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Last month, Danish physician and medical researcher Dr. Peter Gøtzsche published his book ‘How Merck and Drug Regulators Hid Serious Harms of the HPV Vaccine’. Among others, the book reveals that Merck used numerous tactics to avoid reporting serious neurological harms of Gardasil.
“[The book] exposes how profits – rather than safety – can propel vaccine approval, marketing, uptake and mandates. It seals the case on the conflicted nature of public institutions whose pretensions to protect us are shoddy and barely camouflaged, bizarrely making us distrust them even further,” Alan Cassels writes.
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The Dauntless Dane Exposes the Dark Side of HPV Vaccines
Book Review of ‘How Merck and Drug Regulators Hid Serious Harms of the HPV Vaccine’ by Dr. Peter Gøtzsche (Skyhorse, 2025)
By Alan Cassels, as published by Brownstone Institute on 1 September 2025
Over 30 years of studying and writing about drug policy, and documenting the fascinating machinations of regulators, drug companies, medical experts and corporate spokespeople, I have often found myself staring into the dark hole of epistemology, the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, sources and limits of knowledge. Basically, when we say we “know” something, what does that even mean?
If one were to ask me, “How trustworthy or complete is our knowledge base underpinning the effects of prescription drugs or vaccines?” you might find my answer impertinent: “If you want the real truth about drugs, don’t ask doctors – ask lawyers.”
Which is to say, the medical world is only able to deliver us so much truth; to go deeper where true knowledge lies, you have to employ law and philosophy, in an arena where you can ask real questions and question answers.
The world of clinical trials and medical regulators can put on a good show, even though many of us can see through the performative regulation and performative ghost-managed “science” designed to reassure investors and bamboozle doctors while utterly failing to provide information that’s meaningful to patients. Rarely does the medical system slip off its armour of hubris to seek out true epistemological gold. If you think you already have the real truth, why would you search for any further?
In many examples over the last few decades, I have noticed that the rigour of the courtroom remains one of the best tools we have to scrutinise the validity and reliability of clinical evidence, understand its limits and challenge the authority of experts and regulators. Establishing knowledge about drug effects is not a popularity contest. Most of us would agree that information on the likelihood of expected drug effects should be assessed by the cleanest, most unbiased and rigorous studies humans can devise.
Epistemology reminds us that scientific knowledge is provisional and fallible. In the context of drugs, it means acknowledging that what we believe to be true – such as a drug’s level of safety or efficacy – may change with new evidence or reinterpretation of existing data. This humility is vital to prevent dogmatic adherence to outdated or incomplete information. Sadly, it often takes a courtroom, high stakes and tonnes of money to get under the layers of performative “science.”
Those thoughts came to mind after reading a new book by the Danish physician and researcher, Dr. Peter Gøtzsche, a giant among sceptics whom I’ve nicknamed the Dauntless Dane. He’s a fearless, relentless truth-seeker whose penetrating blue eyes seem to look straight into your soul when he speaks.
He’s frequently accused of being arrogant and unrelenting, but one thing is clear: He’s never one to back down from a fight, and he’s usually on the right side. Not one to shy away from difficult truths and bow to industry (and legal) pressure, his intellectual heft has been aimed at tackling important public health questions, such as the value of mammography or evaluating the harms of psychiatric drugs.
Over a decade ago, I became aware of his work in mammography and interviewed him for my book, ‘Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease’. I interacted with him frequently when researching and writing a book on the Cochrane Collaboration, an organisation he was fundamental in creating and by whose hand he was tarnished and thrown to the dogs. (That saga is thoroughly covered in several of his recent books). I have seen the Dauntless Dane many times take a battering in the ring and can attest that beneath his formidable exterior is a mind of relentless clarity and dedication to truth.
His newest book, ‘How Merck and Drug Regulators Hid Serious Harms of the HPV Vaccines’ (Skyhorse, 2025), stands as a fierce indictment of corporate malfeasance and regulatory collusion. It should be required reading for anyone who still believes that the medical establishment and regulators are always and ever more acting in our best interest. As Gøtzsche makes painfully clear, those professing to be working in the public interest often aren’t. What he reveals during a lengthy cross-examination in a legal proceeding about the darling of the vaccine world, Merck’s Gardasil, designed to prevent cervical cancer, is utterly staggering.
Marketed aggressively as a “life-saving” vaccine, Gardasil was rushed onto the market in 2006 despite failing to meet a single US Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) criterion for fast-track approval. The FDA itself admitted a year later that it lacked the scientific capacity to properly monitor the drug’s safety. Meanwhile, Merck’s marketing blitz featured an incredibly expensive campaign, heavy lobbying in almost every state, and a public relations-honed pitch rooted more in fear than evidence – claiming “cervical cancer kills” thousands of women each year, a narrative wildly exaggerated and minimally challenged by corporate media or public health.
Soon after Gardasil’s launch, numerous reports of serious adverse effects began to surface: cases of POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome), neurological disorders, fainting spells and even deaths. These facts, meticulously detailed in Gøtzsche’s book, had been hidden or dismissed by the manufacturers and the researchers in their employ. Court documents and internal studies reveal that Merck kept undisclosed adjuvants in the vaccine – another layer of deception – and manipulated safety data to hide the truth from regulators and the public. They even flatly contradicted their own long-term antibody data, which showed immunity waned rapidly and, disturbingly, might even worsen pre-existing HPV infections.
Gøtzsche’s work underscores a core truth: the regulatory agencies – FDA, CDC, EMA, Health Canada – are often more show than substance. In court testimony such as this, we come to understand how they have been thoroughly captured by the industry they’re supposed to regulate. Court depositions, where you find some of the richest grades of “truth serum,” expose a staggering level of corporate manipulation and regulatory passivity. In this case, Gotzsche had to dig through 112,000 pages of confidential study reports to find the gems of what lay behind Merck’s claims of its novel cancer-fighting vaccine. Again: back to my axiom: it is in legal files, not the medical summaries, where the full extent of industry misconduct is revealed, and it is by these revelations that we gain the most insight into what we “know” about a drug or vaccine.
The most entertaining part of Gotzsche’s book is when he’s being grilled by Merck’s pit bull lawyer, Emma C. Ross, at a full-day deposition. This is totally worth the price of admission, and he describes his under-oath testimony as “the most absurd day in my entire life.” The grilling was rife with arrogance and condescension, frequently hilarious and often sliding into childish and outlandish sniping, so theatrical you’d think it was cooked up by a team of drunk Hollywood scriptwriters.
But the richness of what he had to deliver is solid, delivered by an unflappable expert who refuses to be browbeaten by lawyers. I laughed out loud in places, imagining him staring down this lawyer who was going out of her way to make him squirm. While critics might dismiss the Dauntless Dane as a little too self-assured, his deposition shows a fierce independence and a deep insistence on exposing what others have chosen to ignore.
In my view, his latest book is a powerful call to action. It exposes how profits – rather than safety – can propel vaccine approval, marketing, uptake and mandates. It seals the case on the conflicted nature of public institutions whose pretensions to protect us are shoddy and barely camouflaged, bizarrely making us distrust them even further.
In the wider scope of things, this is a sober, critical “second opinion” for any parent, teacher or health professional who clings to the illusion of the infallibility of vaccines.
Back to the question: Do we ever get the full truth from the drug manufacturers or our regulators?
I would argue, not until they are on trial. Sadly, the unvarnished truth about Gardasil – and many other drugs or vaccines – is buried beneath layers of industry greed, regulatory failure and marketing spin. Gøtzsche’s courage and meticulous research cut through this chaos, offering a clarity that is most rare these days.
The real truth about vaccines for HPV cannot be derived from conflicted researchers, shoddy and biased research or lame regulatory mechanisms. It comes from lawyers and depositions where the curtains are pulled back. Gøtzsche has done that for us.
About the Author
Alan Cassels is a drug policy researcher and author who has written extensively about disease mongering. He is the author of four books, including ‘The ABCs of Disease Mongering: An Epidemic in 26 Letters’.
Featured image taken from ‘Merck prevails in US safety litigation over Gardasil HPV vaccine’, Investing, 11 March 2025
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After everything that I have read I have gone from being a vaccine skeptic to a total anti vax person. I don’t believe that any drug company has tested any of the vaccines & I also believe that they are based on a faulty premise. Natural immunity & good health is based on good nutrition, some exercise & sanitation. Clean water, no additives in the food supply, regenerative farming. None of these things are practiced in the USA.