I'd like to give the other side to the comments on this thread. I've spent 5 years researching this vaccination and the side effects, talking to doctors, scientists, researchers, because my daughter is one of the 'unlucky' ones who did suffer an adverse reaction, and there has been so much indifference to her suffering that we've had no choice by to spend thousands of hours doing our own research - so I'm pretty knowledgeable about it my now.
The OP mentioned the side effects: "headaches, excessive fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, gastrointestinal discomfort, nerve-related pain, sleep disruption and light sensitivity." Some posters have called them transient, or hysteria or better than having to deal with treatment for abnormal smears.
My daughter's experience of these symptoms are typical of the 100's of families I know in a similar situation - not a few, but a few 100.
Headaches, when they stike can leave her housebound for weeks, or even months - earlier this year she was pretty much unable to leave the house for nearly 4 months because of the headaches and nausea.
Excessive fatigue plagued her for 4 years following her vaccination and left her mostly unable to attend school - she was put on a 2 hour a day time-table at school but rarely managed even that. The fatigue sometimes meant she couldn't lift her arm to brush her hair or hold a glass to drink from. She often slept for 18-20 straight and still woke up exhausted. This isnt fatigue, it's mental and physical exhaustion like I've never seen before.
Cognitive Dysfunction has been the worst symptom for my daughter, and even now that she's on medication and can do more, it still plagues her. Prior to the vaccination she was a high achiever academically in arts and sciences. Within three weeks of the second vaccine she would never attend school again full time, her teachers had to be warned not to put her on the spot (on the rare occasion she was in school) because her brain just didn't work as quickly as it used to and she felt humiliated by the inability to answer even the simplest questions. She was pulled out of maths lessons in Year 8 and never had another one because her brain just wouldn't work and she described it as it being like a foreign language. She did manage a C in maths GCSE by sheer grit and determination teaching herself from home. Her cognitive problems include not being able to take in information, not being able to explain things properly, find the right words or understand simple instruction. She can do all these things, and she's still bright and intelligent, it's just that on some days, her brain refused to engage properly. She couldn't be trusted at 17 to make a simple journey by public transport or to go into a bank and complete paperwork to open an account etc - or to manage her own medication.
Gastrointestinal discomfort - that's possibly the understatement of the year. My daughter has been rushed to A&E on three occasions with abdominal pain so severe, the paramedics thought she was in trouble. She's spent days upon days doubled-up screaming with pain so severe it has caused her to pass out. She has nausea and vomits almost daily, when she's having a flare she can vomit up to twenty times a day for days on end, which obviously results in her not leaving the house. On her good days, she choses what to eat by how horrible it is when it comes back up. She's had endoscopies and biopsies several times and all are clear.
Nerve related pain keeps her awake at night and can affect her mobility and her ability to hold things, to write, to do much of what a normal 17 year old should be able to do.
Sleep Disruption was a killer for her, and is still the thing that warns a crash or a flare is looming. She can be exhausted but unable to sleep - this is torturous, and in fact sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture. My daughter is tortured with this regularly and she said on many occasions that she can't stand the thought of living another day and that living like this is worse than dying. That's one of the most difficult things for a parent to hear.
Light Sensitivity - this isn't just being a bit sensitive to light and needing sunglasses. The light sensitivity my daughter experiences means that she has to have the room as dark as we can get it. She cant used a computer or her phone or watch TV because of the glare and to go outside would be agony. This can last a few hours to a few days. There is also visual disturbances which distorts images and light which lasts much longer.
The OP didn't mention that many girls like my daughter have problems with excess hair shedding, with continual infections, with hallucination, with excessive sweating, with new and severe allergies, with muscle pains and aches, with painful joints, with movement disorders and jerks and tremors, with difficulty swallowing, with skin problems. These are typical symptoms in the girls, I've come to know over the 5 years my daughter has been ill.
The symptoms the OP described are not transient - they are lasting years and the medical professionals have no idea how to treat them - they are at a total loss. My daughter has been diagnosed with POTS, so at least she is having some treatment to help manage some of her symptoms, but all her doctors have agreed that POTS is just part of the story and they are still looking for clues to piece the rest of it together. Her neuro thinks it looks like an autoimmune problem but she has said they can only test for the antibodies they know about and this could be something has not yet been found.
For anyone who thinks this is anti-vax scaremongering, it's worth bearing in mind that the MMR issue was one doctor and it was largely contained to the UK. The HPV vaccine is totally different.
• It's given to teenagers who are able to articulate how they feel and explain symptoms (for those who feel it's hysteria, it worth noting that the Td/IPV booster is given in schools to year 9 or 10 teenagers and the same amount of fainting, nausea, dizziness etc isn't noted or reported with that vaccine - this booster has only a fraction of the number of ADRs reported as the HPV vaccine)
• Doctors and scientists from many countries are publishing case histories and concerns in reputable peer reviewed medical journals - published papers have come from doctors & scientists in the US, Mexico, Isreal, Denmark, France, Australia, Japan.
• There are support groups for families of affected girls in the US, Mexico, Columbia, UK, Ireland, Denmark, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Australia, New Zealand, Japan (- those are the ones I know about)
• The Japanese health authorities withdrew official recommendation of the HPV vaccination in 2013 pending further safety studies and research - it still hasn't been reinstated. I believe a large study is due out next year
• In June this year, Denmark opened 5 regional centres specifically for GPs to refer girls with suspected adverse reactions to the HPV vaccination for assessment and treatment. The latest reports from Denmark are that 1 in 400 girls vaccinated are being referred to these centres. Compare that the rate of cervical cancer in the UK which is 9 in 100,000
• The Danish Health authorities initiated a safety review of the HPV vaccines with the European Medicines Agency in relation to two serious neurological conditions - Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) and Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS). That review is ongoing and will conclude next summer. Parents in the UK are not being told the HPV vaccination is subject to a Safety Review as a result of a safety signal being identified by a European country.
• The Danish report recently submitted to the EMA included an analysis of the Danish adverse reports for the HPV vaccination compared to the WHO global database. The report states: "A comparison of HPV vaccines to all other vaccines in females,..., showed a consistency between HPV reports in the different age groups and a difference to all other vaccines." It also states: "Finally, the data suggest that there is an over-representation of serious case reports which describe a constellation of symptomatology and subsequent medical evaluation potentially consistent with a chronic fatigue-like syndrome which may be specific to HPV vaccines"
• The safety studies on which the 'good safety profile' is attributed to the HPV vaccine include:
- the 'placebo' used in the clinical trials being the aluminium adjuvant used in the vaccine or another similar vaccine, and certainly not saline as one would expect;
- the clinical trials being done with adult women and very small bridging studies being done with girls under 15 years of age (despite the immune systems of adults and children being very different)
- the large scale post licencing studies most often quoted to 'prove' a good safety profile used over a million girls from the Scandinavian registries but used a pre-determined list of autoimmune and neurological disorders (POTS and CRPS were not included in this list!) and the follow up period was 180 days. This means affected girls who had not had a firm diagnosis within 180 days of their vaccination were not included in the figures. It took my daughter over two years to get a diagnosis of POTS - she would have been excluded from that study, as would most of the girls I know about. My daughter was still waiting to see a paediatrician 180 days after she became ill! The average time for a POTS diagnosis is 2-4 years and the average time to an autoimmune condition is over 4 years. This is why the 'safety studies' are not finding an increase in cases.
- no studies so far have looked at symptom clusters following HPV vaccination
• There is a huge problem of under-reporting of adverse reactions in the UK - and elsewhere. My daughter has seen over twenty doctors and we have it in writing from two doctors that the HPV vaccine is thought to be the cause, but not one doctor or school nurse reported it to the MHRA who carry out ADR surveillance. This is common and typical. The MHRA's own presentations admit the reported figures represent less than 10% of actual Adverse reactions. Over 8,000 reports have been made with MHRA for the HPV vaccination, and of them around 2,500 have been classified serious (ie disabling, life threatening, causing death) - if these figures represent less than 10%, there are a lot of girls with ruined lives.
Before her vaccination, my daughter danced competitively and played competitive sport - that's what she lived for. She had to give up both just weeks after her vaccination. Prior to her vaccination she knew exactly what she wanted to do with her life and she had an incredibly bright future. The reality now is that she can no longer do the things she loves, her education has been decimated, her dreams are now fantasy and her future very bleak. As a parent I'm beyond devastated that my child may never work, may never be financially independent, may never have a family and may have to fight for scraps of the welfare system to survive. Two of my grandparents died from cancer and I've witnessed the devastation of my father being diagnosed twice with cancer (which thankfully he survived) - I know what cancer looks like and the devastation it brings, but I can hand on heart say I would rather my daughter had taken her chances with cervical cancer than have the bleak future she has ahead of her.
In fact, the kicker is that she could still get cervical cancer! This vaccination can only be claimed to lower the risk of cervical cancer not protect against it. There is NO firm evidence yet that this vaccine will reduce the incidence of cervical cancer - that data wont be available for at least another decade. The estimates which are claimed are based on very complex models which include very dubious assumptions (such as the vaccine offering lifelong protection).
My advice to anyone considering this vaccine is to seriously research as thoroughly as possible.
Apologies for the length of this post - it's a fraction of what I could have said and I want parents to know the facts that are not publicised