Get real girls n boys.. do you really want to stick your ten year old daughter with yet another money making peice of crap? try some healthy living and don’t get sick in the first place.. give medicine the flick it was invented by men for reasons other than looking after your health.
google ross horne and learn about things that dr’s don’t learn. fresh fruit forget the rest.
Good rave eh.. but I mean it
Neil

I just found this site/this page and think it’s a very good point that I overlooked then.

Yes, it was Johnny hoWARd who made this announcement.
And I believe it was important to convince the general public agree on this new vaccine. I mean, yes “Janet Howard is a cervical cancer survivor” as somebody wrote. Therefore it sounds such a wonderful solution for that health problem if it comes out of a survivor’s husband.

I personally wonder why Aussie parents are not asking questions when hoWARd is eager to do some experiment on his population even before his boss manages to.

It’d be interesting if we can find out who owns Merck and/or who’s their shareholders just like Rummsfeld’s Aspartame and Tamiflu which are killing many.

Again,
Why Aussie parents are not asking questions at all?

Merck to Halt Lobbying for Vaccine for Girls
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/business/21merck.html?ei=5088&en=a1e54a0b7dd69131&ex=1329714000&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

The safety of the new cervical cancer vaccine should open for debate.
http://www.informyourself.com.au/Gardasil.html

Cervical Cancer Vaccine?
http://www.informyourself.com.au/articles.html

I hate to break it to you, but the only spinning being done on this issue is by you and your post. Does everything have to have some subterranean evil other agenda in Suz’s world?

Good advice not to underestimate your enemy. These guys are hard-nosed businessmen who work as a team to achieve their goals. The same team approach can be seen in negotiations with the states over GST and water rights, in foreign relations and of course in Parliament. Very few of the ministry’s actions are accidental.

The opposition needs to learn from them.

My figures might be wrong but apparently the vaccine is only successful 70% of the time.

I think it’s that it only covers most but not all strains of HPV. I think it’s pretty much completely effective on the strains it covers.

Bernice is spot-on. While this vaccine is good, it is far from perfect and it is meant to be used alongside traditional safe-sex practices. I think that one of the big benefits of this vaccine however is that the HPV virus (well the version that leads to cervical cancer) can be transmitted by skin to skin contact in the genital region. I don’t want to draw a diagram, but condom’s don’t always offer protection from the virus (though they definitely help). The vaccine just reduces the odds of being affected by the disease by reducing the proportion of the population that can transmit the virus. My figures might be wrong but apparently the vaccine is only successful 70% of the time.

Sounds like your practicing safe politics there Bernice.

Faced with a drug company wanting to charge too much for Gardasil (did I spell that right?), the Govt says that they won’t put it on the list. Normally, the drug company would say “Ahaa – I smell a rat – the Govt is bluffing”, but by having Tony Abbott make the announcement, with his known religious reservations, the bluff is made credible, and the drug company caves in.

Brilliant negotiating, consumate politics, huge kahoonas.

FXH, I’m largely in tune with your analysis – and then there is the issue of the very limited testing that’s been done on this drug. It’s been rushed to market. However, Anna’s points are strong ones too.

Slightly off track but can’t miss the opportunity to mention again, the failure of Steve Bracks to allow condoms in prisons. Not sure whether this is an “ethical issue” for the Premier but a little “public shaming” might be in order here too. The dangers are so great for the prisoners and overall community, it’s pretty scarey to contemplate.

Gardasil will thankfully be out there ,at least, to help make up for that sort of negligence. Not really concerned about who gets the credit for it.

Perhaps if we had a Health Minister who respected facts and science and women’s decision-making faculties we may not have been so quick to judge.

Some of us weren’t quite so confident as you that it would have been negotiated quickly and fairly – rather we used past experience and decided that public shaming was the only thing that would work.

You’d be correct were it any other medicine than this, FXH, but there was no such certainty with this particular vaccine.

It is important to keep in mind the back story on this.

The makers of Gardasil, Merck, are in fierce competition with GlaxoSmithKline’s Cervarix to see who can get in first with monopoly contracts for HPV vaccine worldwide.

The invented here in good old Oz line plays well in the lobbying war, but it means we are paying for a large part of the estimated $1.2 billion (R&D Marketting) it took to get Gardasil to market.

Normally the PBAC has better bargaining chips and the situation is reversed with the R&D (and marketing) $ recouped largely overseas, primarily USA, and PBAC can bargain for a more marginal price.

If we could have waited a few months until competing alternatives came on the market, Cervarix or even better a generic, we would save millions and improve more lives with our health dollar.

But that isn’t such an exciting story – is it.