July 9, 2006
ATTAC Report This Week
The CDC’s Cancer-Vaccine Fraud
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Hello. I’m your host, Boruch Ellison, and this is “ATTAC Report This Week” for July 9th, 2006.
Should 11- and 12-year-old girls be forced to receive a vaccination against cervical cancer? The debate over that question is heating up as federal officials move closer to creating an unprecedented new policy.
An advisory panel of the government’s Centers for Disease Control, or CDC, recently called for nationwide, mandatory shots of the vaccine known as Gardasil for pre-teen girls. Advocates say that sexually active teenage girls are at risk for developing cervical cancer later in life, and that the vaccine might save thousands of lives. Opponents counter that widespread inoculations would encourage more promiscuity among unmarried teens.
Behind this growing controversy lies a less-known but more urgent debate among scientists. Since the early 1990s, some researchers have voiced concern that tests and vaccines for cervical cancer may be headed down the wrong road — with devastating medical and social consequences.
Even in theory, vaccines have no potential benefit against anything but infectious agents such as viruses or bacteria, not against cancer. In order to market a vaccine for cervical cancer, some scientists had to popularize the notion that a virus causes this type of cancer.
Attempts to find a cervical cancer virus date back to the 1960s, when thousands of virologists, scientists trained to study viruses, ran out of new infectious diseases to study. At the same time, millions of federal dollars were just becoming available for researchers to study cancer, and the virologists switched to the new field of research. But with their old training, they discovered it was easier to identify viruses than to prove cancer was infectious.
They also couldn’t agree on which virus to blame. Herpes virologists wanted to mobilize the federal government against type-2 herpes simplex virus; others favored papilloma virus, which causes warts. A third group of researchers tried to blame both viruses at the same time.
As medical studies began turning up serious problems with the herpes virus hypothesis, scientists gradually switched over to lobbying for the papilloma virus. But there the evidence wasn’t much better. Most Americans are already infected with the virus, which can cause genital warts, yet barely one percent of infected women ever develop cervical cancer. On the flip side, many cervical cancer patients have never contracted the virus; federally funded researchers admit at least ten percent of women were never infected to begin with. Some studies place the figure higher, saying over one-third of cervical cancer patients never contracted the virus. Men have the same rate of virus infection, but far fewer genital cancers. And the unusual attempt to blame a single virus for two totally unrelated diseases — warts and cancer — forced researchers to propose that after causing warts, the virus lies dormant for 20 to 50 years before reactivating to cause cancer.
These bizarre proposals have generated doubts and controversy in the scientific community. Ultimately, it was federal funding rather than medical evidence that kept the papilloma-virus lobby in business long enough to develop a vaccine.
The vaccine shows some protection against warts, but hasn’t been proven to prevent cancer. If the papilloma virus doesn’t cause cancer, then the vaccine will prove useless. Worse, it would distract from better lines of research. For example, a relationship has been found between cervical cancer and use of oral contraceptives, which contain powerful hormones.
Public health activists at the Centers for Disease Control have been the driving force behind creating fear of a cancer virus. Their agenda, closely allied with Marxism, uses medicine as cover for turning religious morality upside-down.
By mandating papilloma virus vaccines, CDC activists will not only encourage teenage promiscuity but will also drive medical costs upward as health insurers and federal programs begin paying for mass vaccinations.
Abolishing the CDC could prevent these problems and help free science from political manipulation.
Thank you for listening. From all of us at ATTAC Report, good-bye.
(“ATTAC Report This Week” is available at www.ATTACReport.com.)