There is a big difference between an biologically formed antibody in your body that recognizes an invader and causes your immune system to go after it, and a viracide that you take from some man made concoction to kill a virus that already exists. All vaccines cause the development of an antibody, and need to be used before exposure or are essentially useless. The Gardasil vaccine is unique in that it actually causes your body to develop and antibody to the protein coating on the HPV virus and not the virus itself. Pretty cool idea. End result is the same your immune system recognizes it then, and deals with it.

Reading articles on the HPV virus is fascinating as well. It's amassing how cleaver virus' are. The HPV virus tricks our good cells at 2 different safe guard check points, if you were, into thinking that the cell is good to duplicate itself when in fact it isn't and the cancer starts. The fact that we already know so much about how the virus does this is amassing and the fact that with all that knowledge we can't easily stop it is also amassing.

If those interested in all this would please read the HPV page they would understand all this. It is the virus's ability to express tow onco proteins E6 and E7 that allow it to live and control a normal cell without killing it, all the daughter cells spun off from that controlled cell will have the genetic mutations caused by those two proteins already in them, group a bunch of these together over a period of time and you have a tumor.

These oncoproteins destroy two key chromosomes, P53 that controls normal programed cell death ( apoptosis) making the cell essentially immortal, and the other turns off gene RB, a tumor suppressor gene making it invisible to the immune system. It is all very interesting, the trick is to interrupt this process or prevent it from starting. An antibody that recognizes the virus will destroy it before this genetic alteration can take place. Once that has happened though, it is what it is at our stage of understaning all this.