Do Lord Drayson's assertions on HPV vaccine coverage stack up?

A few weeks ago I attended a debate between Lord Drayson and the Guardian "Bad Science" columnist Ben Goldacre called "Science reporting: Is it good for you?".

It was well attended and as I blogged at the time, even though I disagreed with Lord Drayson's argument (that the UK press is basically good and certainly much better than it used to be when reporting science) I thought he made a good fist of his argument.

On 30th September I was getting so sick of some of the misleading coverage about the HPV vaccine (for example here) where the press was doing its usual thing of hyping up unproven fears and Lord Drayson was still tweeting that the press were doing a good job that I tweeted him this:

@LordDrayson Have you actually seen the scaremongering the Mail and the Express have been at? e.g. http://bit.ly/gVPPx

His response was this:

@MarkReckons #SciDebate Much better coverage on HPV vaccine than on MMR. Scientists & sci/med reporters doing a gr8 job in difficult circs

I really did start to wonder what planet Lord Drayson was on at this point given the coverage I was seeing.

This is now further compounded by some research that Ben Goldacre has done published today which shows that last week's Sunday Express cover story headlined "'JAB' AS DEADLY AS THE CANCER" which quoted a Dr Diane Harper was full of false assertions about her claims. It is worth reading Ben's article in full.

I wonder what Lord Drayson thinks about this.

UPDATE: As Mark Pack points out on his blogpost about this subject today, the best place to get reliable information about the HPV vaccine is the official NHS page on the subject here.