Originally published October 12 2009
Who got to Dr. Diane Harper? Cervical cancer researcher retracts story warning about HPV vaccines (opinion)
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
(NaturalNews) Last week, NaturalNews reported public statements attributed to Dr. Diane Harper, a researcher who worked on both the Gardasil and Cevarix vaccines. A story appearing in the UK paper Sunday Express, entitled "Jab as deadly as the cancer," quoted Dr. Harper as saying the cervical cancer vaccine might be more dangerous than the cancer it was supposed to prevent.
In the time since that story was published, Sunday Express has been under relentless attack by pro-pharma "scientific" journalists, drug companies and even Dr. Harper herself who now claims the entire story was wholly fabricated. In a "skeptics" blog published at The Guardian, Dr. Harper is now quoted as saying, "I did not say that Cervarix was as deadly as cervical cancer. I did not say that Cervarix could be riskier or more deadly than cervical cancer. I did not say that Cervarix was controversial..."
Oh really?
NaturalNews wonders: Who got to Dr. Diane Harper? Did she change her story after being threatened like many other pharmaceutical researchers have been?
To answer this question, we took a trip in the way back machine and gathered some quotes attributed to Dr. Diane Harper by other news sources, including CBS News, US News & World Report, and several other news outlets.
Here you'll see what Dr. Diane Harper really has said about Gardasil and HPV vaccines. Here are some of the highlights (dates and sources provided below):
"We don't know yet what's going to happen when millions of doses of the vaccine have been given and to put in place a process that says you must have this vaccine, it means you must be part of a big public experiment. So we can't do that until we have more data." - Dr. Diane Harper
"If we vaccinate 11 year olds and the protection doesn't last... We've put them at harm from side effects, small but real, for no benefit... The benefit to public health is nothing, there is no reduction in cervical cancers..." - Dr. Diane Harper
"I think there's a strong possibility that Gardasil was the catalyst that set off the ALS [Lou Gehrig's Disease]. It could have been the straw that broke the camel's back in a child who was already predisposed to the condition. I do think it's wrong for physicians to tell parents that it's 100 percent safe." - Dr. Diane Harper
"...neither physicians nor women should be lulled into a false sense of security [about the vaccine]" - Dr. Diane Harper
"It is silly to mandate vaccination of 11- to 12-year-old girls There also is not enough evidence gathered on side effects to know that safety is not an issue. This vaccine has not been tested in little girls for efficacy. At 11, these girls don't get cervical cancer - they won't know for 25 years if they will get cervical cancer. ...To mandate now is simply to Merck's benefit, and only to Merck's benefit." - Dr. Diane Harper
"Dr. Harper is afraid that the way the vaccine is being presented could actually have the effect of increasing the rate of cervical cancer in the U.S." - Michele Cagan, who interviewed Dr. Diane Harper for the Health Sciences Institute.
Here are the full quotes (and links) from each of these sources (note that words in quotation marks are attributed directly to Dr. Diane Harper):
The news stories quoting Dr. Diane Harper (with links)
(Hurry, save off these web pages before Big Pharma intimidates these news outlets into removing these stories, too! Seriously. Somebody save these...)
May, 2008 - Gardasil Researcher Criticizes Moves to Make HPV Vaccine Mandatory
http://www.newsinferno.com/archives...
Dr. Harper, who has dedicated two decades of her career to research on HPV, told Florida TV station WFOR-TV that the rush to recommend and mandate the vaccination of very young girls "went too fast without any breaks." Dr. Harper says that there has not been enough post-marketing surveillance of Gardasil to insure that it is free of side effects that could prove particularly dangerous to young girls. "We don't know yet what's going to happen when millions of doses of the vaccine have been given and to put in place a process that says you must have this vaccine, it means you must be part of a big public experiment. So we can't do that until we have more data." Dr. Harper said.
August, 2009 - CBS News - Gardasil Researcher Speaks Out
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009...
Amid questions about the safety of the HPV vaccine Gardasil one of the lead researchers for the Merck drug is speaking out about its risks, benefits and aggressive marketing.
Dr. Diane Harper says young girls and their parents should receive more complete warnings before receiving the vaccine to prevent cervical cancer. Dr. Harper helped design and carry out the Phase II and Phase III safety and effectiveness studies to get Gardasil approved, and authored many of the published, scholarly papers about it. She has been a paid speaker and consultant to Merck. It's highly unusual for a researcher to publicly criticize a medicine or vaccine she helped get approved.
Dr. Harper joins a number of consumer watchdogs, vaccine safety advocates, and parents who question the vaccine's risk-versus-benefit profile. She says data available for Gardasil shows that it lasts five years; there is no data showing that it remains effective beyond five years."
"If we vaccinate 11 year olds and the protection doesn't last... We've put them at harm from side effects, small but real, for no benefit," says Dr. Harper. "The benefit to public health is nothing, there is no reduction in cervical cancers..."
She also says that enough serious side effects have been reported after Gardasil use that the vaccine could prove riskier than the cervical cancer it purports to prevent. Cervical cancer is usually entirely curable when detected early through normal Pap screenings.
March, 2009 - US News & World Report - Is Gardasil More Effective in Older Teens?
http://health.usnews.com/blogs/on-w...
Harper told me then that the vaccine's efficacy hadn't been tested in anyone under age 16, and she wasn't sure whether it even worked in preteens.
"I think there's a strong possibility that Gardasil was the catalyst that set off the ALS [Lou Gehrig's Disease]," Harper says. "It could have been the straw that broke the camel's back in a child who was already predisposed to the condition."
"I do think it's wrong for physicians to tell parents that it's 100 percent safe." She also has previously spoken publicly about her impression that Merck was too aggressive in marketing the vaccine to preteens and in lobbying state legislators to make Gardasil mandatory for young girls.
May, 2007 - MedicalNewsToday - Efficacy Of HPV Vaccine Gardasil Among Women Previously Infected With HPV Lower Than Expected, Study Says
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/art...
"...neither physicians nor women should be lulled into a false sense of security" by the vaccine. "I don't think this is the gun that is going to take cervical cancer off the map," Harper said (quoted from Los Angeles Times, 5/10/2007)
March, 2007 - Alliance for Human Research Protection - HPV Vaccine Researcher Blasts Mandatory Marketing
http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/vie...
Dr. Diane M. Harper, a lead researcher in the development of the humanpapilloma virus vaccine, who says giving the drug to 11-year-old girls "is a great big public health experiment."
"It is silly to mandate vaccination of 11- to 12-year-old girls There also is not enough evidence gathered on side effects to know that safety is not an issue."
All of her trials have been with subjects ages 15 to 25. "This vaccine has not been tested in little girls for efficacy. At 11, these girls don't get cervical cancer - they won't know for 25 years if they will get cervical cancer."
Dr. Harper said, Merck was required to put together a database on the efficacy in children before Gardasil was approved. But instead, the company put together four study sites that "are not necessarily representative, and may not even have enough numbers to determine what they need to know."
She said that vaccinating little girls now is not going to protect them later. "To mandate now is simply to Merck's benefit, and only to Merck's benefit," she said.
Dr. Harper said, she's been trying for months to convince major television and print media to listen to her and tell the facts about the usefulness and effectiveness of this vaccine. "But no one will print it," she said.
August, 2008 - The Health Sciences Institute - Could the Gardasil vaccine actually help increase cervical cancer rates?
http://hsibaltimore.com/2008/08/27/...
Even though Dr. Harper believes in the vaccine, she does not think it should be mandated for young girls. She also told me about several concerns she has surrounding public perception of the vaccine, including this stunner: Dr. Harper is afraid that the way the vaccine is being presented could actually have the effect of increasing the rate of cervical cancer in the U.S.
Dr. Harper DID say the vaccines don't work!
What's obvious from all this is that the Sunday Express article is clearly consistent with the public statements Dr. Diane Harper made over the last several years:
• She has expressed concern that the vaccine may not work, stating, in effect, that it could have no effect on cervical cancer rates, especially in the short term.
• She has expressed concern that the way the vaccine is marketed may end up increasing cervical cancer rates in women.
• She has characterized the vaccines as an "experiment" on numerous occasions, even while pointing out the profit motive of the vaccine manufacturer.
• She has stated that the vaccine could have "set off" a serious neurological disorder known as ALS.
• She has stated that the vaccine has "no benefit" to public health, and yet it presents a very real risk of harming the public.
It should be clear at this point that the statements attributed to Dr. Harper by Sunday Express are entirely consistent with Dr. Harper's position in previous interviews found in numerous other publications.
Given this evidence, it seems extremely unlikely that the Sunday Express fabricated their story. And even if they did, it must have been carefully fabricated to seem 100% consistent with what Dr. Harper has already said about vaccine safety in the past. And that's not exactly the same class of fabrication, is it? If you restate things that are already true, that's quite different from engineering total falsehoods.
From all this, it's clear that Dr. Harper is an informed, concerned researcher who isn't buying Merck's disease mongering nonsense. But a question still lingers: Did someone get to her?
Why vaccine researchers are afraid to tell the truth
Within hours after going public with her latest concerns about the cervical cancer vaccines, Dr. Harper would have likely been contacted by drug company lawyers and various "threatening people" who pressured her to retract her interview with the Sunday Express and claim she never said those things.
Facing being blackballed by the pharmaceutical industry (which happens a lot to researchers who don't go along with the falsehoods), it would have been a very fearful situation for Dr. Harper.
Why might Dr. Harper be afraid for her job or her safety?
Remember, Merck is the company that drew up a "hit list" of doctors they sought to neutralize (http://www.naturalnews.com/027116_M...). Internal emails from Merck employees revealed that they said, "We may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live..." (this is not fiction. Read the article at the link above if you don't believe it...)
According to court testimony in this case, Merck also threatened or intimidated at least eight clinical investigators.
Dr. Harper is a clinical investigator. She could have very easily been threatened to retract her story. You won't find these facts mentioned in any of the news stories attempting to refuse Dr. Harper's interview.
Remember, Merck was also found to have set up offshore bank accounts to avoid paying billions in U.S. taxes (http://www.naturalnews.com/021645_M...). Merck has a documented history of intimidating doctors and scientists and violating the law.
So did Merck get to Dr. Diane Harper and pressure her to retract her interview with the Sunday Express? While I can't prove it, it certainly seems to be one of the more likely explanations of what happened here.
And you can hardly blame Dr. Harper. Faced with intimidation or professional suicide, what was she supposed to do? The problem here is not Dr. Harper. The problem is that pharmaceutical companies are run like criminal operations, routinely engaging in thuggish acts, violating federal law, intimidating scientists and deceiving the public about the safety and efficacy of their vaccines.
So what else is new?
And to the blogger at The Guardian who pounced on this renouncement of quotations attributed to Dr. Harper, you've been played!
Dr. Harper may have retracted her interview in this story, but what she reportedly said in that Sunday Express story is 100% consistent with her previous statements and it also happens to be true!
Cervical cancer vaccines ARE more dangerous than the cancers they claim to prevent.
Now, I can't prove that Merck intimidated Dr. Harper into changing her story, but based on public court documents, this is a type of behavior in which Merck has apparently engaged. And I can't prove that Dr. Harper changed her story, but I wouldn't blame her if she did, especially if she was being threatened with losing her career.
I can't prove that Sunday Express really did interview Dr. Harper, but if think they did, you've got to ask this one question: Did ABC News, US News & World Report, Alliance for Human Research Protection and everybody else also fabricate their quotes about Dr. Harper? Is this some grand conspiracy by the media to intentionally misquote Dr. Harper over a series of articles spanning many years and many different publications?
C'mon. Ridiculous. Maybe Dr. Harper simply told the truth.
How about that?
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