The Evidence Gap: Drug Makers’ Push Leads to Cancer Vaccines’ Rise

There was a great article a few days ago in The New York Times about the marketing efforts behind HPV vaccines. It presents a variety of viewpoints regarding the costs and benefits of Gardasil and Cervarix, and the general point of the article seems to be that strong marketing campaigns have resulted in an over-emphasis on these vaccines as a public health priority.

For anyone with an interst in DTC advertising of prescription drugs, it's definitely worth a look. These vaccines present an interesting context for the balance between marketing and sales objectives (which is obviously important for the pharma companies and their agencies) and the public health benefits inherent in such campaigns. It's certainly a messy discussion, and I have to wonder if it's going to come up in debates between Obama and McCain. Given their different viewpoints on healthcare in general, I have to imagine they might have some different views on DTC pharma advertising... Hopefully we'll get to hear about their thoughts on this as part of the bigger discussion about how to fix the U.S. healthcare system.