NEW DELHI: A controversy has erupted over the Punjab government’s recent decision to launch HPV vaccination against cervical cancer in government-run hospitals as the health economic evaluation, based on which the initiative has been started, is now being challenged as “misleading and fallacious”.
The row, though limited to Punjab at present, assumes national significance as most private gynaecologists across the country prescribe the vaccination for all adolescent girls before they get sexually active.
Punjab government recently had launched the vaccination with the support of the World Health Organisation, based on an evaluation carried out by nine researchers from the Post Graduate Institute, Chandigarh.
Jacob Puliyel, a senior member of the National Technical Advisory Council, in an article published in the prestigious journal Cancer, however, has said that the PGI authors’ evaluation was grossly erroneous, as it wrongly assumed that mortality in cervical cancer was 98 to 99%. “This falsely exaggerated the benefit of vaccination,” the paper says.
The paper points out that the authors not only present a faulty model but “they also distort the science published by others”.
This is the vaccine that was associated with deaths of tribal girls in Andhra Pradesh in 2010, in a clinical trial performed without their consent by PATH of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
It may cause death, says SJM
Meanwhile, RSS affiliate Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM) has red-flagged any plan to introduce the Human Papilloma Virus vaccine, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Indian Council of Medical Research.
SJM maintained that HPV vaccine could lead to an unmitigated tragedy. In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, SJM has claimed that “unethical” trials of the vaccine was allegedly cause of many deaths of tribal children in Andhra Pradesh.