More on Immigrants and Gardasil

The LA Times has probably the best and most balanced coverage (except for that part about the bogus side effects) of the proposed mandatory administration of Gardasil, an HPV vaccine that can help prevent cervical cancer, to immigrant women. Feministe did a pretty definitive takedown of this policy, but something in the Times article stuck out to me:

The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quickly recommended the vaccine for 11- and 12-year-old girls, with catch-up shots up to age 26. (The vaccine works best if given before a young woman is sexually active and may have already contracted the virus.)

A 1996 immigration law directs the Citizenship and Immigration Services to require that new immigrants receive inoculations that the CDC's immunization committee recommends for U.S. residents.

"It's not really a decision of ours," said immigration service spokeswoman Sharon Rummery. "We can't cherry-pick the recommendations."

Foreigners applying for permanent residency must get medical exams and vaccines against such highly contagious diseases as measles, meningitis and polio.

CDC spokesman Curtis Allen said that his agency's immunization committee, an advisory panel of physicians, did not consider the immigration implications of its decision.

"They made the recommendation based on the effectiveness and importance of the vaccine," he said. "That's their charge, and not immigration."

To me this makes a lot of sense. The CDC recommended the vaccine as mandatory for young women, something feminists disagree about, and because the CDC recommends it for American women, the immigration officials are obligated to categorize it as mandatory for immigrants.

But here's the tricky part. Feminists work really hard at making sure women have autonomy over their bodies. Because Gardasil is a vaccine for a sexual transmitted infection, something that can lead to cervical cancer, it becomes strange to tell women what to do with their bodies. It makes sense that vaccines are most effective when widely used, but the part about giving women direction over their sexual lives brings up all kinds of icky memories from when women didn't have autonomy over their bodies (many still don't today).

So I'm not sure where that leaves me. I'm generally in favor of girls getting the vaccine at a young age, preferably before they become sexually active (and they will at some point), but why do I have an impulse to reject the same standard for immigrant women? Possibly because the hypocrisy on the right of requiring it for the "other" women but simultaneously trying to shield their daughters from such a scary vaccine (and the scary thought of sex). Perhaps this is why so many feminists have taken an across-the-board anti-Gardasil stance until we know more about the vaccine. But somehow I still think it's a good idea to do everything you can to prevent cervical cancer.

More on Gardasil

I finally got to read the long NYTimes piece on the HPV vaccine. The piece is thorough and well-reported, asking many important connections about Merck lobbying and cost-per-life saved. The article's conclusion is somewhat agnostic. It doesn't say that the vaccine is bad, but it does raise a lot of quesitons about both its effectiveness and its widespread use.

But here's the thing that really gets me: these questions are almost never asked about other kinds of medication and the article makes lobbying seem unique to Merck. It's not. It was only until recently that we began to question the amount of subsidies pumped into gas and feed corn farming. Once we're talking about preventing cervical cancer in women, however, that's when we bust out our investigative skills.

I'm not complaining. The piece raises a lot of really important questions, like how urgent is it to vaccinate against a virus that is largely seen as an inconvenience (cough, cough, flu vaccine). The article also points to a false sense of security the vaccine might give women. But I know very few women that suddenly think they're impervious after getting a shot. After all, there are plenty of other STIs (and not to mention pregnancy) that you can get if you risk sex without a condom.

In any case, I still believe that widespread use of the HPV vaccine along with continued research into its effectiveness is sound policy to pursue. After all, even if cervical cancer isn't listed as one of the most deadly, if we can prevent it, it seems like a good idea.

The Gardasil Opt-Out

In Australia, 173,607 school-age girls were offered free HPV vaccines, also known as Gardasil. Of those, about 23 percent opted out of the vaccine. It's true that the shot, developed by Big Pharma giant Merck, has been loaded with controversy, even among those on the left. But you'll notice that this story isn't about the more than 100,000 girls that received the vaccine and will have a greatly reduced risk of cancer. Instead the story is about those that chose not to take the vaccine. I'm not saying that people shouldn't be allowed to opt out. Of course they should, but the controversy has always left me mystified.

We know that Gardasil's negative effects have been overreported. The doctors and nurses at my ob-gyn office even said they've never seen a negative effect beyond a stinging or a sore arm. Because Gardasil involves the parents of young girls thinking about those girls having sex some day, people always get a little nervous. You never see people opting out of polio vaccines. Perhaps after the vaccine has been around for longer, and the FDA approves the vaccine for men and older women, the stigma will begin to ease. At the end of the day, the HPV vaccine is one of the few ways to knowingly prevent cancer.