@Dan_Lyons Dr. Harper is not the creator, she helped in clinical trial design and was a consultant. And what that means is that a pap test can come back either negative, or ‘abnormal’. Abnormal requires follow-up tests, which are frequently negative. Gardasil cuts down on false positive pap tests, and thus helps somewhat psychologically, but her contention is that screening protocols are already so good in developed countries that the vaccine itself doesn’t cut down too much on the rate.
The original statement is from this paper (thankfully not behind a paywall)
However, to the question, no, you’re probably quite safe. Literally millions of doses have been given out and the side effects are very low, no worse than any other vaccines, which are already one of our safest interventions.
Some more specific stats from the CDC (since I can’t see the above link, personally): “57 million doses of HPV vaccines were distributed and VAERS received approximately 22,000 adverse event reports occurring in girls and women who received HPV vaccines; 92% were classified as “non-serious””. Which leads to the .0033% chance stated above. But you should also know that VAERS is specifically set up to be biased towards the patient: to have a claim recognized, it must only hit certain criteria in a certain time period after administration, you don’t need to prove cause and effect. Which makes sense, if you’re having an adverse reaction the last thing you need is to go through a trial. But that does mean that the reactions are, by design, over-reported via VAERS. So actually you’re looking at lower than a .0033% chance, which is pretty darn good.