A very (very) long time ago, I had a close-to-cervical-cancer diagnosis. It was, of course, horrid. Some sort of pre-cancerous mass. My main memory of getting the diagnosis is that the medic who broke the news said:
“It’s a sin.”
Actually, they said it was a CIN — a CIN3. A specific type of abnormality. But because cervical cancer had become intrinsically linked with sexual activity, because most are caused by the human papillomavirus, my addled brain heard “sin”.
Later, someone else went on and blasted a grand portion of my cervix away with a laser and I had the horrors of three-monthly pap smears for a while.
This is how it was for my pre-Gardasil generation. Many pap smears. Many abnormal results. A constant worry. An uncomfortable intimacy with speculums. Then in 2007 came Gardasil, a vaccination against HPV, and everything changed.
Gardasil halved the chances of women developing CIN3. Eventually, it could see cervical cancer eliminated as a public health problem. A study published in the Lancet found “cervical cancer could be considered to be eliminated as a public health problem in Australia within the next 20 years”.
“However, screening and vaccination initiatives would need to be maintained thereafter to maintain very low cervical cancer incidence and mortality rates,” the researchers wrote.
Now, a global peer-reviewed study published in the journal Cancer has found cervical cancer rates were stable or decreasing in most countries — particularly those with effective screening and HPV vaccination programs. It’s a potentially preventable deadly disease.
One study estimates that more than 62 million deaths could be avoided with the rollout of the vaccine.
Gardasil was rolled out despite the bluff, bluster and bullshit of some at the time.
In 2006, then-health minister Tony Abbott said he wouldn’t rush to get his own daughters vaccinated. “Maybe that’s because I’m a cruel, callow, callous, heartless bastard but, look, I won’t be,” he said at the time. He eventually stopped being such a cruel, callow, callous, heartless bastard.
He wasn’t alone. That same year Barnaby Joyce (then a senator, now the deputy prime minister) was concerned about the “social implications” of the vaccine, trickly claiming to represent the views of others when he said: “Don’t you dare put something out there that gives my 12-year-old daughter a licence to be promiscuous.”
He later said his comments were taken out of context.
Two South Australian schools at the time refused to offer the jab because of their beliefs it would make girls promiscuous.
Multiple studies since Gardasil was introduced in countries around the world found that was utter tosh (here’s just one). Girls did not rush off to bonk just because they were protected from a deadly cancer.
HPV vaccination — like all vaccination — is one of the most effective public health interventions we have. Of course, it’s total bullshit that some people tried to hinder its rollout by creating a false moral panic around it.
Disturbingly, it’s hard to work out whether it’s more heinous that the opponents would put girls and women at risk of developing a deadly cancer, or that they enjoyed the idea of a deadly cancer as some sort of modern-day chastity belt.
The Joyce/Abbott comments come from the same fetid swamp that produced the “serves ’em right” narrative around early AIDS prevention and treatment. Springs from belief in a deity that visits horrible diseases upon people according to their degree of observance or otherwise with the sexual mores of some ancient goat herder. We get these people as a PM and Deputy PM. The Lucky Country.
In fact the ” fetid swamp” that is The One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church as both attended that Jesuit establishment , Saint Ignatius’ College, Riverview.
Such remarks by All Hat No Cattle Joyce remarks about promiscuity and upholding family values are to be remembered as showing his absolute hypocrisy when carrying on affair with a member of his staff.
He also spent time fighting to exclude same-sex couples from marriages arguing that it was a sacred institution between a man and woman wittering on as below…
“The best protection for those girls is that they get themselves into a secure relationship with a loving husband.”
He then left a wife of 24 years who had raised a family of 4 girls while he was gadding about as the “best retail politician”
I got the “harmless” chickenpox virus in my mid 40s and almost died. I then had chronic fatigue for the next year or so.
I went from a 300 km a week mountain biker to being unable to walk to the corner shop.
These ‘its only like the flu’ whackjobs are going to be very unhappy campers when they eventually catch covid 19.
I don’t think Craig and the rest of the SAD crew will be coming to the rescue.
We made sure that our daughter was vaccinated when it became available at High School, and would have had our sons also vaccinated at the time if it had been made available. Magical thinking and puritanism (for others!) just doesn’t cut it against HPV.
“Makes my 12 yo daughter licentious”
What’s the beetrooters excuse?
Ask the Murdoch hack Campion.
I wish some other women would ask her “What is the attraction?”
Power.
That was Kissinger’s explanation.
This is the Coalition government that when elected in 2013 refused to appoint anyone as the Minister for Science! Last time the nation was without a minister for science was in the 1930s.