PORT ST. JOE -- A vaccine is all that stands between Simone Davis and U.S. citizenship.
But the 17-year-old English native refuses to receive the Gardasil human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine and objects to its inclusion in a list of vaccinations required for immigrants seeking to become U.S. citizens. It is designed to prevent cervical cancer.

"I don't want to get that shot," said Simone, a Port St. Joe High School senior. "They'd have to take me kicking and screaming."

Simone, born in Colchester, England, and her grandmother, Jeannie Davis, believe the government is "blackmailing" immigrant girls and women by forcing all between the ages of 11 to 26 to receive a vaccine with known adverse effects and questionable long-term efficacy.
The Davises, both Christians, question the appropriateness of giving a vaccine for a sexually transmitted virus to young girls.

"Someone has to stand up and say, 'This isn't right. These girls are being forced,'" Jeannie Davis said.

Jeannie Davis, herself a naturalized citizen and her granddaughter's legal guardian, filed immigration paperwork on Simone's behalf in June 2008.

Simone received all her vaccinations except the Gardasil shot. Unfamiliar with the vaccine, Jeannie Davis asked the doctor to postpone vaccination until she had time to do some research.
What she found startled her. Davis, a Faith Christian School teacher, researched Gardasil on the Internet and was alarmed by reports of adverse health effects associated with the vaccine.

As of June 1, 2009, 25 million doses of Gardasil were distributed in the U.S. A tracking mechanism - the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) - reported 14,072 adverse events following vaccination.

Of those, 93 percent were identified as "non-serious," symptoms such as fainting, pain and swelling at the injection site, headache, nausea and fever.

But the remaining seven percent were "serious" events. There were 43 deaths reported. Others suffered from blood clots and Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a rare disorder that causes muscle weakness.

Those effects, the CDC argued, weren't clearly linked to the vaccine.
Of the deaths reported by VAERS, the CDC noted that only 26 were confirmed, and of those "there was no unusual pattern of clustering to the deaths that would suggest that they were caused by the vaccine."

The CDC stood by its recommendation for women ages 11-26 to receive it.
As she continued her research, Davis also began to question whether Gardasil had any true upside.

Those vaccinated are protected for about five years, the CDC has acknowledged.
If an 11-year-old is vaccinated with Gardasil, she will only be protected against HPV until she is 16, an age typically associated with sexual experimentation.

A sexually inactive pre-teen, then, could risk unnecessary side effects at a young age.
There was something unseemly, Davis believed, about requiring young girls to receive a vaccination to prevent a sexually transmitted disease.

"You wouldn't walk around with a crash helmet on if you weren't going to ride a motorcycle," she said.

Simone is not sexually active. She believes the Bible prohibits premarital sex, and wears a silver promise ring as a sign of her celibacy.

"My point is, if a person is not sexually active and has zero chance of getting it, obviously, you say there's no risk yet so I'm not going to risk an adverse reaction," Davis said. "But that choice has been taken away by the immigration service."

Though the CDC recommends vaccination before the onset of sexual activity, Davis insists the mandate is "terribly inappropriate."

While many of her schoolmates have had the Gardasil vaccine, Simone also remains firm in her objections.

"It should be my choice, not the government telling me I have to have it done," she said. "It's my body. I feel like one of their experiments."

To bypass the Gardasil requirement, Jeannie Davis filed an Application for Waiver of Grounds of Inadmissibility in May on Simone's behalf. She cited moral and religious objections to the Gardasil vaccine.

They got a reply last month. Hopeful that the waiver had been accepted, the Davises arrived at the immigration office in Jacksonville eager to hear a good word.

Once inside, both Simone and Jeannie Davis were required to submit separate affidavits noting their objections to the Gardasil vaccine.

Both cited religious and moral objections. They noted their disapproval of premarital sex and cited health risks associated with the vaccine. They were denied.

The Davises' current options are limited, but an appeal process could last up to five years.
They can appeal the decision this month or file a "blanket waiver" - for which a doctor would have to determine the vaccine is not "medically appropriate."

Though she could presumably remain in the U.S. during the appeal process, Davis could not attend Pensacola Christian College, which has granted her a conditional letter of acceptance. She can only enroll once she has become a U.S. citizen.

For now, Jeannie Davis rises early every morning before work to send e-mails to those she hopes will be sympathetic to her granddaughter's plight. She has emailed Gov. Charlie Crist and other elected officials, news organizations CBS and ABC, and the myriad contacts she's gained through months of diligent research.

And the clock is ticking. Through her online contacts with those familiar with immigration law, Davis has learned that the USCIS can begin removal proceedings, a thought that terrifies Davis.

"I was under a false sense of security that we had until January (Simone's 18th birthday)," she said, noting her granddaughter has no one to care for her in England.

"Where do they think they're going to send her on her own?" Simone continues to hope for the best, putting faith in the woman who's cared for her since she was 18 months old.

"I know that Nanny's been really, really working hard on it," she said. "We're going to fight it, but we don't know what will happen."

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), a malignant disease of the bone marrow, is the most common cancer diagnosed in children. In fact, nearly one third of all pediatric cancers are cases of ALL. Although this form of cancer can be cured in many cases, in the worst case scenarios the cancer crowds out normal cells in the bone marrow, metastasizes to other organs and takes the lives of about 15 percent of the youngsters it attacks. What triggers so many kids, usually between the ages of three and seven, to develop this cancer in the first place? A new study just published in the August issue of the journal Therapeutic Drug Monitoring raises the suspicion that commonly used household pesticides are the cause.

Previous studies in agricultural areas of the US have shown strong associations between pesticides and childhood cancers but this is the first research conducted in a large, urban area to look at the connection. The study, conducted between January of 2005 and January of 2008, involved 41 pairs of children with ALL and their mothers and a control group of 41 matched pairs of healthy children and their mothers. The volunteer research subjects were all from Lombardi and Children's National Medical Center and lived in the Washington metropolitan area.

Urine samples collected from the children and their mothers were analyzed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to look for metabolites that provide evidence of household pesticide exposure. Specifically, the scientists were looking for metabolites associated with the pesticides known by their chemical name as organophosphates (OP). The researchers found evidence of the pesticides in the urine of more than half of all the participants, but levels of two common OP metabolites, diethylthiophosphate (DETP) and diethyldithiophosphate (DEDTP), were significantly higher in the children who suffered from cancer. What's more, the mothers who participated in the study filled out questionnaires that revealed more moms whose kids had cancer used pesticides (33 percent) than did the mothers in the control group (14 percent) whose youngsters were cancer-free.

"We know pesticides -- sprays, strips, or 'bombs,' are found in at least 85 percent of households, but obviously not all the children in these homes develop cancer. What this study suggests is an association between pesticide exposure and the development of childhood ALL, but this isn't a cause-and-effect finding," the study's lead investigator, Offie Soldin, PhD, an epidemiologist at Lombardi, said in a statement to the media. "Future research would help us understand the exact role of pesticides in the development of cancer. We hypothesize that pre-natal exposure coupled with genetic susceptibility or an additional environmental insult after birth could be to blame."

While the scientists aren't ready to flat out say pesticides cause cancer, when you look at the big picture and see what is already known about the havoc pesticides appear to cause in the human body, it makes sense for parents and parents-to-be to ditch pesticides -- for their own health and for the health of their children. For example, NaturalNews has previously reported on the link between residential pesticides and childhood brain cancer (http://www.naturalnews.com/026155_p...), and the strong association between a serious pre-cancerous blood condition and exposure to pesticides (http://www.naturalnews.com/026626_p...).

By Anahad O'Connor /  Tony Cenicola/
The New York Times
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