Did the Gardasil Vaccine Cause Teen’s Paralysis?

By Anastacia Mott Austin

Until March of 2008, then-12-year-old Jenny Tetlock was like any other preteen. But about a month after receiving her third dose of Merck’s Gardasil vaccine, she began to develop symptoms of a neuromuscular disease.

Slowly, over the course of the next year, Jenny’s muscle strength deteriorated to the point that she now must use a wheelchair and cannot even feed herself. The official diagnosis has been an unspecified neurodegenerative disease.

Her parents have become convinced, after researching the vaccine and its reported (and sometimes unreported) side effects, that that Gardasil vaccine is somehow connected to Jenny’s decline.

Indeed, there have been reports of fainting after the shots, and some serious side effects, including deaths. The watchdog group Judicial Watch reports that there have been 10 deaths since September 2007 associated with the Gardasil vaccine, as well as 140 reports of serious side effects, like Guillain-Barre syndrome, a neurodegenerative condition increasingly connected with vaccines. The FDA does not seem concerned, and says it is aware of the increased risk of fainting in teenaged girls receiving the vaccine.

"We're monitoring the safety of the HPV vaccine very carefully," said Robert Ball, the biostatistics director of the FDA, to reporters. "And the only adverse event that causes some concern is syncope or fainting after the vaccine."

Jenny’s rather, Phillip Tetlock, a professor at UC Berkeley in California, is especially concerned that a letter from the FDA to Merck in April of 2008 discussed possible safety violations in the manufacturing process of some lots of the vaccine, including those his daughter received.

Tetlock has begun a blog about the story of his daughter’s illness, (JenTet.com), partly in hopes to find other similar cases to bolster the case of the vaccine causing the condition, and to find help for Jenny.

Her condition does present very much like Guillaine-Barre Syndrome (GBS), a muscle and nerve wasting condition that has been tied to several vaccines, including the polio vaccine.

Merck responds (of course) that the Gardasil vaccine is perfectly safe. Kelley Dougherty, a representative from Merck, told reporters, "We're aware of this case and based on the facts that we've received, the information doesn't suggest that this event was causally associated with vaccination."

Critics of Merck’s response and the Gardasil vaccine itself say that the shot’s safety was not properly tested on girls in Jenny’s age group.

One aspect of Merck’s testing of Gardasil that rankles critics in particular is that the control group receiving the placebo dose (without the HPV vaccine), had some of the same chemical additions, called adjuvants, that the vaccine did. Meaning, because all the test subjects received shots with some chemical adjuvants that may have been responsible for side effects, there was no real control group who had no chemicals injected. The two groups would have tested similarly to side effect responses, and the vaccine would appear to be less harmful than it might actually be.

Whatever the reason, Jenny Tetlock’s family wishes they had done more research before giving the Gardasil vaccine to their daughter. "Jenny endures terrible suffering each day," Phillip Tetlock told Deborah Kotz of The U.S. News and World Report. "She must watch her capacity to control her own body gradually ebb away, and each day her hopes of ever having a normal human life recede ever further into memory. The disease is cruel beyond belief."

For more information about why you should think long and hard before considering this vaccination for anyone in your family, see the Buzzle article entitled "The Gardasil Vaccine: Bad Medicine?" written by yours truly.