Vaccination and the choice agenda - March 10, 2008
Parents in the UK are fine-tuned to be suspicious of childhood vaccines, thanks mainly to massive publicity over reported links between the measles mumps rubella (MMR) jab and autism. So pushing a human papillomavirus vaccine to prevent cervical cancer was always going to be a tricky prospect, not least due to fears in some sectors that it will encourage children to go out and have sex.
Now Gardasil, one HPV vaccine, is on the market. The UK government is keen on it, but given recent history you’d think advisors would pick their words pretty carefully.
A little over a week ago one of the columnists for UK paper The Guardian wrote a column where she attacked the government over its desire to vaccinate pre-teens with an HPV vaccine.
A response from David Salisbury, the government’s director of immunisation, has now been published by the paper. After taking issue with the column, which he calls “factually incorrect and misguided”, he ends with the following sentence:
The Department of Health is rolling out a public information campaign this year, so parents and young women have all the information they need to consent to this important vaccine.
Personally I’m all in favour of vaccination, but shouldn’t that read “to decide whether to consent to this important vaccine”?
[Hat tip: Jon Turney, also blogged by think tank Demos]