Oh dear...

Can we talk about the Gardasil vaccine for a moment. Just a minute, I swear. And I will try my darndest to avoid using such shallow terms as "sexist", "self-righteous", and "flaming fucknut".

Today we discussed the Gardasil vaccine in the Ethics in Medicine course I'm taking. It fell into a lecture about public health, and the true definition of authonomy and what it means to cause harm to others. And of course the subject always comes up about possible side effects, and the discussion is always the same: "They've only tested it for 8 years, what if there are side effects? What if a whole generation of girls is infertile and sickly because of a recommendation from doctors?"

Except it's never phrased like that. It always runs more along the lines of "But there has only been 8 years of clinical trials, and that's not enough, you know? And then there's this worry that there will be this whole generation of infertile females with terrible side effects."

So now it sounds like there is valid worry going around, and we should all be fretting for our lives and uteri because of some imagined health crisis that has only been postulated as a worst of circumstances.

It's not so much waiting for more data before deciding you want to inject something into yourself or completely shunning the vaccine all together that bother me. It's the science fiction/thriller rumors that people haphazardly throw out there that make me want to bludgeon something. I could spread all kinds of nasty rumors about all kinds of nasty things (flu vaccines, soy, flouride, diet soda, florescent lightbulbs, exposure to dogs, exposure to cats, pork, perfume [you would not believe what that stuff does to your ovaries!], salt, pepper, rap music), but I don't. Because for the most part it's silly. And inconclusive. And the studies are conducted by scientists backed by parties with special interests with particular agendas that they want to promote.

And don't even get me started on the "vaccination leads to permiscuous acts of sexy-time and evil!" argument. Because I'd rather have a healthy cervix than chastity anyday, bitches.