others who jump on the bandwagon. The pharmacies are subsidizing those prescriptions... they're paying for them. They're also banking on you doing enough other business with them to cover the cost of those presecriptions. "Free" means "I don't pay". It doesn't mean "Nobody pays".

And as an aside, we don't have free health care here... every election, someone's trying to figure out how to subsidize more health care without visibly raising taxes to pay for it [img]smile.gif[/img] I truly hope they find a way... but so far, nothing :(

*edit* Slight tweaking for what I meant :(

[ 03-02-2007, 11:09 AM: Message edited by: Bungleau ]

As mother to a daughter who falls within the age range given, I must say NO to the madate that she be vaccinated. As the granddaughter of a woman who died when she was 39 of cervical cancer - she had had only one sexual partner, my grandfather, so it is unlikely she fell under the "multiple partners and at risk" category, I would also say NO to this vaccination for a couple reasons.

1. Merck pushed this one through FDA approval much more quickly than other drugs. It is also the only one of its kind, at least in the US, and when you combine the strangely quick approval and the resulting lack of long-term testing / study, how do we know this is safe OR effective in the long term? Because it killed cancer cells in a petri dish? Because a drug company said so?

2. Merck stands to make a LOT of money on this one since they hold the only patent on Guardisil. The vaccintation currently must be given in three (3) shots at just over $100 per shot. Most insurance companies do not cover it. Ok, two problems with that: it deliberately leaves out lower-middle to lower class individuals - the same who may be at higher risk due to other factors. It is also one of (I have read it is THE) most expensive of all vaccines. Why?

3. This vaccine purports to protect young women from HPV which MAY mutate and cause UP to 70% of cervical cancer cases. There are 80 types of HPV. Does this vaccine protect against all types of HPV? Virii are known to mutate in order to survive; will the vaccine be viable in six months, a year, five years?

Too many 'might' and 'up to' and "oh my gosh, how can you be an unfeeling barbarian not to immediately jump in and have your daughter vaccinated" for me. It needs testing, it needs study, it needs PROOF that its claims are valid and irrefutable. It does NOT need religious groups ballyhooing, drug execs spouting bs in defense or the general public under misbegotten ideas due to less-than-enough information to make an intelligent decision.

I protested the Hep vaccine when the school barred CK from kindergarten because she hadn't had it. When I researched the vaccine, I discovered that the variety of Hep it protects against is ONLY transmitted by sexual contact or tainted blood. The vaccine is now given *before* a child hits kindergarten. Despite my arguments that the vaccine 1) made no logical sense to give a 5 year old and 2) it put my daughter at unknown risk in the future, I finally relented so she could attend school. It was a waste since I pulled her out to homeschool the next year due to the school's ineptitude anyhow.

I love my daughter. I love her enough to demand better for her than half-baked politiking by a drug company trying to sell a drug they can't even show works or is safe down the road.

<font color=skyblue>Garnet...thank you SO much for spelling out all three of those points because they really hit home as to my family's feelings on the subject.

I say you are 100% right.

</font>

I respect your position and thoughts, Garnet, and I'd like to offer some counter-thoughts.


"Much more quickly", "strangely quick", "lack of long-term testing"... these are subjective terms, and not objective. The phase III trials involved 25,000 people in 33 countries (as of October 2005). It was 100% effective in preventing cancer - high grade precancer and non-invasive cancer associated with its two primary HPV strains. Apparently, 100% prevention is almost unheard of in these kinds of tests.

In the meantime, more than 500,000 cases are diagnosed worldwide every year, and around 275,000 women a year die from cervical cancer, which is the second deadliest cancer (breast cancer is first). And Glaxo SmithKline is working on its own version of the same vaccine, to be called Cervarix, so the "only game around" argument falls apart shortly.


Price should be equal to cost plus margin. Biologics, or vaccines derived from living organisms, are expensive to make, and Guardasil is apparently one of the most expensive ones to make. That means that while they may bring in a lot of revenue, they don't make a lot of money on it.

With competition comes reduction in price. And I find it interesting (here I go again!) that people complain about the price, and do not consider the cost. Merck also spent over ten years working on this vaccine (based on their partnership with CSL Limited related to technology used in the vaccine in 1995). Would you spend ten years developing something and expect to get no compensation? That's part of the reason for patents, so that companies will make that investment. It's also part of the reason doctors are having an issue with stocking it - they aren't getting reimbursed enough from insurance companies to cover their own costs.


I don't get the "UP to 70%". Those two strains are responsible for 70 percent of the cases. The rest (as many as 100, depending on your sourcE) cause the other 30%. Do you want to wait until every single strain is addressed? 70% is a very nice first step. And yes, viruses can mutate. That's why we have to keep developing new methods to address them.


Hopefully I'm not spouting the "unfeeling barbarian" prose out there [img]smile.gif[/img] I'll agree on more testing because you can never really have enough, and more testing is going on. However, it's already had a lot of testing (a lot more than the "1000 girls" that I keep seeing), and medical boards in Europe, Mexico, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Brazil and two countries in Africa have approved its use.



To put on the grim reaper hat, and having a 9 year old daughter myself, I don't anticipate her getting sexually active for a long, long time, or her needing blood for any reason. So I can easily say it still doesn't make sense to administer a Hep vaccine.

However, as much as I don't like to think about it, there are morons out there who prey on children, and sexual activity may not be entirely her choice. In 2005, there were 191,670 victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assaults according to the 2005 National Crime Victimization Survey (not including those under 12, which are not reported). About 44% of rape victims are under 18, and 80% are under 30.

And on the other side, your daughter (and mine!) are one accident away from needing a blood transfusion.... :(


No argument there [img]smile.gif[/img] I've seen bad teachers before...

And I love my daughter too. They have, however, shown it works (100% effective for 25,000 females in 33 countries in phase III), as studies have already been done on a large multi-country scale.

And no one can *prove* that anything is safe down the road... you have to get down the road before you know it. That means, realistically, long after both you and I are dead. And our daughters, potentially. No matter how far you get (3 years, 7, 15, 35...), someone is *always* going to say that you might still have an issue crop up. And they're absolutely right... you *could*. In the meantime, 275,000 women a year perish from a vaccinable disease.

I know that I'm not willing to wait. It's my daughter's life, not mine, that I'm dealing with. And in fact, based on your post, I did a whole lot more research that led to the thoughts and opinions above. I'm more convinced now that it's a good idea.

Mandate? Maybe not. Make available through insurance and subsidies? You betcha.

Thanks for making me think more!

I have a serious question here, how can anything be said to be 100% effective in preventing cancer? How did they know the women/girls they treated were going to have cancer? Time machine? I'm no rocket scientist, but not smoking isn't a 100% guarentee that you won't get lung cancer. 99.99 maybe, but not 100%.

According to the commercials I see on TV, a lot of the strains of HPV that cause the cancer might even go away with no treatment. They don't claim that the vaccine will protect against all forms of HPV, nor all cervical cancers. The little disclaimer thing at the end even states that flat out.

Anyway, my point is; to say that something is 100% effective in preventing cervical cancer is, to me, misleading, since they even say it's not on the commercials. At 300.00 per individual, I'd say they are going to more than recoup their investments, they have probably already done that. I don't know what the best course of action is. My daughter is beyond the age of Dad telling her what to do, and I trust her judgement enough, no matter what she decides, but to mandate making a drug company rich, on something that may fall well short of what people expect from it, "100% effective at preventing cervical cancer". I just can't help but think about all the commercials on tv about whether or not you took this drug, or that drug, and have these things going on, you may be entitled to money. All from drug companies slipping in "under the wire" with the FDA.

Where that comes from, Robert, is the actual testing that was done. And like many things, past performance is no guarantee of future results. But if you get a good enough sample size, you can predict the effect on the entire population. Sometimes, the population even behaves like you predict [img]smile.gif[/img]

In one of the stage III tests of 10,559 women, exactly none of the vaccinated group developed any of the cancerous or precancerous cells -- they didn't develop cancer. 21 of the women in the control group did.

A second follow-on study of 11,502 women had one develop cancer in the vaccinated group, and 36 in the control group.

I can't seem to find the results, but I think that the one who developed cancer got it from a strain other than the two that the vaccine protects against.

And in a side note, I found a site here that says that the original researchers behind the vaccine are now working on a second method for producing it... from tobacco plants, no less! This second version will apparently cost around $2 per dose instead of $100 per dose for the current vaccine. So at $360 per individual (using the $120 street price), they're only bringing home $60 in profit. For pharma, that's small.

My question remains, however. Just because the injected group didn't develop cancerous cells doesn't mean they would have with out the vaccine. At any rate, my sole position on this is that it should be left up to individual choice, not made compulsary. If they make 60 dollars a dose, and 100 million vaccines are mandated world wide, we have just mandated making Merck 6 billion dollars. Yes, that's billion. If we are going to mandate paying x amount of dollars to somebody, we could mandate that everybody in that group pay me just .50 cents. I'm still having a hard time with my Social Security stuff, and This would get me out of my mom's pocket, and paying my own bills/medical bills. I might even have some money left over to live well in my misery.