9 Times The Media Tried To Scare Us With Bad Science

Yay, who doesn't love a good vaccination scare?

This time the focus was the cervical cancer vaccine that was offered to young women in order to help prevent them contracting HPV.

For this story, the Express quoted a Dr. Diane Harper, who was involved in the development of the Cervarix vaccine, as saying that "the cervical cancer vaccine may be riskier and more deadly than the cancer it is designed to prevent", that it was being aggressively over-marketed and that people were not being properly warned about the side effects.

Actually, what Dr. Harper had said is that there are some concerns with how a similar drug, Gardasil, had been marketed outside of Europe and that people were not made fully aware of the fact that it wasn't a wonder drug.

From this, the Express gleaned that the people allowing their offspring to have the vaccine were as good as giving their daughters cancer. Nothing melodramatic about that then.

It turns out that what they meant by this is that people who had been given the vaccine might feel as though they were now immune to the HPV virus and may be more likely to take risks that they wouldn't normally take, thus potentially exposing themselves to new dangers. 

Those of you with an ounce of logical reasoning will have spotted that this is not the same as a vaccine that is "as deadly as the cancer it is supposed to prevent".

Harper has since lodged a complaint against the Express and they have been forced to take the article down. Dr Harper has  since said that “I fully support the HPV vaccines,” she says. “I believe that in general they are safe in most women. I told the Express all of this.”