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Tuesday, February 11, 2025

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Leaked emails expose Merck’s negligence in Gardasil safety testing

Merck Gardasil news

A landmark lawsuit in Los Angeles has exposed troubling internal communications at pharmaceutical giant Merck, revealing the company failed to properly test its Gardasil HPV vaccine for DNA contamination and lobbied regulators to overlook the issue.

The case, the first jury trial over Gardasil’s safety, has uncovered internal emails showing that Merck was aware of residual HPV DNA fragments in the vaccine but deliberately avoided conducting tests to confirm their presence. Regulators, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Swissmedic, ultimately allowed the vaccine to be distributed globally without requiring Merck to perform rigorous safety testing.

Dr. Maryanne Demasi, a former Australian Broadcasting Corporation investigative journalist, reported that Merck’s Chief Medical Officer, Carlos Sattler, admitted in a 2011 internal email, “We did not specifically look for the HPV L1 plasmid DNA.”

Another Merck scientist, Annie Sturgess, confirmed, “We have not directly measured HPV DNA” in the vaccine.

When asked to conduct proper testing, Merck instead used yeast DNA as a proxy, a method Swiss regulators deemed “not entirely fit for purpose.”

Despite warnings, Merck successfully lobbied Swissmedic to drop its request for new data, burying the issue with minor label changes.

Demasi highlighted the broader implications of these revelations, stating, “Regulators either turned a blind eye or were actively complicit in covering up the contamination.”

The trial, set to hear testimony from DNA expert Dr. Sin Hang Lee on February 13, 2025, could expose major flaws in pharmaceutical oversight and force a long-overdue reckoning over regulatory accountability, wrote Demasi.

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2 COMMENTS

  1. Finance is now ruling all industries.(and gvt). Money must be made. Not products. The last ” product” being the human race. And we know what is planned.

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