Many women, myself included, have been affected by cervical cancer or Human Papillomavirus (HPV) at some point in their lives. In this series of four articles, I will examine HPV and Gardasil — the facts, the hype, and what Merck stands to gain; the marketing campaigns promoting Gardasil in the U.S. and the media’s lack of attention to concerns about the rush to mandate vaccination; the role of the non-profit group Women In Government in promoting mandatory vaccination against HPV; and what is going on outside of the U.S. on this issue.
Setting the Stage: Part One in a Series on the Politics and PR of Cervical Cancer
Judith Siers-Poisson
This piece is worth reading because it is one of those often too rare moments of insightful self-criticism from a progressive point of view. I for one will admit to being completely caught up in the idea of a vaccine against cancer.
I thought the commercials were silly, too, mostly because it was hard to believe that no one had heard this ongoing story about a virus that can cause cancer. Why not put this vaccine on the list of childhood vaccines?
As Siers-Poisson shows in great detail there are lots of good reasons to re-think the vaccine. It doesn’t prevent many cancers at all, as it turns out. Most importantly, the hype behind the drug turn out to be one of those classic behind the scenes arrangements designed to ensure profits.
Merck has only about a year before competing vaccines appear, cutting its profits. “Merck’s greed, ” Siers-Poisson, concludes in the third of a four part series, “and the willingness of its partners to go along with an industry driven campaign, have compromised the actual promise of the vaccine.”
America’s higher education system was built on an important public policy consensus: Investing in higher education is good for everyone. Beginning with the GI Bill and reaching its peak in the 1960s and 1970s, this policy consensus resulted in strong state support for public institutions and an impressive array of two-year, four-year and graduate programs, as well as an extensive system of federal financial aid to equalize educational opportunity. Our nation attracted the best faculty and staff in the world because our institutions of higher education provided good jobs and the freedom to work without outside interference.
August 07, 2007, Chicago
AFL-CIO Executive Council statement
I have to be careful not that this site doesn’t become “annals of of the underemployed…” Still, since I work in education I wanted to note the AFL-CIO’s recent statement here because it hints at a new agenda for the union movement in which education plays a key role. I would argue that education has to play a central role in any successful progressive movement. It’s helpful to contrast these ambitions with the banality of the U.S. News “best colleges” report, issued today.
It’s also important to emphasize that the role of education in a progressive agenda necessarily has two sides: one, making higher education accessible to everyone (It should be free, of course, and we are getting there very very slowly) and two, ending the ongoing exploitation of teachers generally and university teachers in particular. It would great to have a ranking that focused on those two factors. Exploitation is not too strong of a word, either.
“Today, 48 percent of all faculty serve in part-time appointments, ” according to the American Association of University Professors, “and non-tenure-track positions of all types account for 68 percent of all faculty appointments in American higher education.” It’s a ‘class war from above‘ that has succeeded in creating a hollowed out education system. Imagine the outcry if almost half of the doctors in hospitals were hired part time without any job security or benefits. We need unions and a union movement more than ever.
“We’ve had a tremendous response from very interesting commercial players in the search space,” said Jimmy Wales, co-founder and chairman, Wikia, Inc. “The desire to collaborate and support a transparent and open platform for search is clearly deeply exciting to both open source and businesses. Look for other exciting announcements in the coming months as we collectively work to free the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box.”
from a July 27 Press Release.
What I find fascinating about Search Wikia is the implicit Google backlash, which I suppose had to happen. “Do no evil” has lost it’s charm already (see #7 here). I am particularly interested in how Wales pitches Open Source search (human indexing) as an alternative to our contemporary machine logic. Here’s a nice summary of Wale’s position.
It’s a strong contrast to the rhetoric of Wikipedia, which is both open source and free; Wikia, of course, is a for profit company funded by advertising. Ironically, the Search Wikia Labs site has Google advertising. What’s wrong with Google, uh, with search? Wales says it’s broken for the same reason that proprietary software is broken: “lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency.”
It’s a very appealing argument. I’ve heard Adam Curry talk the same talk, and it seems to be the way that Web 2.0 will be sold. This is a textbook example of the contradictions in a capitalist economy between property and human community, or, perhaps more generously, Wales (and Curry) are helping to push property towards its next iteration.
In earlier forms capital– capitalists– owned the commodity, say, music, and sold it to us. All of that has unraveled thanks to mass-sharing technologies, beginning with Napster and perhaps culminating in bit-torrent software. The new paradigm seems to suggest that the property owner owns only the infrastructure that allows “us” to do what we want to do.
I am not sure that this is a good or a bad thing. It may well be that these emerging forms of property are a real advance from the old forms. In Europe and Canada, for example, you can’t get rich off illness and suffering in quite the same way that you can in the United States. Health care has moved from being a commodity to a right; you don’t buy it, it is simple a part of your heritage as a human being. That’s good.
I love podcasting and Wikipedia is one of those great American inventions that only come around once in a century. But I am not sure all of this talk about community and access is going to help us address any of the problems associated with the current iteration of property. Poverty and income inequity, to cite only the most obvious examples, don’t have a technological fix.
