Do HPV vaccines make you more likely to get cancer?

A tweet from Dr. Pierre Kory claims that people who receive an HPV vaccine are more likely to get cervical cancer. 

Dr. Kory gets his ideas from clinical trials where small groups of people with active HPV infections had a higher rate of cancer events. He quickly highlights the negative results of Study 13 but doesn’t mention that other similar groups didn’t show negative results. The effectiveness of the HPV vaccine in preventing HPV-related cervical cell changes (CIN) in people who already tested positive for the HPV virus with a PCR test and had antibodies against the virus on the first day of the study.

The study points out that “while the subgroup from study 013 remains a concern of the clinical review team, there is some evidence that this represented an unbalanced subgroup where Gardasil™ recipients at baseline had more risk factors for development” of cancer events.

He also claims that women reported developing symptomatic HPV after receiving the vaccine. The HPV vaccine is not a live vaccine and not even a killed vaccine. It is a subunit vaccine, meaning that it contains pieces of the virus. There is no way for the vaccine, which doesn’t contain any live virus, let alone whole virus, to cause HPV infections. He then cites a study that claims to have found fragments of HPV DNA.

DNA fragments can no more cause an active infection than a car door handle can provide transportation.