The HPV vaccine is not the deadliest vaccine ever created

Context

According to a video circulating on Facebook, the HPV vaccine is “the most deadly vaccine that was ever created.” The video was uploaded to Facebook on September 11, 2023. The woman speaking in the video goes on to claim that the vaccine is not proven safe or effective. 

The HPV vaccine has not been proven to cause death, but has been shown to be very effective in reducing HPV infection and cervical cancer.

In fact

The HPV vaccine is not deadly – quite the opposite – says Peter Sasieni, professor of cancer prevention at King’s College London. In fact, as far as he knows, there is no evidence of any deaths caused by any HPV vaccine.

“The three HPV vaccines that have been widely used are all known to be extremely safe – with good evidence both from randomised controlled trials and from real world data on hundreds of thousands of vaccinated individuals,” Sasieni explains.

He does mention one case many years ago where a girl in the U.K. died a few days after being vaccinated. However, “a post-mortem revealed that she had a large cancer on her heart (that must have been there long before she was vaccinated) that caused her tragic death,” says Sasieni.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the U.S. has reviewed every death that has been reported in the U.S. after vaccination with the HPV vaccines Gardasil or Gardasil-9, concluding that the evidence did not suggest a causal link between Gardasil and the reported deaths.

A study carried out by the Vaccine Safety Datalink, a collaborative project between the CDC, integrated healthcare organizations, and networks across the United States that conducts studies about rare and serious adverse events following immunization, found no increased risk of death in the 30 days after vaccination, or any deaths causally associated with HPV vaccination. Though two of the reviewed deaths were found to be indeterminate, the authors conclude that the study provides additional assurance that deaths after HPV vaccination “are likely only temporally and not causally associated with the vaccine.”

The effectiveness and safety of the HPV vaccine has been well studied. A study of English women published in the Lancet found a substantial reduction in cervical cancer after the introduction of the HPV immunization program in England and concluded that the HPV immunization program had successfully almost eliminated cervical cancer in women born after 1995.

The verdict

The HPV vaccine has been well studied and has not been causally associated with death. On the contrary, the vaccine has proved to successfully prevent HPV infection and cervical cancer in young women. Therefore we have marked this claim as false.