Vaccine Injury After Gardasil – Are Higher Rates of Adverse Reactions Real?

Yesterday The Daily American newspaper published a heartbreaking letter to the editor from mom Kelly Sotomayor. Ms. Sotomayor describes the story of how her perfectly healthy 13 year old daughter received the Gardasil vaccine and ended up unable to walk for 2 years, with widespread muscle pain and weakness, dizzy spells and much more. Read the letter here.

Gardasil accounts for more than 60% of the adverse reactions reported to the national Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). 1 But is that because Gardasil is truly more dangerous or reactive than other vaccines, or is there something else at play here?

When a parent takes a 13 year old into the doctor’s office to get Gardasil or Cervarix, the parent has known the 13 year old for 13 plus years. The parent knows what the child is normally like, how they digest and eliminate food, how they tolerate stress, interact with people and new situations, how much pain and or health problems they live with, how coordinated and agile they are, what kind of a student, thinker, and communicator they are. What’s more, the 13 year old is more than able to tell the parent, I have pain at the injection site, my tummy doesn’t feel well, I am dizzy now, I can’t concentrate, my whole body aches, I feel weak, and so on. Not only does the parent know the child but the child knows what is normal for him or herself and is able to communicate that to the parent.

Contrast this picture with a 15 month old who goes to the doctor, is given a round of routine vaccines and loses the ability to speak, to make eye contact, to interact, starts banging their heads, pushes on their abdomen, develops digestion and bowel issues, muscle pain and weakness, stops sleeping well, etc. In this case, the parent knows the child but certainly not as well as they would if the child were 13 years old. Moreover, while the child may have been speaking, the child has far less capacity to understand what is happening to their body and their brain and then to articulate it to the parent. The child is diagnosed with learning or behavioral disabilities, or autism.

Now imagine a healthy 12 month old is taken in for routine vaccines, having developed normally to this point, receives the shots, is taken home and cries abnormally for 24 hours, seems to have pain and swelling at the injection site and the doctor says not to worry, this is normal. The child has many illnesses and infections and goes on to struggle a little with school.

Or consider this scenario. A healthy pregnant woman who goes in and gets a flu shot that contains mercury or the Tetanus, Diphtheria, and attenuated pertussis (whooping cough) shot, as is now being recommended for pregnant women despite pregnant women never being studied in pre-licensure trials2, but she is told to take no drugs, not smoke or  drink alcohol during pregnancy. The baby is born and is fussy, spits up milk, is slow to develop, lacks coordination, etc. but the parents are told the baby was just like that, sometimes it happens, it’s probably genetic.

Finally, imagine the situation when a baby is vaccinated with Hepatitis B vaccine 12 hours after birth. The baby is born, the parents don’t know the baby, the baby is at the very beginning of its development outside the womb, the baby doesn’t know itself or what is normal, and the baby can’t speak. The baby never settles well, the baby doesn’t seem to tolerate milk well, develops an allergy, a gut problem, cries often. The baby is taken in for shots at 2, 4, and 6 months. They miss many or all of their milestones and never develop normally. Ultimately, the parents are told the child has allergies, asthma, learning and behavioral challenges or autism, but they were born with it. They came into the world like this.

American children receive more vaccines in the first year of life than any other children on the planet and one would naturally conclude that they should be the healthiest. But they are not, in fact they suffer from more health ailments and developmental challenges than most any other developed nation’s children. A recent report in Academic Pediatrics found that 54% of American children have some form of chronic illness like asthma, allergies, autism, diabetes, obesity, learning disabilities, speech delays, etc. and 21% have a developmental disability.3  There are also many studies and case reports which link vaccines to all these conditions (see our Catalogue of Science here to explore the research yourself.

Vaccines are known to cause inflammation of the brain, they are known to cause death, they are known to cause autoimmune and inflammatory conditions (see Catalogue of Science link here). What if the reason there are so many reports of adverse reactions to Gardasil is simply because the parents know the child and the child can tell the parent they feel different? What if all those supposedly “normal” reactions to vaccines like high pitched screaming, spiking a fever, being generally unsettled and not sleeping well, aren’t really that normal after all? What if some components of the vaccines are crossing the blood brain barrier like was reported in this recent study of death after Gardasil4 but the kids aren’t dying, they are surviving with a variety of seemingly unrelated injuries? What if someone were to do a study comparing the health outcomes of vaccinated to unvaccinated children and found that 54% of the unvaccinated children were NOT chronically ill and 21% did NOT have developmental disabilities? What if Gardasil is in fact harmful and causing many adverse reactions, but no more harmful than other vaccines?