And what are they saying? Choice, not mandates, is the way to go.

Ian Frazer, the co-inventor of the HPV vaccine:

“It’s my belief that the state should offer HPV vaccines free of charge at the point of use to all women between nine and 20. However it should always be the choice of the women - or for younger women under 16, they and their parents - whether a vaccine of this sort should be given. The ‘medical’ objections are mostly raised by the anti-vaccine lobby and they relate to an inevitable lack of longer term safety and efficacy data for this new product.”

Diane Harper, a clinical investigator at the Dartmouth Medical School:

“Giving it to 11-year-olds is a great big public health experiment. It is silly to mandate vaccination of 11- to 12-year-old girls. There also is not enough evidence gathered on side effects to know that safety is not an issue…This vaccine is good, and it will save a huge number of lives around the world. But an important point is that, if women get the vaccine and then not get their Pap smears, or decide to get them infrequently, what will happen in the U.S. is that we will have an increase in cervical cancer, because the Pap screening does a very good job. That’s my main diatribe. We don’t need mandatory vaccinations for little girls. What we do need to ask, though, is how long does it last, and when do you need a booster?…To mandate now is simply to Merck’s benefit, and only to Merck’s benefit.”

You can read the full stories here:
Frazer in The Brisbane Times;
Harper on KPCNews.net.

[tags]Gardasil, HPV, Merck, Vaccines[/tags]