The role of government is not to prevent any conceivable bad outcome.
The incidence of cervical cancer in the US in 2011 was 12,720 persons. According to the population clock the population of the US is 312,236,169. A little handy dandy math shows that in the odds of a person getting this disease is approximately 1 in 24,547, or 0.041%.
That incidence level doesn't justify jabbing everyone with a vaccine (it's not even close).
Vaccines are not risk-free, and the medical research is neither exact nor complete. Based on what we know today it is outrageous to be jabbing every 12 year old girl with a new vaccine for this. This is not polio or smallpox, and if we react this way to every rare disease then we will be pumping everyone full of biomedical stew "just in case".
Now that I've done the math on this particular one, I can see that it's ten times worse the decision to force this vaccine on girls than I'd imagined it to be earlier. It's not even a good medical decision for any given individual to take on the vaccine risk if the manufacturer gave the vaccine away for free.
You forgot to divide (the US population) by two, seeing as about half of the population does not have a cervix.
You might want to consider that half of the population wasn't likely to get cervical cancer, due to the fact they don't have a cervix.
Also not when figuring the odds, those were odds per year.
Most people live significantly longer than one year.
“The role of government is not to prevent any conceivable bad outcome.”
We agree on this.
“Vaccines are not risk-free, and the medical research is neither exact nor complete. Based on what we know today it is outrageous to be jabbing every 12 year old girl with a new vaccine for this. This is not polio or smallpox, and if we react this way to every rare disease then we will be pumping everyone full of biomedical stew ‘just in case’.”
First sentance is correct. Except that for some reason, vaccine makers seem to think that mercury-based compounds that are known to be harmful in other instances are commonly used to preserve vaccines. Thimerosal, for instance. Is it the vaccine, or the thimerosal that is the problem? The published research says, for example, that my son’s autistic-spectrum disorder was not caused by a thimerosal-preserved vaccine. The guy who published the study that said such vaccines WERE notably harmful got his license pulled. However, my son developed the first symptoms (which we didn’t recognize at the time) within weeks of getting his DTP vaccine. Autism has been recognized since the late 40’s. In the past decade or two, the incidence has either risen sharply, or we’re just getting much better at diagnosing it. I was working on a Master’s Degree in Special Education a few years ago, and have been following the vaccine controversy, now supposedly settled, for some time. In so far as I’m concerned, the issue is not yet properly closed.
“Now that I’ve done the math on this particular one, I can see that it’s ten times worse the decision to force this vaccine on girls than I’d imagined it to be earlier. It’s not even a good medical decision for any given individual to take on the vaccine risk if the manufacturer gave the vaccine away for free.”
And again, I disagree, though that may have (in fact, DOES have) to do with my family history. If your family has no incidence of any kind of cancer, it just might be valid for YOUR family. My daughters got the HPV vaccine. I exercised my parental right to get it for them because I know that they are very likely to be at risk due to their family history. YMMV. Not to mention your math error... ;)
After they do studies on guys, I may insist my son gets it, too. Especially since sensitivity to vaccines, tendencies to get cancer, and the potential to develop autism, along with many other things, may be heredetary. Besides,considering how recently they linked cervical cancer to HPV, what else might it be linked to? Prostate cancer? Testicular cancer? Any other type(s) of cancer?
One of these days, maybe we’ll all know. In the mean time, never say “never.”
Old Student.