It’s painful for me to write this, because I don’t like criticizing people I generally admire, but if I’m going to get on the right for sex-phobia and anti-science thinking, I have to do it for the left, too. I hinted at my frustrations in my article about the reproductive health panel at WAM, but truth told, I was banging my head against my desk in frustration when a handful of anti-vaccination types absolutely destroyed any science-based, productive conversation by making the entire discussion about how Merck only invented Gardasil because they enjoy profiting off killing people. It’s one of the most frustrating illogical habits of the left, to assume that because someone makes money at something, that action is almost surely immoral and probably actively evil. You definitely get that every time someone tries to make a scandal out of the fact that liberal and feminist bloggers have advertisements, and you get it in the anti-vaccination hysteria.
Within the course of 10 minutes worth of questions, I heard every right wing myth about the HPV vaccination repackaged as an earnest feminist concern. They didn’t test it at all! With a side dose of acting like this is the first vaccination anyone ever invented, and this is a scary new technology. Truth is, they actually put it through the standard vaccination testing and approval process, and yes, they tested it on boys, too, so that right wing meme that’s seeped into liberal thinking is also what we liberals call “problematic”. The reason it was only approved for girls initially, I suspect, is that the FDA assumed it would be mandated like most childhood vaccinations are (because it’s no different than other childhood vaccinations, except for one thing—-what could that be?), and it was easier to sell it as a way to stop girls from getting cancer. That was stupid, because if they’d done both genders right up front, they could have avoided even really dwelling on the fact that HPV is a sexually transmitted disease, which could have prevented people from having “questions” they don’t have about other routine vaccinations.
Other myths that were trotted out: We don’t know enough about how it works. (The same as other vaccines.) It’s not a real contagious disease like airborne illnesses. This one made me explode, because the implication is right out of Focus On Family’s propaganda on this vaccination—-the implication is that only sluts get HPV, and so you personally should have a right to opt out because you’re not a slut who gets STDs, and you resent being treated like a slut who gets STDs. I’m sure most feminists who trot this line out about how it’s not really a contagious disease would deny that there’s a bit of slut-shaming going on, but I fail to see what else it is. Anyway, they’re wrong—-most of the women who nodded vigorously in the room when this was brought up probably already have had HPV, like most sexually active adults at some point in the lives, no matter how hard they try to keep their number low and respectable. We are all sluts! Truth is, most of us will have more than one partner in our lifetimes, and our partners will probably have more than one partner, so actually, HPV isn’t really different than an airborne illness at all. After all, it’s only your slutty insistence on leaving the house and engaging with other people that makes you vulnerable to airborne illnesses. You have the choice to be a shut-in.
I was disappointed to see a blogger I really admire engage some of these same myths about Gardasil, implying that the slickness of the Merck ads encouraging older women to get the vaccine is somehow evidence that the vaccine itself is questionable. She engaged in the same myths. That it’s a “personal choice”, as if herd immunity isn’t a valid concern with HPV, which it is. You bear some responsibility if you refuse to get the vaccine, get HPV, give it to a boyfriend, who then gives it to his next girlfriend, who then gets cervical cancer. Sorry, but something to consider now that you have an option to avoid spreading this very common disease. That the fact that Merck is making money automatically means that the vaccination is probably bad for you—-look, they make money on nearly every product they sell,* and most of us aren’t fearful about non-sexualized medications like cholesterol-lowering meds, insulin, painkillers they give you at the hospital, and a whole host of things that aren’t sexy enough to start a public panic. That mandatory vaccinations is using women as “human guinea pigs”, which wrongly implies (yet again) that Merck didn’t put the vaccination through standardized vaccination testing.** But I think what bothered me the most was this: