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You've probably seen the commercials. Over the last few months, it's been almost impossible not to see them. They parade endlessly across our screens—a multitude of women of all ages, from all backgrounds—and they all have the same urgent message to share: "Tell someone that human papillomavirus causes cervical cancer. Tell someone. Tell someone. Tell someone."

To which I can only respond, "We tried."

Lest you think me odd for talking to the television, let me add that I usually only do it in moments of extreme frustration. And the "Tell Someone" ads frustrate me because, for years now, friends and colleagues of mine have been trying to "tell someone," anyone, about the HPV-cervical cancer link. But no one wanted to listen.

Someone told me about HPV a few years ago when I was working at Family Research Council (FRC), a Christian public policy group in Washington, D.C. Friends and co-workers of mine there were lobbying for the addition of a warning about HPV to condom packages. Specifically, they wanted to warn people about the HPV-cancer link and the fact that condoms could not protect women against this dangerous virus.

All the way back at the turn of this century, FRC staffers Heather Farish (now Heather Cirmo) and Yvette Cantu (now Yvette Schneider) wrote in a thoroughly researched policy paper: "HPV has been linked to over 90 percent of all invasive cervical cancers, and is the number two cause of cancer deaths among women, after breast cancer. Approximately 16,000 new cases of cervical cancer are diagnosed each year, and 5,000 women die annually from this disease." To back up their statistics, they cited such prestigious sources as The New England Journal of Medicine and the Kaiser Family Foundation.

In short, just as the commercials tell us to do, they told someone.

And they were told to shut up.

A chorus of voices from the media, politicians, and organizations like Planned Parenthood and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS) derailed the condom-labeling effort, claiming that FRC and its allies were putting teenagers and young adults in danger by making condoms look bad. "What no one in the HPV brigade mentions," scoffed Sharon Lerner in the Village Voice in 1999, "is that, even by conservative estimates, a teeny number of people who have the virus—far less than 1 percent—will develop cervical cancer." The implication was that it was hardly worth putting warnings on condoms for that minuscule number of women.

How strange, then, that just eight years later—with the same amount of information about the link between HPV and cancer, and fewer infections and deaths than we had then—the calls to vaccinate that "teeny number" of women and girls are loud and urgent. Suddenly, the situation is dire enough that governors and legislatures in more than 20 states have either ordered mandatory HPV vaccinations, or are attempting to do so.

Of course, these recent efforts hit a snag when it came out that at least some of the lawmakers had accepted donations from Merck, the drug company that manufactures the vaccinations and came up with the ubiquitous "Tell Someone" campaign. But the call for mandatory vaccinations is still ongoing—and, believe it or not, coming from the same people who used to say that HPV was no big deal and that we really needed to lower our voices.

Having turned 180 degrees in how they view the urgency of the disease, these former critics could have joined with people who had already been spreading the message for years. Instead, they attacked them.

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March (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51