Leo Varadkar cautions on teen girls’ vaccine fears

Teenage girls who believe the ill-health they are suffering is because of the HPV vaccine against cervical cancer should be treated based on their symptoms "rather than what they believe the cause to be", Minister for Health Leo Varadkar has insisted.

He reiterated the results of the review of the vaccine by the European Medicines Agency found that "there is no need to change the way HPV vaccines are used or to amend the product information".

Independent TD Clare Daly, who raised the issue during health questions, had asked the Minister to meet the families who established the group Regret after almost 200 teenage girls "experienced serious side effects having taken the human papilloma virus HPV vaccine".

Mr Varadkar said: “We may do people a disservice by treating them as a single group. We should be trying to treat them based on their symptoms and diagnosis rather than what they believe the cause to be. That is why I do not want to do anything that would give credence to this.”

Harm

He said a meeting could be facilitated if he was still in office after the election.

“However, it would need to be on the basis that such a meeting could not be used in any way to give credence to the view that their symptoms are caused by this vaccine”, which would do more harm than good.

He said it appeared some girls first suffered symptoms at about the time they received the vaccine, and understandably some parents had connected it to their daughters’ condition. Ms Daly said while the origin of the problems the young women were experiencing might be debated, the problems were undoubtedly real.