News Analysis From BrandWeek
Red flags raised by parents, politicians over Gardasil STD vaccine.
To hear Beverly Lybrand tell it, you would not know she’s a brand manager in the midst of a storm—over sex, teen girls, sexually transmitted diseases and cancer—that is currently raging across op-ed pages and cable news talk shows. As VP/General Manager at Merck, she’s responsible for Gardasil, the new vaccine for HPV, genital warts and cervical cancer.
Marketing for Gardasil began in earnest last November and almost immediately ran into controversy over its lobbying campaign. Merck had sought to persuade state governments to make the vaccine mandatory for schoolgirls. But it was revealed in February that the company had given Texas Gov. Rick Perry $6,000 in campaign contributions prior to Perry ordering that Texas girls be vaccinated. Later that month, Merck said it would cease all lobbying activity. “It was distracting from the conversation about women’s health and cervical cancer,” said a rep at Whitehouse Station, N.J.-based Merck.
Since then, pundits, scientists and parents have been battling over whether Merck’s marketing was too aggressive, whether the drug should be mandatory and whether the science behind the product is sound. An op-ed last week in the Detroit News was representative of others: “Imposing [Gardasil] on young girls devalues personal morals and promotes society’s increasingly (sic) tolerance of promiscuity and the willingness to ‘medicate’ the effects of a problem rather than solve the cause of it.”
Lybrand downplayed the controversy. “There’s just sort of an awareness gap,” she said. “Consumers were pitifully unaware of HPV and how prevalent it was and how it’s linked to cervical cancer.” About 80% of all women have HPV by age 50, per the CDC. She also stayed resolutely on-message: “To have the role of bringing together the policy and medicine and science and communications components globally is just unprecedented,” she said of her job.
Ads, via DDB, New York, are tagged “One less,” meaning reducing the number of women with cancer. Merck spent $46 million on ads last year and $24 million Jan.-Feb. 2007, per Nielsen Monitor-Plus. Celebrity endorsers include Susie Castillo of MTV’s TRL. Merck also sent out 82,000 bead kits that can be assembled into “Make the connection” cervical cancer awareness bracelets.
Lybrand said Merck has shipped two million doses and “96%” of people with health insurance are in plans that have made “a positive coverage decision.” In March, the CDC formally recommended the vaccine for females 11-26. Merck made an estimated $144 million in revenue on the drug in Q4 2006, per Merrill Lynch.
Still, Merck has met with resistance from parents who are suspicious of mandatory vaccines. There are about 3,600 fatal cases of cervical cancer in the U.S. every year, per the American Cancer Society. The figure is far behind the leading causes of cancer among women in the U.S.: lung (about 71,000) and breast (about 40,000). And a lack of long-term safety data—Gardasil has only been available since last June—has fueled critics. “I don’t believe that it has been tested long enough,” wrote one reader of parenting blog MommyLife.net.
“I will teach my daughter abstinence. That is the only sure way to prevent any STD. And if the public schools tell us she can’t attend, I will find a way to send her to private school,” another MommyLife reader wrote.
Regarding her own daughter, who is in the middle of a series of Gardasil shots, Lybrand said, “She told me it didn’t hurt at all. You’d be surprised to find that moms and their daughters are quite good at this [conversation] . . . she’s interested in knowing about the virus.”
