Found on r/medicine, aptly titled “Vaccines Work.”
It’s Official: HPV Vaccine Doesn’t Turn Teens Into Monsters
New research today from the Department of Oh My God Why Does This Study Have To Exist — turns out, vaccinating teenage girls against HPV won’t cause them to go from innocent children drawing pictures of flowers with crayons to unstoppable sexzillas. Sort of like how wearing seatbelts doesn’t cause car accidents, or how wearing sunscreen doesn’t cause skin cancer. But will the study convince reticent parents to abandon their ass-backwards logic and actually acknowledge that their daughters’ sexuality will someday exist?
The study, published today in the journal Pediatrics, showed that there was no evidence that girls who are given the Gardasil vaccine against HPV respond by going out and hopping on the nearest guy. Instead, girls who receive the vaccine have similar sexual trajectories to their unvaccinated peers — except the girls who are vaccinated get the bonus of being protected from a deadly and preventable form of cancer when they do have sex.
I think it says a lot about the state of scientific literacy and ignorance in this country when a study like this is actually needed.
And to the last point:
Call me cynical, but I’m not convinced that the country that invented purity rings will be willing to throw Michele Bachmannesque anti-Gardasil hysteria aside en masse just because some fancy elites in Georgia used science to present some data. Unfortunately, in this case, ignoring the problem is a particularly ineffective method of solving it. And willful ignorance can’t cure cancer.
Nope, I don’t think it will either. Let’s look at vaccines, another “hot button” health topic. Wakefield’s paper has been discredited and many studies done finding no correlation between vaccinations or autism. Many of those “fomg look at this dangerous neurological disorder this person got!” on news channels years ago have also been found to be faked. Yet, there are still many people who believe that vaccinations will give you autism, will poison you, and are a conspiracy from “Big Pharma” to get you sick and ring you from money like an anti-establishment knee jerk reaction.
