Today @KatieShow we're talking about #HPV & the controversy surrounding the vaccine - what are your thoughts?
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— @katiecouric
@katiecouric @KatieShow My thoughts are that my daughter got the vaccine and my son will. Prevents cancer. Stop fear-mongering!
— @katekilla
.@katiecouric @KatieShow There’s no controversy. It’s safe. And this is some serious fear-mongering.
— @HillaryKelly
.@katiecouric You are perpetuating a dangerous myth about HPV vaccine by presenting it as "controversial."
— @MarkLGoldberg
How @katiecouric stacked the journalistic deck in her segment today on HPV vaccine. By @matthewherper
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— @carlzimmer
.@katiecouric @KatieShow Will you publicly respond to serious concerns raised by @sethmnookin, others? Bk is closed on HPV vaccine. It works
— @sci2mrow
One wonders if @katiecouric realizes what a massive mistake she made on @KatieShow yesterday.
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— @gorskon
More on the unfortunate Katie Couric anti vax show from
Aetiology:
Regular readers keeping up on infectious disease issues might have seen Seth Mnookin’s post yesterday, warning of an upcoming episode of the Katie Couric show focusing on the HPV vaccine. Even though Mnookin previously spoke with a producer at length regarding this topic, the promo for the show certainly did not look promising:
“The HPV vaccine is considered a life-saving cancer preventer … but is it a potentially deadly dose for girls? Meet a mom who claims her daughter died after getting the HPV vaccine, and hear all sides of the HPV vaccine controversy.”
And indeed, reviews thus far show that unfortunately, Couric pretty much mangled the issue and allowed heart-wrenching anecdotes to trump science (reminiscent of Jenny McCarthy’s appearance on Oprah). I won’t cover it all (you can view it here), but basically Couric allows stories about illness and death in the weeks following administration of the vaccine to go unchallenged, and brings on Dr. Diane Harper as her HPV expert (featured prominently in the anti-vaccine documentary “The Greater Good“). Dr. Harper believes the HPV vaccine is over-hyped, and that Pap screening is “100% accurate” so no HPV vaccine is really needed. This, frankly, is hogwash. Even with emphasis on screening, here in the U.S. we have 12,000 cases and 4,000 deaths from cervical cancer alone each year. (And in Mnookin’s post and in Matthew Herper’s Forbes post, both note that head and neck cancers can also be caused by HPV as well–but have no good screening process).
Couric's show is no gift to journalism, and no credit to the profession.
Matthew Herper:
We can’t ignore the stories of the girls Couric reported on, either. She said that eleven cases allege that HPV vaccines have caused death, according to the National Vaccine Information Center, an anti-vaccine group. (For comparison, Merck has shipped 62 million doses of Gardasil.) Vaccine makers and the CDC should redouble their efforts to make sure that if there is a risk of death from the vaccine, we know that. I think Merck in particular should be making an effort to approach these families and find out if there is anything it can learn about its vaccine. Is there any biologically plausible way that Gardasil could be having these effects? It seems unlikely, but we can’t be careful enough.
But deaths – including deaths by seizures or unexplained causes – do occur for all sorts of reasons, without explanation, and just because a death happened 18 days after a vaccine was given, as in the example on Katie’s show, does not mean the vaccine caused it. So far, investigations trying to link Gardasil and Cervarix to serious side effects have come up empty.
A study of 997,000 girls in Nordic countries found no link to autoimmune, neurological, and venous thromboembolic adverse events from the vaccine. A CDC analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2009 also found no link between HPV vaccines and serious side effects. Schaffner says the main side effects he sees are sore arms and fever.
So far, despite the fact that many families do opt not to get the vaccine, Gardasil is performing better than expected. In the seven year period ending in 2010, the prevalence of HPV infection in girls and women fell 56% to 5.1% of the population. Thomas Frieden, the director of the CDC, told NBC the reduction was “better than we hoped for.” Let’s hope that can continue.
Respectful Insolence:
It was even worse than I thought it was going to be, and I knew it was going to be bad when it was advertised as having a mother who thought that Gardasil killed her daughter. And so it did. What I didn’t realize is that Couric also had one of the founders of the anti-HPV vaccine crank blog SaneVax on her show, Rosemary Mathis, and her daughter Lauren. If you want to get an idea of just how much quackery and pseudoscience is promoted by SaneVax, just search this blog for the term. I’ll just give you two examples. First, SaneVax latched onto a dubious finding of trace amounts of HPV DNA in Gardasil to launch a fear mongering campaign of such monumental ignorance about molecular biology and science itself that it was breathtaking in its scope. Then about a year ago, SaneVax published a guide to blaming the deaths of children on Gardasil. I kid you not. The title of the despicable article was A Parent’s Guide: What to do if your child dies after vaccination.
One of the founders of this group was one of the mothers Couric interviewed as an equal to a real pediatrician.
More policy and politics below the fold.
Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani:
The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.
The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.
Juliet Eilperin and Amy Goldstein:
President Obama urged a group of young activists Wednesday not to give up on promoting his signature health-care law, as enrollment picked up on HealthCare.gov.
Roughly 27,000 Americans signed up for insurance on the federal exchange on Tuesday, according to internal figures, bringing the site’s three-day enrollment total to 56,000. That figure is more than double the number who enrolled online in the entire month of October, which was almost 27,000.
EJ Dionne:
The debate over the Affordable Care Act can stay small, focusing on Web site failures and other short-term difficulties facing the law. Or it can get bigger, with wider insurance coverage seen as part of a larger struggle for social justice in a nation growing steadily less equal...
“If the Senate Republican leader still thinks he is going to be able to repeal this someday,” Obama said, “he might want to check with the more than 60,000 people in his home state who are already set to finally have coverage that frees them from the fear of financial ruin.”
And Obama put forward his strongest call yet for an increase in the minimum wage, raising the stakes on a popular cause that Democrats hope to make central to the 2014 midterms.
Charles M. Blow:
As the president pointed out:
“The problem is, that alongside increased inequality, we’ve seen diminished levels of upward mobility in recent years. A child born in the top 20 percent has about a two in three chance of staying at or near the top. A child born into the bottom 20 percent has a less than one in 20 shot at making it to the top. He’s 10 times likelier to stay where he is."
CNN:
Wednesday's release of audio recordings of the 911 calls from the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings forced news organizations to make difficult — and probably unpopular -- decisions about what to broadcast and what to hold back.
News executives said they were considering both the wishes of the community where the school was located, Newtown, Connecticut, and the journalistic impulse to report on one of the biggest news stories of the past year.
Thank you to NBC and ABC for not playing the tapes. As for CBS...
But fighting for the release of information that should be available to the public doesn't mean news organizations should, or even will, make those details available to their audiences, he said.
"A bad reason for using them is if they are merely interesting, emotional, sensational and just raise public emotion without any illumination," [Al Tompkins, senior faculty member for broadcast and online journalism at the Poynter Institute] said.