Did HPV vaccines in India cause harm?

Between 2006-2011, PATH, a public health nonprofit funded by the Gates Foundation, conducted HPV vaccination programs in 4 low- to middle-income countries, including India, to guide future cervical cancer prevention program planning. These were neither clinical nor safety trials, as the video making the claims suggests since the HPV vaccine had been approved in India in 2008.

The video also makes an unsubstantiated claim that many of the 24,000 girls vaccinated in India were seriously injured, from seizures to cancer itself. It does not cite any credible sources or detail documented instances.

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) in New Delhi suspended the project in 2010 after the deaths of 7 girls following the vaccine. However, 5 of those deaths were completely unrelated to the vaccine (drowning, snake bite, pesticides, and malaria), and the other two were unlikely related to the vaccine.

Allegations by a parliamentary panel that oversees India’s health ministry were that the project had breached medical ethics and violated Indian regulations on clinical trials, as these deaths were not investigated by PATH. Since “clinical trials had already established the safety of HPV vaccines through clinical trials and the vaccine had been approved in India in 2008, they were not collecting safety data at the time. The disagreement may have opened the door to anti-vaccine claims.

HPV causes the deaths of nearly 73,000 women by cervical cancer in India each year.