Informing the Crowd - How the HPV Vaccine was Sold to a Credulous Irish Public.

Regret.ie, 16/9/2015

In 2010, one Irish mother needed to make a decision on whether her daughter would receive the newly introduced HPV vaccine. Based on her subsequent research, she wrote a thesis for her Master’s degree titled: 
“Informing the Crowd, The Path of Public Consent for the Human Papilloma Virus vaccine”.

In this 100 page thesis (plus 12 pages of citations and references),  Olive Glennon explores how the Irish public were made to believe that HPV was a lethal killer requiring pre-emptive action on the part of the government. She details the methods and mechanisms used to create public awareness and public demand for the Vaccine for a ”target audience utterly credulous and naïve“.

A Health Technology Assessment (HTA) was produced by the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) to justify the cost. On the subject of this HTA she states that “The proliferation of misinformation and manipulated information, especially when coming from experts, was disturbing”.  

The author notes that adverse reactions did not cause real concern for the national monitoring organisation (the IMB*). Before listing the results of reported adverse reactions the IMB qualifies the report by stating “Suspected adverse reaction reporting rates .. cannot be used to determine the frequency of occurrence of adverse reactions to Gardasil”. 
In response, the author asks:
“This statement clearly begs the question, if the reporting of adverse reactions cannot be used  to monitor the frequency of occurrence of adverse reactions, what is the point of gathering the information in the first instance?”.

The thesis is available here. 

* Since renamed to HPRA
 

If your child has suffered health issues that you think may have been triggered by Gardasil, and you wish to get in contact with other parents who have had a similar experience, please contact us at: