Stemmed cells

the injection may have triggered a reaction far more lethal than any future distant threat of a comparatively rare disease”. The Health Editor of The Times, alongside sound advice under the headline “There are always risks, but this vaccine will save lives”, strongly implied that HPV vaccine had caused Natalie’s death. “Most experts agree that vaccinating against the virus that causes cervical cancer is a good thing,” he wrote. “It carries risks, as fatally shown in Coventry, but these are outweighed by benefits. Getting this across is far from easy. An unknown life saved decades down the line does not capture the imagination like the spectre on a young life lost.” Equally surprising was an article in The Daily Telegraph (30 September) by a researcher at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, London. “Politicians have long known that a life lost today is far more emotive than a life saved in some hard-to-glimpse future,” Mark Honigsbaum wrote. “Never mind that history is pitted with examples of vaccines that the public was falsely assured were safe: the experts reason that in every mass vaccination there are bound to be a few casualties.” Parents were entitled to weigh for themselves the risks of protecting their daughters by HPV vaccination, he said, “but there are also other methods, such as better screening”. The latter comment was particularly inept, since regular screening will continue for many years and is in no sense an alternative to immunisation. In its article on 1 October, The Guardian pointed out that vaccination programmes had not been suspended (there had simply been a slight delay in certain areas receiving vaccine supplies), and that a “serious underlying medical condition” was probably responsible for Natalie Morton’s death. Next day, nearly all newspapers and radio and TV channels carried the pathologist’s finding of a “large malignant tumour of unknown origin in the heart and lungs”. The immediate furore — though probably not underlying public anxiety — was at an end.