…I’m sharing this story now, more than eight years after her diagnosis, because a notorious vaccine skeptic may soon lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for that job, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has previously sued the maker of the HPV vaccine Gardasil, calling it “dangerous and defective” and saying it had caused “severe and life-changing injuries.”
Plenty of scientists and other journalists have fact-checked the widely circulated claims against Gardasil and found them to be exaggerated or outright false; I won’t duplicate their work here. What I do want to convey is some of the “severe and life-changing injuries” from treating one kind of HPV cancer that vaccination can prevent.
My wife was diagnosed in June 2016. Our twins had recently turned 4, and our youngest was 9 months old. Though survival rates for HPV-related throat cancer are relatively high, hearing your children’s mother has a roughly 1 in 7 chance of dying within five years focuses you on one thing at the expense of all others: survival.
Doctors warned my wife that her treatment would be brutal: Her five weekly radiation doses over two months would burn her skin, probably make swallowing food and water intolerable and potentially damage her salivary glands for years or even the rest of her life. All of this turned out to be true. My wife desperately wanted to eat and drink, but sores in her mouth and throat made it impossible.
Imagine that: Starving even though food is easily available, you want to eat that food, and everyone is begging you to eat that food, as if it’s a matter of will power and not the constant burning sensation in your mouth and throat.
She’s healthy now, but every sore throat or enlarged gland — both features of colds and COVID-19 — sparks worry of the Big C’s return. She lives checkup-to-checkup, alternating between relief from the most recent “all clear” to bubbling anxiety as the next appointment approaches. She lives with constant dry mouth and all-too-frequent (and frightening) choking spells…
Source: Cancer vaccine should spare next generation from ordeals like my wife’s – Los Angeles Times

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