Topic: WorldNetDaily
In his latest attempt to fearmonger about the HPV vaccine, Bob Unruh writes in an Oct. 2 WorldNetDaily article:
Dr. Christian Fiala, who successfully fought the use of the drug in Austria, told WND this week "there is no proof of a causal relationship of HPV and cervical cancer (correlation is not necessarily causation) and there is no evidence that HPV vaccine reduces the overall number of cervical cancer (cases)."
In an email, Fiala called the HPV vaccination plan "a money-making machine without any benefit for patients. But some inherent risks."
Officials report that there have been 17,500 or more "adverse" incident reports that have been made over the last few years because of the use of the vaccination.
Fiala, who fought the idea of vaccination with Gardasil as part of a national health standard in Austria, says he was targeted by the vaccine developers for his findings.
"The doctors involved in vaccine development submitted an official complaint ... accusing me of doing harm to the image of doctors," Fiala said. "The investigation did not go far, because I could show that I fully respect evidence based on medicine. Therefore, the investigation was closed. But it could have cost me the right to [practice] medicine. It was meant as a threat."
Unruh doesn't tell us anything more about Fiala than that. Which is too bad, because it's a fascinating story.
First up, Fiala performs abortions in Austria -- making for a very strange bedfellow for the anti-abortion WND on this story.
And that's not all: The even more anti-abortion website LifeSiteNews penned an article in 2008 calling Fiala "Austria’s most notorious abortionist," claiming that anti-abortion protesters are "enduring his latest infliction of demonic psychological terror from paid clinic escorts, who have in the past abused and assaulted both physically and sexually the praying peaceful protestors."
After claiming without evidence that Fiala's escorts "sexually abuse male and female protestors under his supervision," the article serves up this description of Fiala:
The most notorious and well-known abortionist in Austria, Dr. Christian Fiala has made his life’s work the advancement of abortion in Austria and Europe. He is the chairman of the International Association of Abortion and Contraception Specialists and directs the well-known Gynmed abortion clinics in Vienna and Salzburg. Fiala’s brainchild, the Museum of Abortion and Contraception opened in Vienna in March 2007, and catalogues a history of human effort through the ages devoted to suppressing or destroying the next generation of human life in the womb.
Why would WND team up with an apparently notorious abortion doctor? The rest of Fiala's record may provide an answer to his appeal to WND.
Fiala's denial of the effectiveness of the HPV vaccine is of a piece with his views on HIV and AIDS. In a 2003 article, Fiala claimed that the rate of HIV and AIDS in Africa was grossly overstated because "the major symptom criteria in the African definition for AIDS" is thte same as for diarrhea. Similarly, he has claimed that there is no heterosexual AIDS epidemic in Africa because the population of Uganda has continued to increase despite large numbers of claimed HIV cases there, stating that "the almost hysterical focus on HIV/AIDS in Africa has done much harm over the last two decades."
According an article at the Office of Medical and Scientific Justice, Fiala also appears in a documentary thatclaims to "poses basic concerns about the actual definitions of those acronyms, the reliability and meaning of HIV tests, the difficulty of HIV transmission, the isolation of HIV, and whether the drugs prescribed to people said to be 'HIV-positive' actually extend their lives or hasten their deaths."
You may remember that the OMSJ -- which appears to deny that HIV and AIDS actually exists -- was cited by Unruh in an earlier article attempting to fearmonger about the HPV vaccine. He repeats many of those fringe claims in his new article, include inflated, unverified claims of deaths caused by the vaccine.
He again hypes that "there have been 17,500 or more 'adverse' incident reports that have been made over the last few years because of the use of the vaccination" without providing any context for the claim.As we've previously noted, the rate of serious adverse effects from taking the HPV vaccine is far lower than that of a single specific adverse reaction to ibuprofen.
