On the other hand, public health officials say Gardasil is safe and beneficial. The Centers for Disease Control recommends it, and Merck has already sold 10 million doses in the U.S. The demand for it helped double the company's vaccine sales to $1.2 billion in its most recent fiscal quarter.
Lybrand's own story so far: Her atypical business career began with a nursing degree from Trenton State College and work in the cardiac critical-care unit at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. That was a coming-full-circle experience for a woman whose father had died from a heart attack when she was a child.
Then she earned an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, did some healthcare consulting in New York City and joined Merck, where she has overseen marketing for everything from cholesterol medicines to glaucoma eye drops. Before Gardasil, she led the U.S. launch of the asthma drug Singulair.
She lives in Lower Gwynedd with her husband, Sam, and 15-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, whose celebrity as a pioneering Gardasil recipient - she's just received her third and last shot and has gotten a fair amount of national press - is beginning to lose its charm.
"She does occasionally ask, 'Mom, you're not mentioning me, are you?'" Lybrand confides.
The calm amid the controversy: Predictably, mothers at school functions buttonholed Lybrand with questions when Gardasil was first introduced, and they still do.
Typically for a nurse, her stock answer doesn't mince words: "What I tell them is, if you're between the ages of 9 and 26 and you have a cervix, you should get this."
