Yet Another Conspiracy Theorist

"This is akin to funding research that purports to show tobacco smoking does not cause lung cancer. And that tobacco cessation, rather than helping reduce risk, is actually causing harm ... CIHR would not fund such a study, would it?"
Dr. Eduardo Franco, head, cancer epidemiology, McGill University

"I don't know who was on her [grant awarding] jury. Someone was really sleeping."
Dr. Marc Steben, chair, Canadian Network on HPV Prevention

"I'm sort of raising a red flag out of respect for what I've found in my own study, and for the despair of parents who had totally perfect 12-year-olds who are now in their beds, too tired to go to school."
"Yes, we're going against the grain, and we are going against those who are believed; i.e. doctors and nurses and people in public health."
Dr. Genevieve Rail, professor of kinesiology, Concordia University, Montreal

"This is one of the best understood cancers there is. We know not only that HPV [Human Papilloma Virus] absolutely causes this cancer -- because every cancer has HPV in it -- but we actually know it is particular strains of HPV."
Dr. Lori Frappier, Canada research chair, molecular virology, University of Toronto

Joe Raedle/Getty Images   The two types of HPV vaccine now on the market have been shown effective at preventing strains of the virus that cause 70% of cervical cancer, as well as some other cancers.

In Canada, routine immunization against HPV infection of girls was initiated in most provinces in the late 2000s. There are two types of HPV vaccine proven to be effective at preventing strains of the HPV virus known to cause 70 percent of cervical cancer. It is recognized as well as the cause of some penis, anal, throat and vaginal cancers. In Canada, some 1,500 women are annually diagnosed with cervical cancer. Of that number 380 die yearly from cervical cancer.

Dr. Genevieve Rail -- described on Concordia University's website as a feminist critic of "body-related institutions", a designation that pejoratively encompasses health industries, pharmacological corporations and the media specializing in health concerns -- finds alternate favour with "post-structuralist, de/postcolonial and queer approaches" to women's health concerns. She feels herself qualified in her opinions as a 'social scientist' with her doctorate in kinesiology.

She certainly has company in her suspicion of HPV vaccines and her outspoken criticism of their use. Catholic boards of education are famously not dreadfully keen on inoculating girls against HPV. Their view is that girls and all unwed females have no business being sexually active, and to use a vaccine to protect against a sexually-transmitted disease is tantamount to giving girls permission to become dissolute sluts.

Her public utterances attacking public health agencies for their recommendations and use of HPV viruses have most certainly brought her to the attention of the medical-scientific world. The link between the human papilloma-virus and cervical cancer is considered settled. Five years ago the Nobel committee caught up with the 30-year-old discovery by German scientist Harald zur Hausen by awarding him the 2010 prize for medical discovery.

As far as Dr. Rail is concerned, this is simply not sufficiently convincing. She considers the federal agency that has funded her studies praiseworthy for daring to fund an independent study and in so doing giving assistance to ensure that "social change and social progress happen". In response to her retrograde and potentially harmful utterances and writings, 26 scientists have cited studies showing the vaccine has reduced the number of precancerous lesions and genital warts triggered by HPV, in contradiction of her negative assertions.

Such as that in her opinion there is no existing evidence "directly" linking HPV to cervical cancer. And nor has she any doubts relating to her public commentary. She does have aspirations, that her voice will help to offset the "dominant discourse" on the vaccine. She co-authored a four-year study comprised primarily of 170 interviews, some with parents who expressed their belief that the inoculations had caused serious side effects to their children.

Experts in the field are outraged that the Canadian Institute for Health Research had funded her work to the sum of $270,000 over a six-year period of study. Her application read that she meant to examine HPV vaccination "discourses"; their effect on teenagers through interviews and drawings, primarily. Dr. Rail and Dr. Abby Lippman, a University of Montreal professor emeritus, had published an op-ed article in Le Devoir newspaper casting doubt on the safety and usefulness of vaccines for HPV.

Their authoritative position was that the province of Quebec should put a stop to HPV immunization until such time as the dangers inherent in the procedure have been independently investigated to give the program a clean bill of health. The two researchers, Drs. Rail and Lippman travelled to the World Congress on Public Health held in India last February where they held a workshop encouraging participants to be "on the offensive against the vaccine", since "politicians are paid off" to buy into the programs.

Presumably Big Pharma has suborned the medical-health community and the political community in one fell swoop for the purpose of doing great harm to vulnerable teens who should not, in an event, be encouraged to believe that should they be interested in having early-youth sex adventures, they will be perfectly safe from harm.