Disclosure: Just the Facts Ma’am.
With subjects like Gardasil, it’s not simply that law and science aren’t on the same level…it’s also that we are all blind mice running in a maze with no idea which path is going to lead us to health and which path is going to take us toward the farmer’s wife with that knife that children have been singing about ever since nursery rhymes were put to music.
We won’t know what we should do now…until 50 or more years from now! Hindsight is priceless. We can look back a few decades and say that the polio vaccine was good and Thalidomide was bad. Fifty years of medical tracking makes a big difference in the amount of information we have to work with. There are thousands of public health issues out there right now we have to make decisions about every day.
Clean water is good, but what about polyethylene terephthate (PET)— leeching nasty chemicals into bottled water, especially after the bottles have sat in the sun or trunk of a car for a long time? Or for that matter, plastics in the microwave? Fly ash floating in a Tennessee river is bad. But what about the fly ash contaminated with sulphur that is compressed into drywall that makes people’s homes unlivable? That’s also bad.
Even if I’m concerned about public health issues, NO ONE has the all the answers. We just want the power of choice and full disclosure. It’s a matter of logic and personal decision making. If dozens of people in my family had Epstein Barr, I would stay away from Gardasil. But if dozens of women on both sides of my family had cervical cancer, then maybe Gardasil would look a lot different to me. For that matter, if Gardasil protects against HPV, wouldn’t it help if boys were required to be vaccinated as well? If Gardasil is so great, wouldn’t it cause a reduction in the rate of HPV exposure down the road? So why is it not marketed to boys? Is it a marketing issue or is there some medical reason? NO answers here, just more questions.
If new drywall in your house smells like rotten eggs, I’m concerned. If some pharmaceutical giant has secretly been fouling your water table and your drinking water has been contaminated with Chromium 6, I’m concerned. If your house or park or school is built on a former superfund site and you didn’t know it and now you’re sick, I’m concerned. I don’t have all the answers, but dude, I can sure find all the questions. And I know some powerhouse lawyers who can bring those questions home in a meaningful way.
Not everyone responds in the same way to the same chemical. So we need full disclosure regarding good and bad effects. Then, people can make appropriate decisions based on their individual realities (i.e. allergies, case histories, family histories, lifestyle, personal beliefs, political beliefs). The issue about Gardasil isn’t even an issue about Gardasil. It is really an issue of basic freedom. Whether it is toxic drywall, fly ash, hpv vaccines, or even plain old water, we need full disclosure.
As Americans, we should have the right to choose and the right to refuse.
It’s pretty simple. We can’t go through life with blinders on. There are always two sides to a coin (three if you count the edge). The fact is that even though I’m not a medical expert and I’m not a lawyer, I always find myself walking some kind of shaky tightrope between the two— moving targets of medicine (which is always lagging) and law where the rules are always changing. I don’t want to make some kind of medical declaration because I DON’T KNOW. But I DO know that where issues are concerned, there are a LOT more than just the traditional “two” sides.I want to advocate for full disclosure and getting the information out there for the girls who have been impacted or communities that are impacted.
If we do all that we can right now to learn and grow from our experiences, 50 years from now, we may be looking at Gardasil as a Thalidomide-type disaster, or the polio-type miracle of 2010. But that’s a conclusion that only time will tell.
By Erin Brockovich
