Childhood vaccinations were given out the same way guardisal is now. No one knew the actual results til years later.
Something to ponder.
Also now we have more medical technology now than we did in the past. By saying that "research" animal testing. Lab testing that we did not have in the past.
We are more aware of the vaccinations of now than we were of the past vaccines
Yes, vaccinations were given out after testing, all drugs are, but there are some really important differences that you're completely ignoring. First of all, the vaccines that were developed and are now given to children are for devastating or deadly diseases. On the level of the virus being treated, you can't really compare something like HPV to the things we get vaccinated against as a child. The reason that those vaccinations were given, even without the years of testing that have since shown them to be safe, was that the benefits
far outweighed the risks. Gardasil is a vaccine against something that the majority of the population has with generally no major side effects (or even symptoms, in most cases). And before you even start on the whole "preventing cancer" argument, it doesn't prevent cancer. You can still get cervical cancer, even if you get the Gardasil vaccine. It may reduce your chances of getting cancer from one particular mechanism, but the vaccine itself is for something that is, on the whole, pretty harmless.
Also, yes, we have better medical technology now than we used to, but this also means that we don't make vaccines the same way we used to. Instead of just creating dead or inactive viruses, which they've used, and tested, and know are really safe, they now go and do all sorts of weird things to make their vaccines. Conjugate vaccines, DNA alteration, or subunit vaccines (like Gardasil), are being used more and more, but that doesn't mean that we understand them as well as the old kinds, or that they are somehow safer because our technology has improved. If anything, making something like a subunit could be so much more dangerous, because you don't know how that particular aspect of the virus interacts with other things independently. It comes back to the old argument of, "just because you
can do something, does it mean you
should".
You really can't compare Gardasil to childhood vaccines. They're made in totally different ways, operate differently, and have different levels of understanding and testing behind them.