You’ll have heard by now that a 14-year-old girl died a few hours after being treated with Cervarix, a vaccine against Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), a leading cause of cervical cancer. My first thought when I heard this was – oh no, not again.
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I, Editor by Henry Gee
This is the Nature Network and therefore Terribly Extremely Very Serious foothold for Nature Senior Editor Henry Gee. If you want fun and games, visit http://cromercrox.blogspot.com/
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As MMR, so HPV?
- Date:
- Tuesday, 29 Sep tember 2009 - 10:25 UTC
The media coverage of the story has, so far, been fairly responsible. No link has been formally made between the girl’s death and the fact of her vaccination. The BBC Online story is typical, though there is cautious and sensible coverage from the Torygraph, Grauniad and Thunderthighs. The headline in the Daily Nimbyist Bungaloid Curtain Twitcher
First picture of girl, 14, who died after being injected with cervical cancer jab from 'rogue batch'is shockingly irresponsible. The quotes don’t hide the fact that the paper has jumped to conclusions even before we know the result, and in its daily poll – should the cervical cancer vacination programme be suspended – 71% of respondents say it should. I think the Daily Nimbyist Bungaloid Curtain Twitcher should be suspended, but hey, that’s just me.
The Daily Distress story is also worrying.
In America, Cervarix was refused a licence in 2007 while further investigations were carried out into possible side-effectssays the Distress.A report released by the drug safety watchdog, the MHRA, last month showed that, of the 700,000 schoolgirls vaccinated last year, more than 1,300 of them had officially reported an adverse reaction. They ranged from minor complaints to more serious ones such as convulsions.What the story doesn’t say is how this translates as a rate of less than 0.2%. Neither does the story compare this rate with that associated with any other kind of vaccination. None of the stories I’ve read make these comparisons: no wonder that the public has such a poor perception of probability and risk. But the Distress story gets worse.
Last night, Jackie Fletcher of Jabs, a campaign group for safe vaccinations, called for immediate withdrawal of all the HPV jabs. She said: “These dangerous side-effects must be investigated straight away. Recalling the jabs is not scare-mongering.'Jabs is the group that made a lot of capital out of the Measles-Mumps-Rubella scare, as a result of which some children have been at risk of suffering, being maimed by, or even dying from measles, where they otherwise might have been safe. Why are these people given any time at all? It’s not as if they have anything useful to contribute, after all.
Last updated: Tuesday, 29 Sep 2009 - 10:25 UTC
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Comments
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I did a similar, but longer, round up of today’s papers’ irresponsible coverage of this story.
I like going to the Daily Mail and voting down the muppets in the comments.
@Malcolm – thanks very much for that link. What I should have emphasized is that none of the news sources put the case into any kind of statistical perspective, offering comparative figures for reactions reported against established childhood vaccinations that few have any qualms about.
@Richard – it’s a pleasant sport, but less satisfying than listening to tapes of kittens being impaled on red-hot skewers.
It’s so frustrating that people just love to believe the most idiotic (I hesitate to use the word) journalists.
I suppose that rather than getting frustrated we should all do more to go out and inform people better…maybe nature could start a lay persons magazine!!
Nature already has its news on the web, which aims to be accessible. I write a column for BBC Focus which has a much more mainstream appeal (Gee Minor, aged 10, loves this magazine). But in a world in which the intellectual so-called ‘opinion formers’ affect a disdain for science, and feed the proletariat pabulum designed to titillate (I use the word advisedly) rather than inform, what does one expect?
I just heard the most outrageous news broadcast on the radio saying that it has now been proven that the girl died of the vaccine – apparently this information came from Jab.
On the subject of news on the web I think this is a bit too much like Nature itself and so people don’t perceive it as being aimed at the general public, or they simply don’t know about it.
I would never suggest that we should silence the press but I do think something should be done to address some of the most irresponsible journalism.
Most newspaper (and other mass media) editors are under pressure from executives to make any story (i) as ‘human angled’ as possible and (ii) as scary as possible. This way, we live in a constant state of fear, needing to return as frequently as possible to our news sources to find out what scary, fearful object we need to look out for next. Hand over yer cash, so we can tell you why you need to constantly look over your shoulder.
The media’s responsibility is not to impartial, factual reporting. It’s to lining the shareholders pockets. I was pleased that good old Auntie Beeb had these things to say at the top of the story:
Auntie Beeb has to compete with all the attention grabbing morons out there, and we’ve all been conditioned to expect scandal, sex or
Scotch eggsEdwina Currysix second soundbites from every story, so I think this is as mature an approach to this case as we might hope for.I would like to read any comments from any researcher stating that if a vaccine is super safe and no reactions happen we will never have any vaccines….. it doesn’t save the few people who will have adverse effects of course, and that is sad. However, in a perspective on how many that will die from the actual disease there is the discussion about a rock and a non-rock place…
I look forward reading your column too. Thanks for letting more people know (i.e. outside of UK since at least I didn’t see it before you posted the story).
According to the Bad Science forum, the Daily Fail heavily re-edited the original online version of the story, with the disappearance of extensive quoting from the anti-vaccine fanatics over at JABS that originally appeared. Somehow I fear it may be a bit late.
For those interested in the reporting of vaccine issues, the Mail famously has been attacking HPV vaccination in England (where the Govt has rolled the vaccine out to schools) whilst simultaneously excoriating the Govt in Ireland for not offering the vaccine – this story was broken earlier this year by blogger Martin Robbins.
Whilst the Mail’s position may be consistent with “whatever the Govt’s for, we’re against”, from a public health perspective one can really only despair.
Apart from the general irresponsibility, giving credence to an “it wuz de vaccinez wot dunnit” conclusion, pre the postmortem and other investigations, can surely only add to the distress of the girl’s family. I am uneasy with the printing of photos of her for the same reason.
It’s only a matter of time before somebody starts yakking about it causing Autism too. At which point I will explode in an apoplectic rage.
Hark – the Beeb have another story telling us we shouldn’t trust statistics (when it comes to government claims about crime).
They’re singing from the Silly Mail’s songbook.
Mrs Gee, inexplicably, buys the Daily Nimbyist Bungaloid Curtain Twitcher – and the Grauniad on Saturdays. I find them both extremely useful for lining the bottoms of
guinea pigsguinea-pig hutches, though the Daily Nimbyist Bungaloid Curtain Twitcher is more absorbent.The NHS medical blogger “Dr Crippen” likes to refer to Henry’s Daily Nimbyist as the Peoples’ Medical Journal, referring to the frequency with which it makes trenchant direct-to-the-public pronouncements on health issues that contradict the experts… like, er, on the HPV vaccine. And on MMR.
I thought the same thing when I read about this.
This blog post claims that the girl had been feeling unwell before getting the injection, but I couldn’t see the same claim in the linked BBC article (I can’t watch the videos at work, so maybe it was in there).
So, almost 1,000 people a year in the UK die of cervical cancer, according to virologist Malcolm McCrae at the University of Warwick. (Nature news via Great Beyond blog).
One person has died, of unknown (as yet) causes, soon after receiving the vaccination.
Do the maths…..
@Maxine – thanks for posting that article on The Great Beyond: I’ll link to it via Facebook and Twitter.
The BBC article just got updated – they’re now saying:
@the results of a preliminary post-mortem examination had “revealed a serious underlying medical condition which was likely to have caused death”.
“We are awaiting further test results which will take some time,” she said. “However indications are that it was most unlikely that the vaccination was the cause of death.” @
I guess this story puts the Daily Fail in a bind. Everything either causes or cures cancer, and the HPV vaccine should “cure” it (or rather prevent it. pre-emptive curing, I guess), but that’s not newsworthy for them. So they have to find something.
Oh well.
You beat me to it, Cath.
I was trying to explain to someone at lunch today that there were all sorts of possible reasons for rare sudden deaths – hereditary cardiac hypertrophy, strokes and/or blown aneurysms, long QT syndrome etc. etc.
It will be interesting to see how this new development gets covered, and whether the public is convinced. Wonder what the Daily Nimbyist / People’s Medical Journal will say?
I fear we can safely predict that the anti-vaccine gang will see it as a cover-up.
With utter predictability, the Daily Nimbyist brings you its headline for tomorrow:
Chaos over cervical cancer jab for girls: Thousands cancel vaccinations after 14-year-old’s death
The story does contains this paragraph referring to the latest reports:
But it follows that up immediately with a sly “scare reviver”:
Nice. Of course, it was a classic tactic of newspapers in the MMR hoax to loudly insist that they were “just reporting the story”, all whilst assidously stoking the fires at every turn.
PS The Daily Distress has an equally temperate (not) headline:
PARENTS’ REVOLT AFTER GIRL DIES IN CANCER JAB HORROR
Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. All of which only goes to underline why I, as a science editor, will no longer have anything more to do with the mainstream media, if I can help it. There is really no point kicking against the pricks. The mainstream disgusts me. I despise it. Look, guys, it’s the 21st Century, so why do they carry on like it’s Gotham City? I’d rather hang out with the grown-ups.
I rounded up all the day’s coverage here. The Mail and Express were the worst …
@Malcolm – thanks for that. The results of your survey are, sadly, no great surprise.
I guess that the innate selfishness of people prevents them from appreciating the full picture. This may explain a moderately negative reaction to the vaccination program, which in itself is really the best solution for the entire society.
I don’t think the selfishness can explain the inappropriate viewpoints that exhibit pure hatred towards the vaccination program.
But then again, isn’t the human society rife with extreme social viewpoints that go against rational thought? Maybe the extreme views are due to yet some other unpleasant aspect of human nature. This isn’t a very pleasant thought of course.
@Mark – I expect you’re right – and that’s what newspapers that cater to the less refined end of the market exploit in order to sell papers. Given that sales of newspapers have been on the slide for decades, I guess they have to resort to ever more shrill and desperate headlines to attract the ever-waning attention of their readers.
Hey, here’s a novel thought: perhaps if newspapers stopped being so shrill and did real reporting again then they’d attract readers, instead of driving them away?
Naw. Cloud-cuckoo land.
My sense of despair felt from the ineptitude of the mainstream media to report any sort of science accurately is somewhat tempered by the prevailing wind of
last night’s goat bhoonacommon sense that blasts through this post and comments. Good work, H.G. et al, for reminding me that there still is some sense out there, after all.And I applaud your repeated efforts to highlight this ineptitude, Henry. Hopefully more people will stumble upon this blog and the others linked, to get a more informed version of events. Perhaps I’ll post a link to here on the offending paper’s blogs.
EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about it! Newspapers can’t be trusted to describe the news no more.
Sorry, that should readed “pape’rsess”.
I’m sure Dr. B.G. of Bed Seance in the Grauniad will be all over this on Saturday.
@Richard Hey, here’s a novel thought: perhaps if newspapers stopped being so shrill and did real reporting again then they’d attract readers, instead of driving them away?
Although the sales of newspapers were in decline before the advent of teh interwebz, I wouldn’t be surprised if teh interwebz have accelerated the process (I read somewhere recently an opinion piece saying that the creation of websites by newspapers in an attempt to keep reader loyalty has made the problem even worse). One side-effect of this will be a decline in quality, as th people who might have become journalists look for careers with greater long term prospects.
I saw this years and years ago in a related industry – typesetting (Dr M. C. of Kingston-upon-Thames will remember this well). Back in the day, magazines sent their copy to professional typesetters. This ancient trade was immediately threatened by computers, when newspapers and mags found they could do the same job in house, for less. This meant that those typesetters who sought to remain competitive had to shell out for the new technology – and, probably, cut wages. (This was a cause, I believe, of the infamous Wapping dispute). And as every schoolboy knows, if you can only pay peanuts, you get
hamstersparrotsgirrafesmonkeys. At Nature our experience was that it was harder and harder to get good, reliable, quality typesetting, so we brought a lot of it in house anyway.@Mike: thanks for those kind words.
Read all about it! Newspapers can’t be trusted to describe the news no more
It could be that one strategy newspapers have adopted to stay afloat is to steer clear of ‘news’ as such – the web is much better at delivering straight news – and reinvent themselves as comics. The Sun became a comic years ago (under Kelvin Mackenzie), which accounted for its success in the (I suppose) 1980s, though its sales are declining too, I suspect. The Spectator under Boris Johnson, whom posterity will show to have been the greatest statesman of this or any other age, was a comic, too, in its way. Newspapers have discovered that audiences are more reliable if you can identify who they are and tell them what they want to hear. For the rest of us, we can design our own online news aggregators, which do the same thing. Or read Nature. Or, perhaps, The Economist.
@Bob: indeed. I’m sure Mr B. G. will make hay with this one.
In the book I am reading, someone has just been appointed new Ed in Chief at a failing newspaper, and has introduced a nine-point plan to reinstitute types of coverage that had been dropped, re-staff understaffed desks, etc. Unfortunately, it is fiction. (Also, not sure if she’s going to have her plan accepted by the board, yet – it includes cutting their dividend for a year.)
Governments should be more creative. If we would simply ban toilet paper I’m sure the newspaper would have a proper function again.
Which book’s that, Maxine? Would you recommend it?
@Mark – if you look very closely at the Daily Nimbyist, you’ll see
NOW WASH YOUR HANDSprinted at the bottom
of each pageof each page’s bottom.Unrelated except by the theme of newspapers, but anyone who has watched the final series of The Wire (on UK TV recently) will have also seen a depiction of a (US) newsroom and the managerial and financial pressures on it.
In particular, at one point the chief editor makes it clear that he see it as a good thing if the paper makes itself a key part of a big story – in a way where it can be seen to be shaping events via “crusading journalism”, rather then just recording them.
@Austin I offer the front page of today’s Sun in support of your thesis.
Yes… “It woz the Sun wot wun it” and all that. Ugh…
Which book? At this moment in the space-time continuum, there is only one book, and that is “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” by Stieg Larsson. It’s published tomorrow (1 Oct) but I would not recommend reading it before reading the first two in the Millennium trilogy (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire). Millenium is a magazine, and some of the characters are journalists, publishers and editors of it. One of them moves to the ed-in-chief job I mentioned above, in the 3rd book (the one I am reading now, or should be as I’m supposed to be reviewing it). There are lots of themes in these books, the death of campaigning, “old style” journalism being one of them. Probably these books will get no marks for high literature, but I’m enjoying them.
To give The Sun its due, the front page (online) for today also has a clear headline on this HPV story: “Natalie wasn’t killed by vaccine”.
The Sun is perhaps the canniest of all newspapers in that its circulation, I now find, is still high, at more than three million a day – though not as high as it once was.
Word on the street is that it’s very sensitive to the public mood, which explains the former, I guess. It’s come out for the Tories very eloquently in England, where the Tories are popular, but not in Scotland, where they are less so (the sight of Union leaders ripping up The Sun at the Labour conference will only strengthen this – Mrs Gee was in the hall with the comrades when it happened and said it was nauseating).
I’ve always liked The Sun for its directness and the fact that its reporting is pretty good. Harridan Harperson dislikes Page 3 – but then turn to the Women’s Page of the Grauniad and ask yourself which is more honest and less patronizing? I have to say, when The Sun reports a story from Nature, they usually get the facts right and don’t try to spin it, unlike the Daily Nimbyist Bungaloid Curtain Twitcher.
I was going to flag the Sun’s Irish Fail-esque strategies north of the border, Henry’s just beaten me to it.
Maxine, I’ve read the first two Larsson novels (the English translations). I remain undecided as to whether I should bother with the third. I think there’s an excellent plot buried in these books, but I really don’t need to bother with another 400 word summary of this year’s IKEA catalogue. I also know that Swedes like to drink coffee, this stereotype doesn’t need to be repeated in every single page. Please let me know if the next installment has actually been edited by an editor. I realise the author ain’t with us anymore, but honestly, someone needs to remove at least a third of the babble from each of the first two novels.
Now, being in Finland, which was previously a fully consolidated part of the Swedish kingdom, I’d better put the percolator on.
Apparently the poor girl died of cancer.
Beat me to it. Yah.
..but in typical style, the Fail doesn’t want to let go of its scare:
Cervical cancer jab girl died from unrelated chest tumour as researcher calls vaccine plan a ‘mass experiment’
The Wail also ran an article by Dr Richard Halvorsen, a familiar figure in the MMR scare who runs a single vaccine clinic. He refers to vaccines in typically restrained style as:
Meanwhile, the Daily Distress ran this morning with the helpful:
IF THE CANCER JAB DIDN’T KILL NATALIE, WHY WON’T THEY REVEAL WHAT DID?
Duh – haven’t they just… hmm.
They also outdid themselves by quoting anti-vaccine campaigner Jackie Fletcher of JABS (who turned up in early coverage of the story in the Fail.)
As a general summing up, I think the coverage of the last few days does show that some of the media have learned from the MMR debacle, at least in terms of printing “no – it was not the vaccine” stories promptly once the prelim post-mortem findings were made public. However, to my way of thinking what we also see is that the Fail and the Distress have blatant anti-vaccine agendas.
The Nimbyist has a science correspondent, who is a decent sort of chap. And the Distress once commissioned me to write a whole page about Homo floresiensis. So they can’t be entirely bad. I wonder, though, being a science correspondent on one of these papers must feel like Tom Lehrer’s proverbial Christian Scientist with appendicitis.
To see a jaundiced medical view of the Fail’s modus operandi, try the comment here.
The Sunday Distress has pulled the classic tabloid ploy of finding a dissenting ‘expert’ -their headline is
Jab 'As Bad As The Cancer'According to the crew over at the Badscience forum, there is a strong chance that the quoting of the said “dissenting expert”, Dr Diane Harper, was selective at best – see e.g. here.
There is also some interesting stuff there relating to the previous track record of the reporter credited with the Distress story.
Is it possible to charge newspapers with conspiracy to endanger life?
Surely the delightfully vague English libel laws could be useful in this context? Perhaps the ‘Jab’ industry could be persuaded to take up the financial burden. The way the snoozepapers have been reporting this has surely impacted on their business models.
Sadly, there is now a “possible HPV vaccine side-effect” story in the Torygraph as well- see here.
One of the Grauniad’s columnists was claiming yesterday that the media had done much better on HPV than on MMR. I sort of see what he means, see my earlier comments, but it is still early days, so overall the jury is still out.
The kind of “manufactroversy” scare garbage the Fail and Distress have been printing is no surprise, given their dire record on health issues in general and on vaccination stories in particular. The real question, I think, is whether the other papers and the broadcast media are going to steer clear, or whether they will keep re-cycling the story via the tired
“we’re just reporting the controversy”
- line. This was a major part of the problem with MMR, as such reporting has a sort of drip-drip-drip effect and leaves many people thinking “there’s no smoke without fire”.
The Telegraph’s story comes from their health correspondent, Laura Donnelly, who used to work for the Health Service Journal. The story is neutral as written, but I question their editorial decision to run it at all, for the reasons just set out. Of course, the Telegraph was supposed to have laid off most (all?) of its specialist science and medical correspondents a few months ago, so one wonders if there are many (any?) countervailing voices in their editorial meetings speaking against:
“Grieving parents – vaccines – it’s news – run it.”
Grieving parents – vaccines – it’s news – run it
This can be generalized to my complaint here and here in which journalists run stories about fossil humans and dinosaurs just because the stories concern those subjects, irrespective of their importance. It seems that the main function of stories in journalism at large is not to educate and inform but to titillate and to reinforce the readers’ native prejudices. Sure, it might sound naive that I should say such things, but it worries me that even those who know what’s going on are so blase about the way in which the media conduct themselves.
If there is so much spin about science and medicine, what about politics or anything else? How can be trust any medium to tramsit news in an unbiased way? Ah, but perhaps that’s an impossible dream.
I wondered if you’d like to take part in my campaign to get sensible NHS advice higher in google’s results. You just need to add a few links to relevant NHS pages – here’s how to do it: http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/cervical-cancer-jab-please-hel/#comment-5068