Issue:
October 2025 | Japan Media Review
Japan’s newspapers too often put emotion before science in their coverage of the HPV controversy
While vaccines have greatly reduced the spread of infectious diseases over the past century, they have recently come under pressure due to dubious claims about their efficacy and health risks. Medical and statistical research has debunked these theories, but they remain at large thanks mainly to the media's tendency to sensationalize.
In Japan, this trend has resulted in a drop in the number of girls and women who receive the vaccine that prevents infection by the human papillomavirus (HPV), a leading cause of cervical cancer.
The HPV vaccine entered the market in 2006 and was approved for use in Japan by the health ministry in 2009. The following year, the government began subsidizing its distribution, and in 2014 introduced it into Japan's vaccine regimen, encouraging adolescent girls to receive it. Subsequently, a number of vaccinated girls and women reported adverse reactions, including seizures and chronic pain. Although the health ministry, which called these reactions "functional abnormalities", did not find any causal relationship, it suspended support for the vaccine in the face of large-scale media coverage that addressed these concerns sympathetically. As a result, the public came to accept the notion that the government no longer had confidence in the vaccine, while, in fact, that wasn't the case. Uptake of the vaccine fell from 80% to just 1%. Every year in Japan, about 10,000 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer, and 3,000 die.
The matter was exacerbated in March 2016 when a law firm solicited some of the affected girls and women to join a class action lawsuit against pharmaceutical companies that manufactured the vaccine. Suits on behalf of 132 plaintiffs were filed in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, and Fukuoka. Major media who covered the suits portrayed the plaintiffs as victims, even though scientific studies carried out in other countries did not find that the reported conditions were caused by the vaccine.
One of the chief advocates in Japan for the HPV vaccine was Dr. Riko Muranaka, who in 2017 won the John Maddox Prize from the science publication Nature for challenging misinformation about the vaccine. In 2016, she wrote a magazine article in which she said results of a Japanese study that purported to show a link between the vaccine and brain cancer in a mouse had been fabricated. The researcher in question sued Muranaka and the magazine for slander. A court found for the plaintiffs in 2019, saying that Muranaka had not proved that the results of the study were fabricated. Nevertheless, she continued to speak out against HPV vaccine sceptics and was vindicated in April 2022 when the health ministry reversed its decision to retract its recommendation of the HPV vaccine and began distributing it again under new protocols. But by that point, the media had tired of the vaccine story and reported only the bare minimum about the government's reversal. Moreover, thanks in large part to an online petition circulated by Yukiko Takahashi, a gynecologist at Saitama Medical University, the ministry launched a free "catchup" program for women born between 1997 and 2008 who had not yet received the vaccine. Consequently, uptake is now improving, although it is not as high as it was initially. During a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan in 2023, Muranaka estimated that some 4,000 women will likely die of cervical cancer unnecessarily because they did not receive the vaccine.
The media's role in the vaccine's rejection is discussed in more detail by freelance journalist Eito Suzuki in his new book, What I Can See as an Unaccepted Reporter. Suzuki made his name through coverage of the Unification Church (UC) and was in demand as a pundit following the murder of former prime minister Shinzo Abe, allegedly by a man who resented Abe for supporting the church, which he accused of ruining his mother's life. It was Suzuki's interest in UC that led him to the HPV vaccine.
In August, he appeared on the web news program Democracy Times to promote his book. The UC, he says, virulently opposed the use of public funds to administer the HPV vaccine, but not because of its supposed adverse side effects. The church objected because it believed the vaccine encouraged pre-marital sexual activity among girls, since the HP virus is spread through sexual activity. UC dogma mandates abstinence outside of marriage. Thanks to church propaganda, a significant portion of the public associated cervical cancer with "free sex", although women could develop cervical cancer through sex with their spouses. (For that matter, men can also contract the HP virus and develop other kinds of cancer, which is why boys are also encouraged to get the vaccine.) Church-related media covered the "victims" of the vaccine and shared their coverage with the mass media, which started reporting church pronouncements as news –including, for instance, the claim that nuns had very low rates of cervical cancer. In turn, the media talked about the side reactions of the plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit. They also fixated on the physical pain of the injections, which may have caused trauma in girls who were typically between the ages of 13 and 16. They broadcast images of girls having seizures and confined to wheelchairs.
Suzuki found that the lawyers who filed the class action suit had prior experience suing for drug-related damages. They actively solicited girls who thought they had adverse reactions to the vaccine, and some politicians, including the mayor of Nagoya, threw their weight behind the suit. That's when the health ministry pulled its recommendation of the vaccine, though they continued to administer it for free to people who wanted it. While the ministry still believed the vaccine was safe and effective, it didn't want to be seen in the press as denying the plaintiffs' claims.
Some doctors and journalists tried to point out that the suit did not have any scientific merit, but lawyers for the plaintiffs limited their arguments to legal questions, thus avoiding any discussion of scientific rigor. At the same time, the vaccine had become widely accepted overseas where uptake increased steadily. According to Suzuki, Nagoya's mayor, Takashi Kawamura, conducted a survey that sampled recipients as well as non-recipients of the vaccine in equal numbers. The survey found that there were no differences, meaning that the incidence of side-effects associated with the vaccine among the target demographic was the same among non-recipients as it was among recipients. The natural conclusion is that these reactions were not caused by the vaccine, which is why Kawamura didn't publicize the results.
Studies conducted in Sweden, Denmark, and South Korea also showed no clear connection between the abnormalities and the vaccine, and attributed the abnormalities to a kind of psychosomatic condition common among preteens and teenagers who find it difficult to adjust to life changes, such as starting a new school and entering puberty. These problems afflict the same percentage of young people in the general public as they do HPV vaccine recipients. Moreover, all the plaintiffs have grown out of adolescence and are now young adults. Despite their supposed afflictions they appear to live normal lives holding down jobs, being wives and mothers, and traveling overseas.
Major Japanese media neglected to report these developments. In the beginning, the class action trial mostly involved the exchange and scrutiny of documents. Suzuki continued to attend court sessions and says it wasn't until 2023 that witnesses and experts were called to testify. He seemed to be the only journalist covering it at that point. Lawyers for the pharmaceutical companies cross-examined the plaintiffs to prove that some of their issues had begun even before they were vaccinated. A verdict isn't due until 2027, and if the judge decides against the plaintiffs and they choose to appeal it further to the Supreme Court, the suit could continue after 2027.
At the beginning of his coverage, Suzuki said "interested parties" automatically assumed he had supported the plaintiffs simply because he was a member of the media, but once he started asking questions that challenged their views, he was quickly ostracized. In particular, he wanted to know how much money the lawyers for the plaintiffs would make if they won.
The mainstream media framed the trial as victimized teens fighting against powerful pharmaceutical companies, and would portray the plaintiffs as promising students whose dreams had been destroyed by the vaccine. It was a narrative that guaranteed sympathy from the public. But once scientific evidence was introduced in the trial, the media lost interest because it required explanations that reporters couldn't handle. The big dailies, the Asahi, Mainichi, and Yomiuri, reduced their coverage to the bare minimum. They reported the health ministry's resumption of the HPV vaccine recommendation, as well as the new catchup program, but never explained why it was stopped in the first place. Suzuki singled out the Tokyo Shimbun as one of the few news outlets that tried to cover the issue conscientiously on a continuing basis. The Yomiuri Shimbun’s medical columnist, Naoko Ienaga, wanted to write responsibly about the vaccine but told Suzuki last year she had been discouraged to do so by her editors.
During the Democracy Times interview, Suzuki said that it was a journalist's job to "defend the disadvantaged,” so it is somewhat natural to expect reporters to side with the so-called victims of the HPV vaccine, "but it has to be said that the socially weak are not always correct”. He also blamed liberals for the failure of the vaccine program. When he was fighting the Unification Church, liberals cheered him on, but once he started covering the vaccine they blocked him on social media.
"The issue right now is helping these women [the plaintiffs] heal," he said. "And I want to do that, even though they hate me. But that's all right. I'm used to it."
Philip Brasor is a Tokyo-based writer who covers entertainment, the Japanese media, and money issues. He writes the Japan Media Watch column for the Number 1 Shimbun.
Sources
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405852117300708
