Amid a tense line of questioning in the course of the first day of affirmation hearings, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. mentioned he would hold his monetary stake in pending litigation centered on Gardasil, a vaccine meant to stop cervical most cancers, which might be brought on by the human papillomavirus, or HPV.
On Thursday, below questioning by Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, Mr. Kennedy declined to disavow feedback he had made disparaging the vaccine as unsafe and as one thing that no guardian ought to give to a baby. (Unexpectedly, he additionally appeared to say that he had surrendered his monetary stake within the litigation.)
Mr. Kennedy has usually singled out Gardasil in his critiques of vaccines, suggesting that its substances enhance the danger of most cancers, result in autoimmune situations and could also be accountable for an increase in psychological sickness.
The Youngsters’s Well being Protection, a nonprofit co-founded by Mr. Kennedy, known as the vaccine “some of the harmful vaccines ever accepted.”
The Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention, which displays the negative effects and ongoing security of vaccines like Gardasil, disagrees with that characterization, noting that the physique of scientific proof “overwhelmingly helps their security.”
Earlier than the Gardasil vaccine was accepted by federal regulators in 2014, it underwent prolonged scientific trials with greater than 15,000 members.
C.D.C. monitoring has revealed some minor negative effects, mostly dizziness, nausea, headache and fever. And in extraordinarily uncommon instances, there have been extra severe negative effects documented, like Guillain-Barré syndrome.
However the vaccine can be remarkably efficient at stopping most cancers — roughly 97 p.c efficient in stopping cervical most cancers, and practically one hundred pc efficient in stopping exterior genital warts.
The C.D.C. is at the moment conducting analysis into the connection between all vaccinations and sure situations like postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) and persistent fatigue syndrome.
However present research present that HPV vaccines trigger “no elevated danger” of persistent fatigue syndrome and do “not assist a causal hyperlink” between Gardasil and POTS.