Jonathan Irwin, the founder of Jack & Jill Children’s Foundation, is an active campaigner against the HPV vaccine Gardasil. He regularly tweets and appears in the media to highlight the supposed danger of the vaccine.
His latest tweet shows how motivated reasoning works, and how in the antivax echo-chamber, scare stories can be built from nothing. Note that in his tweet he says “death of Austrian girl from HPV Vax”. He’s drawing a clear causal link between the vaccination and the death.
https://twitter.com/JohnJoedotcom/status/913108051951067145
From later tweets, it’s clear that he’s referring to this story published on 27 September 2017, which says:
“A teenage girl died in her sleep weeks after being given the controversial human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, a new documentary has claimed. Jasmin Soriat, 19, a student from Vienna, suffered neurological symptoms after having a second dose of the injection and suffered respiratory failure three weeks later.”
Leaving aside the Daily Mail’s appalling record on science reporting, the story doesn’t even claim that the girl died as a result of getting the vaccine, it says that she died three weeks after getting her second dose of the vaccine. Irwin’s claim that the Mail Online draws a causal link – that the girl died as a result of the vaccine – is straight-up untrue.
In general, teenage girls have a low death rate. About one out of 2,000 will die each year. In the US, the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) keeps statistics on causes of all deaths and, among teenagers; more than a third of those deaths are caused by motor vehicle accidents. Other accidents, suicide and homicide each account for about one death in eight, and all illnesses combined account for the rest.
Jonathan Irwin
More than 200 million doses of Gardasil have been administered in the 10 years since it was developed, so since the average girl got her first Gardasil five years ago, that would predict that almost half a million girls who received the HPV vaccine have since died, from accidents, suicide, homicide and illnesses.
Of course, the fact that those half a million girls have died after receiving the HPV vaccine doesn’t mean that half a million girls died as a result of receiving the vaccine.
But as you go down through the causes of death, it is inevitable that some will be unexplained, either because there was no doctor around to explain it, or because no doctor could work it out.
To be fair to Jonathan Irwin, the Mail Online story is a classic example of an anti-scientific tabloid scare story. It gives the odd nod to reality, saying that “The jab is given to adolescents because the HPV virus is said to cause certain cancers – and almost all cervical forms of the disease”, but it mostly focuses on horror stories that it says “a new documentary has claimed”. One line from the report said
“A pathologist who examined [Jasmin Soriat’s] body has said the vaccine could have been the cause of her death.”
Here’s a hint when you see the word ‘could’ attached to the name of a doctor or other scientist in a tabloid quote: use great caution. That’s because scientists use great caution. When a scientist is asked “Could X be true?” she recognises that she is not being asked “Is X true?” Therefore, unless she has firm proof that X is untrue, the answer must be ‘Yes‘, it could be true.
Science has a way of dealing with this, it’s called Russell’s teapot, after Bertrand Russell, who said that a claim that a teapot orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars should not be believed just because the claim can’t be proven wrong. In science we believe things if there is good reason to believe them – not just because there isn’t a reason not to believe them.
Jonathan Irwin cited the Mail Online as though the Austrian girl had died recently. In fact there are claims about her death on anti-vaccine conspiracy theory websites going back more than 10 years. The Mail Online report is the only news media to mention her, so I can’t really say much about it for certain.
But I do know how the story got into the Mail Online. Their report is based on a YouTube video from an anti-vaccine website called SaneVax. SaneVax promotes many other conspiracy theories, including one about another girl called Meredith Prohaska. SaneVax promotes a claim that she died as a result of getting the Gardasil vaccine.
She didn’t. She did exist and, sadly, she did die, but she didn’t die of anything related to vaccination. The local medical examiner in Milwaukee, Wisconsin found that she died of a drug overdose and specifically said that
“there is no evidence that any vaccination caused or contributed to her death.”
But that doesn’t stop SaneVax from promoting, without a shred of evidence, false stories that she was killed by a vaccine. And when that type of story is taken and further exaggerated by influential people like Jonathan Irwin, it shows how easily hysterical rumours can come to be believed by people, in the teeth of all available evidence.
Irwin supports the REGRET group which campaigns against the Gardasil vaccine in Ireland, and it seems he supports their claim that there are more than 400 girls who have serious health problems from taking the vaccine, of whom 200 are on 24-hour suicide watch.
REGRET have provided no information to back up these numbers; it appears that not one of the 400 have reported their symptoms to the HPRA, the body responsible for monitoring bad reactions to drugs, and not one has brought a legal case against the HSE, the manufacturers of Gardasil, or anyone else. REGRET have threatened to sue journalists who have made enquiries to try to verify their claims.
Despite this, many media outlets in Ireland, particularly local papers and radio stations, report these claims as fact.
