- HPVs are extremely common: 80% of men and 90% of women will have at least one strain in their lives. Unless you plan to remain completely celibate, you are likely to contract a strain.
- Sooner is better, but vaccination can be done at any age. Guidelines often lag behind, but vaccination makes sense even if you are currently HPV-positive. While it won't clear an existing infection, it protects against different strains and reinfection (typically body removed HPV in 1-2 years). See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38137661/
- HPV16 is responsible for a large number of throat cancers (around 50% in smokers and 80% in non-smokers!). This affects both men and women. Vaccinating men is important for their own safety and to reduce transmission to their partners.
You can get HPV without sex too.
https://www.cdc.gov/sti/about/about-genital-hpv-infection.ht...
"HPV is most commonly spread during vaginal or anal sex. It also spreads through close skin-to-skin touching during sex"
This focuses on sex, but any virus that can be found on skin, also has a chance to be transmitted without sex just as well. Admittedly the chance here for HPV infection is much higher with regard to sex, but not non-zero otherwise. The HeLa cells also contain a HPV virus in the genome, though this was probably transmitted via sex:
"The cells are characterized to contain human papillomavirus 18 (HPV-18)"
HPV-18. I think HPV-18 may in general be more prevalent than HPV-16.
So, NOT in fact “just as well”.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277270762...
This statistic seems to be used by some people to avoid the vaccine - they figure they've already had it at some point. The biggest problem with that logic is that not all strains are as dangerous and they probably have not contracted 16 or 18 specifically. The other problem is there's still a good number of people who have never had it and shouldn't assume they have because its common.
Second, the body normally clears HPV naturally after 1-2 years. However, natural infection often does not provide immunity, so reinfection can easily occur (even from the same partner or a different part of your own body).
People often assume that HPV is either a lifetime infection or that recovery guarantees immunity - neither is the case!
1) you probably haven't had all N strains yet.
2a) you likely haven't been infected with the ones that cause cancer, because they're relatively rare.
2b) ...that is especially true if you're young and not sexually active.
2) being infected with one strain does not provide sterilizing cross-immunity against the other strains.
3) even if you've been infected with a strain, some of the vaccines have been shown to prevent reinfection and reactivation better than natural infection alone.
4) in general, the vaccination-mediated immunity might last longer or be "stronger" than the natural version, since the vaccines are pretty immunogenic, and the viruses are not.
But for point 4, it's well-known that vaccine efficacy is lower for people who have already seroconverted (cf [1]), so there's clearly some amount of practical immunity provided by infection.
[1] The vaccines are roughly 90% effective for the major cancer-causing strains, but it's not a simple answer, and varies a lot by how you frame the question. See table 2 here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8706722/
Also be sure to see table 4 if you're a man. The data for biological men and women are surprisingly different!
I'm not being avoidant here -- medical decisions are always subjective and multi-factor, and I can't begin to tell you what you should do. (But I also sincerely believe that propagandists try to reduce nuanced data to talking points, which is equally wrong.)
Please note the caveat about gender that I just added. The data for biological men and women are very different. Also, I haven't discussed risks at all, which is the other side of the ledger -- these vaccines are pretty darned safe, but everything comes with risk, and only you can decide what level of risk is appropriate for your life.
The initial data says you should vaccinate somewhere around 12-14 year old girls because most of them will be HPV naive but if you wait longer they won't be any more. But too many US parents cannot imagine their little girl ever having sex and if they never have sex they almost certainly won't contract HPV so, why are we vaccinating them? Are you trying to make my daughter a slut?
If you've been a teenage American this should strike you as very silly, and doubly so if you understand biology. Teenage girls are not, in fact, celibate by default, so some of them will get horny. And if you understand biology the viral infections aren't caused by the same mechanism as pregnancy "sexual activity" is a shorthand, you can easily get infected while steering clear of anything that would get somebody knocked up. A peck on grandma's cheek is unlikely to work, but if you're sucking face for most of a Stranger Things episode that's definitely enough that you might contract HPV.
You need to be careful making assumptions.
Previously that recommendation was due to limited vaccine production and trying to prioritize young women.
There were CDC recommendations during covid that were not about what was best for you individually.
As always with health, the right answer is to seek professional advice. But also to take personal responsibility for your own choices (that depend on your specific circumstances).
Did I read this correctly? You are going to decide for your children based on their plans to be monogamous?
And you’re also going to decide for your parents? I can only assume you’re in the unfortunate situation where your parents are no longer capable of making decisions?
If there is a benefit for my gen and my parents, then why wouldn’t we consider it?
I think there's truth to the idea that the specific 11-12 range is somewhat arbitrary: as much as anything it's that because there was a preexisting "slot" in the vaccine schedule at 11-12. The American Academy of Pediatrics differs from the CDC's panel on this... but on the earlier side: they would start the recommendation at age 9. I think to a significant degree the thinking there is that if you go earlier the messaging and reaction is more "your child will probably eventually have sex and this is an effective time to give the vaccine" and less "your child will be having sex like, tomorrow."
Your children will have sexual contact with another human eventually as they grow into adults, and there is very low risk with an HPV vaccine. There is, in my opinion, no reason not to vaccinate as soon as possible (considering the material reduction in future cancer risk, and that there is no cure once infected, only prevention via vaccination). You might have feelings, as many have strong feelings, but they won’t matter once your kids are 18 and you no longer control them. Google the stats on parental estrangement.
Try to do better, you are a guardian of your children, not an owner, and your values will potentially not be their values. I don’t care with who or when my children have sexual experiences with once they are old enough to consent, what matters is they are respected, as well as protected from harm and poor health outcomes from these experiences they will certainly have eventually during their lifetimes. If you don’t think your kids are going to have sex when they’re older, or think you can control it, you are lying to yourself. So, protect them from what you can, which in this case is HPV.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=false&qu...
I work in risk management, and have for almost a decade, so that’s how my brain is wired to evaluate and manage risk. I understand others may decision and action differently. Low cost, low risk, high reward choice? That’s a damn good deal, I’ll take that deal.
Pretty sure this line never convinced anyone of anything. We all want to do "better" but have different definitions of what that constitutes.
> If you don’t think your kids are going to have sex when they’re older, or think you can control it, you are lying to yourself.
I don't think anyone thinks this. Some people do hope and expect their children not to have sex outside of a monogamous marriage. If you give your kid a vaccine that is primarily meant for people who do not do this, you are letting your kid know that you don't really have faith in them.
That sends a strong message that some people do not want to send. As GP said, you're free to raise your kids different, and if you don't place value on reserving sex for marriage, it would make sense that you would do differently.
And there is no issue of having faith in them--you are trying to make a decision you have no right to make. You're a parent, not a slavemaster.
The real world data is that the "good" girls are more likely to get pregnant, more likely to get STDs. And more likely to end up in bad marriages.
And lets add another data point. I used to have a bunch of coworkers from a very conservative background. An unmarried person would not be able to buy a condom in town type conservative. Over the course of many years I became aware of many marriages--and every single marriage was either arranged or due to pregnancy. Every single one. Remember, one of the definitions of insanity is keeping trying the same thing and expecting a different outcome.
~54% of Americans read below a sixth grade reading level, for example. We would trust your average American’s judgement on vaccination need or schedule, especially for their children, why?
Can you share which jurisdictions mandate the HPV vaccine and have no exceptions? I am aware of only a few jurisdictions where it is required, and all such jurisdictions have exceptions.
They also only require it for kids in schools, so any kid who is homeschooled is not subject to the mandate in the first place.
More importantly, the vast, vast majority of jurisdictions have no mandate whatsoever, so any parent can also choose to move to one of those, in addition to the homeschool option.
Regardless, I would imagine that very few jurisdictions, and a relatively small percentage of the world, lives somewhere that mandates these vaccines and has no opt-outs.
Trying to make sex more dangerous to me falls squarely in the realm of child abuse.
The problem here is the do-it-later crowd is going to wait too long. Same thing as we see with sex-ed, knowledge is treated as encouraging when reality says it's exactly the opposite. Honest sex ed leads to later sex and fewer problems.
The kids of these people get a chance to do better when they become adults, and that's all we can hope for: that they make better choices than their parents. Better luck next generation I suppose.
[1] How has marriage in the US changed over time? - https://usafacts.org/articles/state-relationships-marriages-... - February 11th, 2025 ("In 2024, US adults were less likely to be married than at almost any point since the Census Bureau began tracking marital status in 1940. The percentage of households with a married couple peaked 75 years ago: in 1949, it was 78.8%. That percentage has been below 50.0% since 2010, when the rate was 49.7%. In other words, less than half of American households have included a married couple for over a decade.")
[2] Charted: How American Households Have Changed Over Time (1960-2023) - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-american-households-hav... - November 6th, 2024 ("More Americans today are delaying or forgoing marriage altogether, with just 20% of women and 23% of men aged 25 being married—the lowest on record. Projections indicate that by 2050, one-third of Americans aged 45 may remain unmarried.")
[3] Morgan Stanley: Rise of the SHEconomy - https://www.morganstanley.com/ideas/womens-impact-on-the-eco... - September 23rd, 2019 ("Based on Census Bureau historical data and Morgan Stanley forecasts, 45% of prime working age women (ages 25-44) will be single by 2030—the largest share in history—up from 41% in 2018.")
[4] Pew Research: Share of U.S. adults living without a romantic partner has ticked down in recent years - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/08/share-of-... - January 8th, 2025
[5] Pew Research: A record-high share of 40-year-olds in the U.S. have never been married - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/28/a-record-... - June 28th, 2023
[6] Institute for Family Studies: 1-in-3: A Record Share of Young Adults Will Never Marry - https://ifstudies.org/blog/1-in-3-a-record-share-of-young-ad... - February 26th, 2024
[7] Pew Research: 8 facts about divorce in the United States - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/16/8-facts-a... - October 16th, 2025
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xr9r!,f_auto,q_auto:...
from https://www.ggd.world/p/what-do-parents-want which was sourced from https://thezvi.substack.com/p/fertility-roundup-5-causation
Hm, worked great for many people I know. I can imagine it would depend on a number of factors.
But looking at your links, they don't seem especially relevant to the question of whether more people are having sex before marriage than before. They don't even mention the word "sex" in fact. And of course, the relevant question isn't whether people in general are having sex before marriage less, it's whether people raised in families where abstention is valued are upholding that value in their lives.
But congrats on sharing lots of links, which makes it look like evidence is on your side!
As to whether "hope and faith are not effective strategies", it probably makes sense to listen to the experience of people who rely on such hope and faith in their lives, and who have many friends/family who do. People who express outward disdain for such things are probably not the best source of reliable info on the matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23921675/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
https://hilo.hawaii.edu/campuscenter/hohonu/volumes/document...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.12425
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34449007/
(edit: facts and data are not unkind, they just are, and I feel like I have been very polite in my delivery of all facts and data presented; if you are unhappy about the facts and data presented, that is an internal issue to reconcile)
Forgive me for not digging into your links again...fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
You're entitled to your opinion, but when you go around spouting about faith not being a good strategy and then cite a bunch of unrelated articles, you've shown that you are yourself not very intelligent (or kind).
And you're using the wrong yardstick. What you should be looking at is the number of adverse events. STDs. Unintended pregnancies.
I don't need to use the yardstick you propose. There are many confounders in aggregate data, and there are not public polls that capture the demographics and beliefs of my family. It would be a fool's errand to pretend that publicly available data is somehow more important than my own understanding of my kids.
It's funny how you think I shouldn't be able to make decisions for my children, but you seem to think that you know better than me what is right for them.
Would it be acceptable to not belt your kids because you have faith in your driving skills? (And never mind that the one time in my life where a seat belt mattered was when I was essentially PITted by someone who didn't look left. I walked away with nothing but a pulled muscle and because I was belted my foot correctly found the brake pedal while I was spinning around and totally disorientated.)
Or how about the woman from ~30 years back that said that DUI doesn't really matter if your faith is strong enough as god will protect you.
And the parents who have a sexually active 9 year old that they do not realize is sexually active are probably not taking them in for their regular doctor appts and vaccines.
Trying to force abstinence does not work and leads to more problems down the road.
As far as I'm concerned this is child abuse.
Is it big enough to warrant charges? No. Doesn't make it not abusive.
But the fact remains that you are still at risk of many other STDs, so you can still bring home (or have brought home) plenty of other diseases.
The last point, which I knew some people here would dislike, is that the possibility of HPV transmission could, on the margin, discourage some people from being unfaithful. This is because it would be a telltale sign of infidelity, and would cause the spouse to investigate.
Granted, this is only the case where the spouse knew he/she did not have HPV before (mostly people who remained celibate before marriage). If you had many partners before marriage, this advice probably doesn't resonate, but for people who did it makes perfect sense. It acknowledges the risk of infidelity and creates additional accountability by not shielding one's self from a likely telltale sign.
Also, I think these questions are in bad faith.
It is actually hard to get people to change any behavior. The public health benefits should be a primary concern. Avoid vaccination if there is a downside to you personally, but that isn’t what I’m hearing from your comments.
Now maybe that changes if you get divorced and get a new sexual partner.
The FDA itself restricted access to the vaccine on the basis of age. Given that virions aren't even involved in the production process, its safety should have been deemed good enough for the entire population early on.
Same reason you can't get Shingrix under a certain age.
Insurance companies used to only pay for the vaccine at 60. They've reduced it to 50 now because people (like me) were getting it in their 50's. I got it in my left eye and because my immune system is kinda shit, I still have it, though it doesn't give me too much grief now. But it did trash my cornea in that eye, so it's messed my vision up pretty good. And since there's still an active infection (after 8 years), I can't get a cornea transplant.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/two-dose-shin...
(1) a booster won't be invented in next say 20 years and
(2) you will live next 20 years (likely if you are healthy and have a healthy lifestyle)
https://www.boots.com/online/pharmacy-services/shingles-vacc...
> Price per dose:£230
> Full course (2 doses):£460
The original trials were for a specific population - no prior HPV infection, young women. Hence the approval was for that population.
Additional trials have been run expanding the population, but the decision was based on data not “yeah, I’ll bet this is safe/works for this other group”
As people cite these statistics, it would be useful to distinguish exposure to HPV causing foot warts, etc from the much more dangerous variants. I rarely see any statistics do this sort of segmentation.
There are multiple publications. THe easiest way to find is Gemini 3 Pro or ChatGPT Thinking + find for publications (go to link, not just rely on summary).
They differ by population and methodology. For example, here is "Age-specific and genotype-specific carcinogenic human papillomavirus prevalence in a country with a high cervical cancer burden: results of a cross-sectional study in Estonia", 2023, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10255022/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X2...
They say the prevalence of virus is down. They don't say that the cancer rate is down (granted too early to tell), nor do they talk about any adverse events or all cause mortality differences (again, probably too early to tell)
The only thing they can conclude is that the treatment given to stop the virus, stops the virus. But they don't mention any tradeoffs.
Not trying to be an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist, but good science needs to talk about the whole picture.
It is DEFINITELY not too early to tell. Cervical cancer rates in Australia, which adopted the vaccine widely and early have decreased, and it has been widely reported ( https://www.canceraustralia.gov.au/cancer-types/cervical-can... )
In the case of public health, there are a bunch of organizations that keep on top of the research and maintain a more comprehensive view of their perception of the current consensus.
For day to day guidance, individuals should be referring to either those sources, or healthcare professionals.
If people are looking at individual studies like this to make decisions, something has gone very wrong.
The first thing on your list of complaints is something that by your own admission cannot yet be determined. If you’re not trying to be an anti-vaxxer, you’re doing a bad job of it.
- HPV causes genital warts, HPV is permanent, doctors won't test you for HPV unless you demand it, and the tests aren't reliable, which is why they literally won't diagnose you unless you already have genital warts.
- Once you are confirmed HPV positive (again, you won't be confirmed without getting genital warts), you need to inform your partners, as it causes cancer in both men and women (but mostly women).
The HPV strains that cause cancer and the ones that cause genital warts are different. The strains that cause cancer do not cause warts.
So you can very much have HPV without genital warts.
And conversely, while having genital warts tells you you are infected with the low risk strains, it does not guarantee you that it is the only strain you are carrying.
Thus you cannot rely on the presence of genital warts to know if you are or are not infected with the high risk strains, they are completely uncorellated.
The cancer-causing strains cause no symptoms and can only be detected by getting tested for them.
> The cancer-causing strains cause no symptoms and can only be detected by getting tested for them
Cancer-causing strains can still cause the following symptoms: persistent sore throat, lumps, pain when swallowing, earaches (one-sided), swollen lymph nodes in the neck (painless lump), painful/difficult urination or bowel movements, unusual lumps or sores, or unexplained weight loss, in addition to others I have not listed here. However, early cancers often do not present symptoms.
> and can only be detected by getting tested for them
There is no test that covers all strains. You would need to get penile brushing, urethral brushing, semen samples, and anal pap smear. So "getting tested" is not the only solution, and getting regular scans for cancer is the best detection method. Therefore there is more involved than you have indicated, making your own comment as ;really bad and dangerous' as mine.
Perhaps we should trust people to do their own research and ask their doctor, rather than only listen to randos on the internet?
> HPV causes genital warts
False. Not all do. And more importantly, the ones that cause cancer do not!
> Once you are confirmed HPV positive (again, you won't be confirmed without getting genital warts)
Again false. You can be tested without genital warts and be positive to a strand of HPV that simply does not cause wart. You might have had (or heard about) a bad experience with a health professional that refused to test without warts, but the presence or absence of warts has absolutely nothing to do with the strands that matter.
> you need to inform your partners, as it causes cancer in both men and women (but mostly women).
False again. Since you were specifically talking about the strands of HPV causing warts, then it does not cause cancer. You can still inform them if you care about no propagating warts, but the fact that you have wart-strand HPV does not make you more at risk of getting/causing cancer than someone with no symptoms whatsoever.
Your comment clearly says that someone with cancer-causing HPV will have warts, thus someone reading this might feel confident they are not carrying a cancer-causing strand since they do not have warts, which is dangerous because again, it is 100% false. It might also needlessly worry someone that recently noticed genital warts on themselves into thinking they might have gotten/propagated a dangerous disease, while the wart causing strand are in fact harmless and are just unpleasant aesthetically.
So tl;dr, you should get vaccinated if you can, and if you want to be sure you do not have a cancer causing strand, you need to get tested for it, that's the only way. Warts or no warts is completly unrelated.
> Perhaps we should trust people to do their own research and ask their doctor, rather than only listen to randos on the internet?
On that we agree!
1) not every strain of HPV causes cancer (iirc, the bad ones are rare).
2) many people (in fact, most people) who are active in the world have been infected with at least one strain of HPV.
3) it’s common to have asymptomatic HPV infections. you probably have one now.
one more:
4) the vaccines likely have little effect on anything unless you were vaccinated as a child (and are a biological woman).
Overall, it’s a situation where you’re asking that sexual partners “disclose” something that the partner probably already has, if they bothered to be tested for it to begin with. Moreover, nobody does these tests (in men, at least), because there’s no point to doing them, other than creating anxiety.
I will leave the nuances of bioethics to other people, but it’s not as clear a situation as you’re making it out to be.
One final thing: these infections aren’t “permanent”. They generally clear naturally in a few years.
This guidance is changing. Vaccinating men protects women. Also just because you were infected with one strain, that doesn't mean you can't contract another, possibly oncogenic one. Get vaccinated, it protects against the most common cancer-causing strains. I did, why would I want to unknowingly give someone cancer?
> This guidance is changing. Vaccinating men protects women.
Yeah, it was fucking like pulling teeth getting my HPV vaccine as an adult male. "It's for teenage girls" comments from multiple health care professionals.
I only took the first fucking dose in the regime, and none of my health care providers now offer low cost or covered options. I had to spend Covid money when I had it. I still need the rest of the regime.
Thank you thread for the reminder.
There seems to be a very motivated contingency who want to spin a story that male vaccination for HPV has benefits for women. The problems with this story are:
1) Efficacy of the current vaccines for women are incredibly high. Vaccinating young women, alone, is basically enough. Whatever benefits you're imagining must therefore be marginal.
2) Efficacy of current vaccines for men are (surprisingly) low [1], so it’s hard to claim secondary benefits for other people without substantial additional evidence.
It’s perfectly OK to acknowledge that the HPV vaccine is an overall good, should be on the schedule for young women, and yet does not need to be administered to men. Giving it to men (particularly older men) is not supported by data at this time, which is why your doctors don’t make it easy for you to get it.
[1] Again, refer to https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8706722/
See table 4. In a naive population of men, the efficacy against DNA detection of HPV runs around 50%, and in men who may or may not have the virus, the number is lower. Efficacy against persistent infection is similar. Compare to tables 1-3 for women, where efficacy nears 100% in some populations.
1. They start with a cautious roll out to the highest lifetime risk population (teenage girls in this case)
2. They may be limited by vaccine stocks as it does take time to build up product. There's an entire world to vaccinate, billions of doses needed
3. They need time to prove that it will be useful to give to other populations - in this case, adults
There's no conspiracy here, you had to push to get it because you were going against the existing recommendations, which were reasonable. Not because of your gender.
Those recommendations have likely changed recently because when I went in for shots last month (male, 40s) they immediately recommended that me and my partner both get it.
On Permanence: 10-20% of HPV infections either don't go away, or go dormant and recur throughout your lifetime. These strains are the ones likely to cause cancer. Low-risk ones cause genital warts that continue causing warts throughout your lifetime. High-risk ones may cause cancer.
The vaccine is available up until 45 years old. Worst case it does nothing, best case it prevents genital warts and cancer.
You can make up “just so” stories to justify anything.
The point is, the story you’re telling isn’t likely to occur if the woman is vaccinated.
The vaccine is incredibly effective in young women, and only borderline effective if administered in older men and women who have never been infected. Long-term efficacy in young men is less certain than for young women.
> Low-risk ones cause genital warts that continue causing warts throughout your lifetime.
Again, no. Most infections clear on their own. You are correct that rarely some infections are persistent or dormant, and that these sometimes lead to cancer. But these are the minority.
I wish more people would get vaccinated.
Gardasil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardasil
https://www.google.com/search?q=gardasil+shot+cost
https://www.goodrx.com/gardasil-9/how-much-is-gardasil-witho... :
> When you have your first shot is the main factor that determines whether you will need 2 doses or 3 doses
> Without insurance, the average price of 1 dose of Gardasil is $368.82. But you could pay as little as $169.50 with a GoodRx coupon at certain pharmacies
A prescription is only required for insurance reimbursement fwiu
Many insurances do. I asked if the pharmacist could check last time I was at CVS, and it did. I'm turning 46 before I can sneak in the 3rd dose, but 2 doses seems to be all that's needed for most of the benefit.
Deregulating medical systems regarding patient choice and access to drugs is good, but you'll eventually get some bootlicker claiming that "we can't do that because SOMEONE WITH A VIRUS MIGHT USE AN ANTIBIOTIC INCORRECTLY" while ignoring the mass consumption of antibiotics by farm animals as a vector for super bugs.
Also, are farms actually the major vector for antibiotic resistance in the human population? I was under the impression that the majority of antibiotic resistant infections occur in places like hospitals rather than among farm workers, which would seem to indicate farm animals are not the main problem (I 100% support banning the practice anyway).
The dangerous thing about antibiotic immunity is that it can transfer also between bacteria species.
Why is this different? Why is pestering a doctor to give me a medicine they don't recommend a good idea?
Doctors/medical associations don't agree with each other on much, even at the very highest levels. For example, the USA and EU have totally different recommendations related to digital rectal exams for aging men. One believes that finding cancer in old men is important, the other claims it's bad because most of those cancers are benign and sticking a finger up an old mans butt often causes its own complications.
Doctors are not all knowing, infallible oracles. They are human beings you can have a conversation with about your health. If you think something makes sense for you, you can run it past them. No one is suggesting randomly asking doctors to prescribe random shit.
Kind of hurts my pride, but seeing as I'm older than 40, and my wife and I are pretty freaking boring, the vaccine is better spent on someone with more opportunities ahead of them.
I really hate these vaccine specific awareness campaigns. Not only do they hurt my vanity, but I know too many people who are anti-vaxers, or into weird fake medicines.
I just go with what my doctor says. If social media says something different, social media is wrong.
But really, don’t get your vaccine schedule from Hacker News.
The activists on these threads should probably be pushing folks to get their kids vaccinated.
Even when I live in Europe, which I do occasionally, I’m told to follow the vaccine schedule of my home country.
My kids have all received all recommended vaccines, including the one discussed. So I’m not in any way opposed.
It’s just not appropriate to go around vaccines not recommended.
1) if you've ever been exposed to HPV already, then the vaccine is useless
2) there is no test to determine if a male has been exposed, although there is one for females
so they just push the ages up by probability, over time. As the probability of a man being with an older and therefore unvaccinated woman decreases - since with women is the most probable - the age can rise
This is patently incorrect. The vaccine protects against 9 variants. Having been exposed to all 9 before vaccination sounds like really bad luck.
> 2) there is no test to determine if a male has been exposed, although there is one for females
The female HPV tests, as I understand, only test for the presence of HPV in the cervix. It can be present in many other areas. No one is testing women for the presence of HPV on their hands or in their throats.
Most places now offer HPV vaccines to young boys as well. People over 40 more or less missed the boat, but they can still get vaccinated. How useful it is depends entirely on their personal circumstances and risk profiles.
It is incorrect. I had it tested multiple times. It is done less routinely, usually under assumption that since it is women who are mostly at risk, why bother testing men. Which is horrible mindset in anything related to epidemiology.
See:
- https://www.droracle.ai/articles/607248/what-methods-are-use...
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12256477/
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2024.2...
> 1) if you've ever been exposed to HPV already, then the vaccine is useless
Also no. See other comments.
No. The general reason that people don't do the test for men is that DNA testing is extremely sensitive, and produces a lot of false positives for a virus that is widespread.
It's also not actionable. You can't treat an asymptomatic infection, and a positive leads to the same outcome they would give anyway: use physical barriers and abstinence.
(Edit: hilariously, your first link says exactly what I just wrote, at the very top of the page. Did you read it?)
Sure, test from penis has lower specificity and sensitivity that for cervix, but it is not binary "works or not" (as side note, just measuring from urethra is rarely enough [1]). Life is probability, and it is a huge fallacy to believe that things work 100% or 0%, nothing in between (rarely the case in medicine).
Results are actionable on many ways. Most important, screening for female partners, informed risk for partners or your on safety for ones partners (condoms BTW reduce infection rates, but do not fully protect, as HPV can be on other parts of skin).
[1]
> The overall prevalence of HPV was 65.4%. HPV detection was highest at the penile shaft (49.9% for the full cohort and 47.9% for the subcohort of men with complete sampling), followed by the glans penis/coronal sulcus (35.8% and 32.8%) and scrotum (34.2% and 32.8%). Detection was lowest in urethra (10.1% and 10.2%) and semen (5.3% and 4.8%) samples. Exclusion of urethra, semen, and either perianal, scrotal, or anal samples resulted in a <5% reduction in prevalence.
You keep saying things in these sub threads that are factually incorrect in some important way that hides nuance, or otherwise seems calculated to provoke outrage. This was another example, which I why I replied here.
and even if it is reliable, its utility is limited
all leads to focusing solely on probability of exposure(s)
I think the most insightful thing is that there are 9 HPV variants some of which someone wouldn't have exposure to so its worthwhile to get the vaccine anyway
but other than that, the situation is the same. for men's age the utility of the vaccine is based on probability alone, as its a waste of resources to even attempt checking for prior/current exposure
Here is what I know (which may be limited, I’m not a biologist) and also what I’m assuming:
1) The body apparently doesn’t eliminate the virus on its own when it picks up the virus unvaccinated. I’m assuming that this is because it isn’t registered by the immune system as being harmful, for whatever reason.
2) The attenuated virus in the vaccine would not produce an immune response without the adjuvant, because even viruses that are registered as harmful are not reliably registered as harmful when attenuated. This is where the adjuvant packaged with the attenuated virus comes in - it is registered by the body as harmful, and in its confusion the immune system also adds the virus to the registry.
So, naively, if the immune system previously didn’t register the natural infection as harmful, and if it does register the virus in the vaccine as harmful, why doesn’t the registry entry for the vaccine also get applied to the natural infection, the same way as it does for a person who wasn’t previously infected?
Is there some kind of specificity hierarchy, along with a “not harmful” registry alongside the “harmful” registry, such that the natural infection continues to get its previous classification of “not harmful” because the “not harmful” registry entry is more specific than the “harmful” registry entry? That’s the only explanation I can (naively) think of.
And if that’s the case, could we first wipe out the registry by infecting the person with measles, and then give them the HPV vaccine? Just kidding about this part!
Like for viruses that have a vaccine, normally you wouldn’t vaccinate someone who had the virus already because the vaccine would be redundant - they already have natural immunity.
But in the case of HPV, apparently they don’t have effective natural immunity, the immunity naturally acquired is worse than the vaccine one. So why can’t the vaccine one take effect after the absent (or at least ineffective one) natural one isn’t (or is slightly) in place? That’s what I don’t understand. It seems like the natural immunity prevents the vaccine induced immunity from developing, but the natural immunity in this case doesn’t seem to work, while the vaccine induced immunity does work. Why…?
However, the vaccination is expensive (~1k) and it is difficult to find doctors who will do non-recommended vaccinations for self-payers.
YCMV
Depends entirely on where you are and what your healthcare situation is. Mine cost me ~100eur.
I am currently getting the HPV series and I only had to pay my copay for the first appointment have nothing for the second one (I am assuming it will be the same for the third)
I heard 1 shots already conveys a lot of protection so I'm wondering whether to take the third. I'm a bit late with it too
Or you (and your future partner) practice abstinence until you're ready to commit to a lifelong monogamous relationship.
The benefits may be statistically lower, since you may have been infected by some of the variants already, older males may have fewer sexual partners in the future, and cancer takes a while to develop.
In the USA, it is recommended by default for adults up to 26 and kinda for 27-45.
(And dengue fever has the nasty property of making subsequent infections worse--and the vaccine does the same thing. Thus you get the really weird risk balance of only vaccinating those who have already had it. Also, Covid is prone to causing myocarditis--and the vaccine carries a small risk of doing the same thing. AFIAK no vaccine caused case is serious, though.)
The study you've quoted here is not definitive evidence of the claim you're making, and that claim is...let's just say that it's controversial. Conventional wisdom is that you're unlikely to benefit from HPV vaccination unless you have not already seroconverted for at least one of the 9 strains (6, 11, 16, 18, 31, 33, 45, 52, 58) in the current vaccine.
There's not much hard evidence to suggest that vaccination for HPV has strong ability to protect you from a strain after you've already been infected with that strain [1], as the best available data shows a substantial decline in efficacy for women over age 26 and for women of any age who had prior documented infection [2]. This study is small, unrandomized, and the measured primary outcome (anti-HPV IgG) doesn't really tell you anything about relative effectiveness at clearing an infection. The only real evidence they advance for this claim is:
> Persistent HPV infection after vaccination was significantly less frequent in the nine-valent vaccinated group (23.5%) compared to the control group (88.9%; p < 0.001).
...but again, this is a small, unrandomized trial. We don't know how these 60 people differ from the typical HPV-positive case. You can't rely on this kind of observational data to claim causality.
Vaccination is great, but let's not exaggerate or spread inaccurate claims in a fit of pro-vaccine exuberance. The HPV vaccine has age range recommendations [3] for a reason.
[1] For the somewhat obvious reason that your immune system has already seen the virus.
[2] See tables 2 and 3 here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8706722/
It's also worth calling out table 4, which shows the (IMO bad) efficacy data for biological men, which is why I only talk about women, above, and why anyone who recommends vaccination without mentioning this factor is not being entirely forthright. Few people are rushing to give older men the HPV vaccine because it's not really supported by data!
[3] I believe the current guideline is under age 45 in the USA.
But that's the general response to any question of this form. Medical treatments carry risk, however small. There is no free lunch.
> best case you are 1-5% likely to spread a bad strain dangerous to yourself or to your partners, right ?
I don't know where you're getting this number. I don't think anyone knows the actual answer to this question.
For whatever reason the vaccine just doesn’t seem to work as well when administered to adults, even if they’re naive to the viruses.
Weaknesses / Counters:
1) Surrogate endpoint only — HPV PCR positivity is not a clinical outcome; no CIN2/3, no cancer, no mortality measured
2) Correlation ≠ causation — HPV-cancer link is epidemiological association; Koch's postulates not fulfilled in traditional sense; detecting DNA doesn't prove pathogenic activity
3) PCR detection ≠ disease — Transient HPV infections are common and clear spontaneously; most HPV-positive women never develop lesions or cancer
4) Type replacement signal ignored — 66% higher incidence of non-vaccine HR types in vaccinated group is dismissed rather than investigated as potential clinical concern
5) No long-term clinical follow-up — Cervical cancer takes 15-30 years to develop; this 7-year study cannot assess actual cancer prevention
6) Confounding in vaxxed vs unvaxxed comparison — Unvaccinated group is small (n=859), likely differs in health behaviors, screening adherence, socioeconomic factors
7) Circular reasoning — Vaccine "works" because it reduces detection of the types it targets; says nothing about whether those types were actually causing disease in this population
8) Assumes HPV16/18 reduction = cancer reduction — Untested assumption; clinical benefit must be demonstrated, not inferred from PCR
9) High baseline HR-HPV in vaccinated group unexplained — 32% prevalence of other HR types suggests substantial ongoing oncogenic exposure despite vaccination
10) Genome validity unestablished — HPV reference genomes are in-silico constructs assembled computationally; never validated by sequencing purified, isolated viral particles; PCR/sequencing performed on mixed clinical samples where true origin of amplified fragments is indeterminate
But then, don't blame me for your partner being a slut.
I'd invite you to look up the prevalence of STDs during the most puritanical eras and places, maybe you'd change that stupid take.
Put another way: a "slut" practicing safe sex today will have fewer chances to contract an STD than a regular married woman in Victorian times.
> stupid man without any arguments
Seriously? Your argument is "damn those slut whores" and you're pretending to have an intellectual high ground...? Have a good weekend.
No. Now calm down and try to understand what I wrote. It's not that hard.
> There's a whole range of behaviors and HPV risk profiles between celibate and being a slut.
A quick find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Deaths_from_throat_ca...
Uh, monogamy of both partners is also an option, not just celibacy. Not common in these times, I know, but you don't have to completely abstain from sex to be safe.
In the 1960s, more than 900 people were diagnosed with cervical cancer each year, corresponding to more than 40 cases per 100,000 Danes.
Today, that number is below 10 per 100,000 nationwide – and among women aged 20 to 29, only 3 out of 100,000 are affected. This is below the WHO’s threshold for elimination of the disease.
While we have some anivaxxers here in DK, most people (90%, I believe) are sane and follow the recommendations.
The vaccinations start while the children are small and continue while they grow up .. the last one is when they are 12.5 years old.
The notifications are delivered in eboks or by mail if you don't want to use eboks. Everything from the state is delivered like this. There is nothing special about how the information is delivered. The SMS/e-mail notifications are just about hwo sent you something and not about what it is. At least for me.
I don't see how the use of eboks makes this work better. It would work just as well without eboks. People listen to doctors and the MAGA like shitheads we do have don't have a lot of influence.
What makes it work is the public registers.
e-boks is like gmail (and others) in that it keeps your old mail. So you can easily find old stuff, a great improvement on paper mail.
I don't even check my physical mailbox once a week.
Denmark is one of the very most digital countries. Physical mail is very much on the way out. We no longer has mailboxes to send mail, you have to go to a shop to send letters, which now cost at last $6 per letter due to the low amount of mail sent.
It is only a matter of less than 10 years before letters will be fully gone.
Which is bad, we definitely should have them. Referral data appears to be managed through Healthlink, which may just be a privatised not always used medical record system.
HealthLink is a messaging system and stores no EHRs at all. eHealth is the National EHR programme aiming to roll out EHRs by 2030 nationwide.
It will be a no-opt-out centralised EHR and combined social care record.
This is bad (from my perspective, as someone who's moved a lot and thus has medical records scattered all over).
> It will be a no-opt-out centralised EHR and combined social care record.
This is probably the right approach, even though I'm sceptical that it will be delivered effectively.
If you want full privacy you’d get no notifications and would have to go and ask for various things which you many not know exist.
We all need something like ranked/list voting and incorporate invalid votes into the result so urgently.
Citation needed.
You can look at any Gallup or Pew poll or whatever sources you prefer and you will likely see that Americans have been steadily losing trust in their government. It has been in steady decline since the post-war era with some notable brief increases, but they don’t last.
>citation needed
I disagree as it is incredibly easy information to track down. But here you go anyway:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/12/04/public-trust...
I’ll ask you this: Do you think Donald Trump is a socially adjusted, empathetic person? A lot of people like him currently because he is a bully.
Edit: I think Nixon is another person whose character deserves scrutiny. His decisions shattered a lot of people‘s perception of the US government.
https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1993654135917257214/pho...
One would have to be crazy in order to extend exactly the same trust towards a random Danish Dane vs. a random Somali Dane.
Not every negative statement about non-white people is rooted in racism, and the ugly, fanatical attitude "everyone who has a negative observation about any sort of immigrants must be racist, stupid and evil" is what upended the political spectrum and brought the far right to power in many places.
First answer and you directly go to 'racism', that's a rather poor effort. Put some more thought into your replies if you want to be taken seriously.
That 'racism' word has lost its meaning due to severe overuse, find another argument. As to finding 'data', that is easy enough if you ask people around you. I live in Sweden and I hear this every day, everywhere, both in the countryside where I live as well as in the more urbanised areas on the west coast where I work and where my daughter goes to school.
If you want to get a bit closer to the actual truth than your knee-jerk 'racism' accusation you should look into the clash of cultures - not races - which lies at the bottom of these problems. Go and speak to people from low-trust societies as well as those from high-trust societies and ask them where they put their trust, how they think about their neighbours - not just the ones in the house next door but also those in other areas.
The government’s appalling failure wrt housing seems like a pretty valid reason for young people to distrust institutions tbh.
Then there are problems like the childcare benefits scandal ('toeslagenaffaire') - again partly related to migration by way of Bulgarian migrant fraud [4] - where the tax department made erroneous claims about benefit fraud without every really acknowledging they were wrong. I have some experience with the Dutch tax authorities making clear mistakes without accepting responsibility, instead they come up with mysterious restitutions which somehow exactly match the erroneously claimed taxes due.
The restrictive and SARS2 unpleasantness hit trust in public institutions hard which caused the universities of Rotterdam and Leiden to publish a report calling the Netherlands a new low-trust society ('de laag-vertrouwensamenleving', [6]). This trend has not reversed, especially among those with 'higher educational levels' [7] who used to have a higher trust in governmental institutions but now slid down to resemble the trust levels seen among those with 'lower educational levels' - this could simply be related to the fact that the left-wing parties favoured by those with 'higher education' did not participate in the government at that time.
I grew up in the Netherlands and lived there until about 25 years ago. I have seen this slide in trust with my own eyes, from the country where I could open the front door by pulling the string which dangled through the letter slot when I cycled home from school at 6 years old to the Fort-Knox-with-cameras now required, from the police officer on his bike greeting the people on his beat to "romeo's" (undercover arrest teams) being accused of inciting riots [8], from nearly the entire village coming out to welcome Sinterklaas (St. Nicholas who brings presents to children at the 5th of December) to those events being cancelled due to the fear of violence and protests, etcetera.
[1] https://www.volkshuisvestingnederland.nl/onderwerpen/huren-e...
[2] https://www.volkskrant.nl/binnenland/meer-sociale-huurwoning...
[3] https://iplo.nl/regelgeving/regels-voor-activiteiten/technis...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...
[6] https://www.impactcorona.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Def_-...
[7] https://www.scp.nl/actueel/nieuws/2025/03/04/onder-nederland...
If it helps, my mail slot still has a string…
This was in Amstelveen, to the south of Amsterdam. Where do you live?
So I get the theory of this thing. But has anyone actually tried this? Finally I got OneMedical to prescribe it for me for some $1.2k at which point I decided I’ll just get it abroad during some planned travel.
I decided years ago I’d do this because I was going to have girls and I wanted to minimize my daughters’ risk of cancer.
Over a decade ago I tried getting the HPV vaccine in my early 20s, but the doctor told me it wasn't recommended for men and that insurance won't cover it. I was young and didn't have the money to pay out of pocket.
I went to Planned Parenthood and got the vaccine last year. At some point they changed the recommendation to men under 45 now and I got all 3 shots free.
Honestly, though I'm glad to have finally got the vaccine it's been a pretty frustrating experience.
For more context, I have Anthem Blue Cross health insurance. The cost might depend on your insurance.
I don't understand: how would your daughters be more/less likely to get cancer based on whether you were vaccinated? There's obviously the (hopefully extremely) roundabout way in which there is a direct path of sexual partners leading from you to your future daughters, but is there something else I'm missing?
And if you don't have it by age 35 (and married, per your comment below), how likely are you to even get it at this point? Are you thinking you could hypothetically pass it to them by kissing your babies on the mouth, after contracting it in the future?
I would think that kissing a baby on the lips would be the best chance, and if that were the case it'd be super obvious because there'd be a bunch of toddlers with HPV, which would cause alarm.
If you want to read more: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/IVF
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2759438/
Want to boost the economy massively at next to no cost? HPV vaccinations are incredible.
My reading of the following is that the cost of each additional quality adjusted life year would be over $100,000, rather than that each vaccination prompts $100k in economic value
> Including preadolescent boys in a routine vaccination programme for preadolescent girls resulted in higher costs and benefits and generally had cost effectiveness ratios that exceeded $100 000 per QALY across a range of HPV related outcomes, scenarios for cervical cancer screening, and assumptions of vaccine efficacy and duration
Hmm. Compared to what measurement? Most viruses are actually not oncogenic.
From cancer causes, oncogenic viruses are thought to be responsible for about 12% of human cancers worldwide:
https://www.mdpi.com/2079-7737/14/7/797
From what I remember, most viruses are not oncogenic in nature, so I am unsure whether the statement made is correct.
E.g. EBV is strongly associated with several lymphomas.
There are other significant clinical associations for HPV, HBV, HCV, HTLV-1, HHV-8, and many others.
I'm a proponent of EHRs, but the key value is at patient-level, not population level where other approaches perform equally well.
"Since HPV vaccination was implemented in the Danish childhood vaccination programme in 2009, we have received 2,320 reports of suspected adverse reactions from HPV vaccines up to and including 2016. 1,023 of the reported adverse reactions have been categorised as serious. In the same period, 1,724,916 vaccine doses were sold. The reports related to HPV vaccination that we have classified as serious include reports of the condition Postural Orthostatic Tachycardi Syndrome (POTS), fainting, neurological symptoms and a number of diffuse symptoms, such as long-term headache, fatigue and stomach ache."
"The risk of cervical changes at an early stage was reduced by 73% among women born in 1993 and 1994, who had been vaccinated with the HPV vaccine compared with those who had not been vaccinated."
"The Danish Health Authority recommends that all girls are vaccinated against HPV at the age of 12. The Danish Health Authori- ty still estimates that the benefits of vaccination by far outweigh any possible adverse reactions from the vaccine."
https://laegemiddelstyrelsen.dk/en/sideeffects/side-effects-...
Those are basic bits of knowledge that apply to most vaccinations.
The problem is that the quacks diminish the positive effects, exaggerate the negatives and engage in a campaign of fear mongering that costs some people (and in some cases lots of people, see COVID) their lives. They are not only clueless, they are malicious.
From Gwyneth Paltrow, JFK Jr, all the way to Donald Trump and a whole raft of others the damage is immense. I have a close family member who now is fully convinced of the healing power of crystals and there isn't a thing you can do to reason with people that have fallen into a trap like that.
My medical insurance will pay for several literally fake/quack treatments because of this crap. If you want to wage war against Quackery I better see you going after "big Chiropractor" first.
This has nothing to do with vaccines. There is a very good reason that misinformation is, and should remain legal. This simply allows the person or group who gets to define what is or is not misinformation to arbitrarily imprison anyone doing publishing they don’t like.
You really need to think through the implications and consequences of censorship laws before advocating for them.
Maybe I did?
It is possible that we just disagree on this. Clearly misinformation about medical stuff is so damaging that many places have found it necessary to have laws on the books. I'm just elevating this from a misdemeanor to an actual crime based on the outcomes.
That scientific consensus you are alluding to is not what you claim it was.
Finally, we're talking about celebrities without any qualification whatsoever spreading utter nonsense causing real harm, you can look at that in isolation and compare it to you making that statement out of an abundance of caution regarding something where there is no downside. The two simply are not equivalent. Free speech absolutists always pull the same trick, aiming to refuse an obvious wrong in order to defend their bastion while forgetting that there isn't a black-or-white at all, you can have some reasonable limits on what people can and can not do and in the age of 'influencers' with global reach the danger is much more prevalent than it used to be.
Free speech is a great good, but it is not the greatest good.
The dangers of medical misinformation, regardless of scale, do not negate the fact that criminalizing _what the state calls_ misinformation allows the state to arbitrarily imprison people publishing things, because it demands that the state be the arbiter of truth, something that does not have an objective legal method of determination. If it somehow did, promoting religion would of course be illegal as it is clear misinformation.
Also, consider for a moment the insane amount of harm the delusion that is religious belief has wrought. Should we be outlawing that, too? The suggestion that prayer is an effective treatment for ailments is a claim they have been making for millennia. Shall we somehow square your anti-misinformation law with religious freedom?
People should always be free to be wrong, because we often don’t know what is right until many decades or centuries or millennia later.
Also, you have already admitted there is a Ministry of Truth equivalent, as such a thing is necessary to prosecute people for telling lies.
Dishonest practices and claims to have special knowledge and skill in some field, typically medicine.
The legal definition does not require one to first be a licensed doctor.
And malpractice is definitely not covered by freedom of speech.
Not everybody lives in the USA.
Your comparison of Sweden vs Austria has a problem: Covid did more damage in warmer climates. Thus this proves nothing about policy. Look to others more similar--Sweden didn't fare well.
80-90% of adults gets some form of HPV during lifetime. Often several strains. Each have different risks of cancer. Even if you’re married - if you or your partner experience a severely stressful period- it might reactivate. Most people’s immune systems clears HPV, and makes it dormant. (Mine likely doesn’t see HPV as a threat. Long term (10y+?) exposure to active HPV cause cancer.
If you can, at least do your very best to avoid the cancer nightmare. Take the vaccine. Worst case it protects you from being a vector. It’s an imperfect insurance from 3-4 months in/out of hospitals, scans, blood work, from chronic dry mouth,all food tasting very bad, issues with energy, possible bone death (that you suddenly have to monitor every day for the test. Oh, and any alcohol or smoking after having had this increases risk of recurrence by 30-50%
So I'm fine with it being flagged and decline to vouch for it.
For the HPV section specifically, there were at least two major omissions.
First, in his table showing autoimmune adverse effects, he has chosen to crop out the next column in the table containing the control conditions - which show very similar rates of adverse effects to the vaccine condition.
Secondly, when discussing negative efficacy in the case of existing persistent infection, he only quotes the data from one of three studies that the linked report covers. The linked report indeed covers the negative efficacy in study 013 as an area of concern. However, study 015 (which had roughly twice the number of total participants as study 013) showed no real evidence of negative efficacy. When all 3 studies are pooled together, the point estimate still says negative efficacy, (at ~-12%), however the error bars are quite wide.
Why this is tragic, is because these two omissions do actually point to failures in public communication about the vaccine. For example, the control condition in the Merck trials were a mix of saline injections (this is the traditional placebo), as well as injections with just the adjuvant (AAHS). This is less standard, and raises legitimate questions about why Merck used an adjuvant as the control, instead of just saline. There a cynical/conspiratorial angle to this question, which I think would be directionally correct.
The second omission is because I think there is a reasonable question of "are there extra risks associated with getting the HPV vaccine while having an active persistence infection", even when taking into account the different and larger study populations within the original trial data. Once again, I think the idea that both companies and public health agencies don't want to deal with a vaccine that requires testing before hand is true. I also believe that on a population level, even if there was a modest increase in risk in that specific subgroup, it makes sense to implement broad vaccination campaigns.
That said, I think the unwillingness of public health agencies to engage with this tricky area of communication and education creates these types of opening for anti-vaccine messaging. If you want a sense of "conspiracy" - here's a random review study - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8706722/
Notice that when reporting results, the groupings for HPV status at enrollment time are "naive" and "irrespective" - the "test positive" grouping isn't broken out.
EDIT: The article that we're discussing is https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-perils-of-vaccinating...
In this house we believe Love is love Black Lives Matter Science is real Feminism is for everyone No human is illegal Kindness is everything
Signaling your alignment to the public-facing opinions of your social betters is the modern ersatz religion for atheists. The television is the temple, the pundits the priests. Apostates and heretics are not welcome here. Now, my child, you would not want your words to inadvertently cause the faithful to stray. Would you? Just think of what the late night comedians would say if they could hear you cast doubt on their sponsor Pfizer? Perhaps you would rather join our hate session on the pagans in flyover country?
HPV vaccination leads to massive reduction in nasopharyngeal, penile and rectal cancer in men.
The focus of messaging around HPV vaccination on ovarian cancer, female fertility and the age limitations for recommendations / free vaccination in some places are nothing short of a massive public health failure and almost scandal.
Just truthfully tell the boys their dicks might fall off and see how all of them quicklky flock to the vaccine.
Every male above the age of 26 is locked out of the vaccine unless you pay out of pocket, which will be €300-€500 (or even higher).
It's led to this really weird situation, where HPV vaccination for men is now recommended up to 40s but only covered up to 26yr old, and that recommendation upgrade happened relatively recently. Which means there's a whole generation of men who are told they should get the vaccine, who would have had covered access to the vaccine in the past, but are now expected to go out of pocket.
For younger people it's three shots (second after two months, third after 6 months of the first one), now for older (over 30s or 40s, I can't remember exactly) it's recommended to get two shots (second after six months).
Moral crusades have zero place in public health and are actively harmful.
Those who marry younger are more likely to divorce. Or lead unhappy lives because they don't divorce to save face, but the marriage is dead.
HPV spreads through oral sex as well by the way.
It is a simple fact that unprotected sex with large numbers of people is very risky. We should have learnt that lesson in the eighties.
The biggest barrier to disease transmission reduction, at least here in the US, is uncritical abstinence promoters like yourself. It works, at best, for a small fraction of the population, and leaves the rest woefully unprepared for the biological realities. The best solution to STDs is education. Which, yes, should emphasize that not having sex is an option, but cannot stop there.
Simple data point, though: my wife is from China, grew up in a culture where divorce is basically unheard of. At first she was horrified at what she saw here--but over time she's come to see the marriages of her culture weren't any more successful. It just they turned into unhappy people staying together for reasons of face. Just about everyone she was close enough to to know about their marriage was no longer having sex.
People don't want to hear this obviously. But it is a fact STI transmission has skyrocketed since the so called sexual revolution of the late sixties. Within fifteen years, we has an AIDS epidemic.
It’s the opposite of a fact. Gonorrhoea rates as an example rose significantly in the 1960s, but are now lower than in the 1940s and 1950s. This is thanks to good public health measures.
Start by making sure you’re accurately informed.
The solution to covid/flu is wearing well-fitting masks and vaccines rather than never getting out.
The solution to STIs is good protection with vaccines, condoms and tests.
Religion can stay out of that.
Without the gays it might have gone a long time as a blood vector without being identified. When it was a "gay" disease it was busy killing old people who got transfusions but were never identified as having AIDS.
Statistically nobody even knows a guy who knows a guy who's dick fell off. Serious HPV problems for men are not even common enough to be viable urban legend. You have less to back up your DARE messaging than DARE did. It's just not gonna work. The nanosecond someone who took your bait shows up to be interviewed by some Youtube talking head about side effects the already severely damaged (compared to, IDK a decade ago) credibility of the medical establishment will go up in flames.
You need to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth and let people make their own decisions. People don't "trust the experts" anymore at the scale you need for stuff like vaccination campaigns so you have to operate based on that reality.
If nobody knows a guy who knows a guy who had penile cancer, that's probably because people are very bad about talking about genital health. I'm sure some of the men in my life have issues with erectile dysfunction, enlarged prostates, hemmorrhoids, etc. But no one is talking about those issues.
Got a source?
So maybe 70% of throat cancer victims have HPV, and like 70% smoked - and if those were independent facts you'd expect that about 49% both smoked and had HPV, but it's actually more than half 'cos it turns out that if you have HPV then smoking is even worse. So that's nice.
[0] https://www.asha.org/practice-portal/clinical-topics/head-an...
I didn't say it wasn't a significant source of cancer. I said that nobody knows a guy who knows a guy who's dick fell off or some other extreme outcome. Without enough of that to back up your messaging it just won't work. You need to be honest with people, not try and scare them like you're trying to keep school kids from smoking weed in 1990.
The public messaging you're trying to engage in could perhaps have skated by in a less critical time but in the current environment it will be counterproductive.
I don't want my kid or my grandkid to get measles or some other "of immediate consequence" disease because they go to school with a bunch of unvaccinated kids because you people sullied the reputation of public health via "just push the truth a little, it'll make them take the vaccine" type endeavors.
> Among the 859 unvaccinated women, HPV16/18 prevalence was 6%, 5%, and 6%
and
> However, about one-third of women still had HPV infection with non-vaccine high-risk HPV types, and new infections with these types were more frequent in vaccinated than in unvaccinated women.
so… real summary is “hpv vaccination correlates with lower infection for vaccine specific HPV strain, but does not impact / potentially worsens overall high-risk HPV infections”
so what exactly is solved here, supposedly?
not to mention, the study does not compare helth outcomes, which is the only meaningful measure.
There's a lot in the paper to summarize, but I think it makes a reasonable argument that HPV16/18 are especially high risk, and that "simple" replacement of the 5% HPV16/18 with another 5% of any of the other HR HPV strains would be beneficial. The linked paper suggests up to 74% (depending on your assumptions) reduction in cancer with "simple replacement".
I wonder if we'll those non-vaccine strains will eventually become the most prevalent.
Hope we'll develop vaccines against those too.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/hpv/hcp/recommendations.htm...
Also on my soapbox it's an absolute absurdity that we still do not have any HPV test for men.
Is the idea that you're married and have a single partner and the risk factor has dropped below a certain percentage of the population where there's little reason to recommend getting it if the likelihood is that you've already acquired HPV in your lifetime thus far?
Every other vaccination appears to be straightforward, besides HPV, and I don't know why. I've also never heard a clear answer from a physician.
Is it just that our vaccination schedules are out of date in the United States? This seems to be the most likely culprit to me.
The justification for 27-45 year olds heavily references a meeting. Based on time, author and title, I think either https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/78082/cdc_78082_DS1.pdf or https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10395540/ should be a fair summary of the meeting (I hope...).
I don't really have time to read it all, but the basic idea is as you said - the cost-benefit ratio is off. Basically expanding from something like the current case, to vaccinating up to 45 year old will avert an extra 21k cases of cancer (compared to the base case of 1.4 million) - so about an extra 1.5% cases averted, while the direct vaccination costs are estimated to increase from 44 billion to 57 billion (+29%).
The current guidance says "do not recommend" plus "consult your doctor". You should read that as "blanket vaccination as public policy is cost inefficient in that age range" not "you as a 45 year old should not get the vaccine categorically".
Also I’d really prefer my daughters not get cancer no matter their sex lives.
I mean if you support lifelong monogamy or similar sure, you do you, but I don’t think more dead people is a good thing to advocate to promote your lifestyle choice.
I used to know a lot more people like that and I swear half of them left the church and had a hoe phase despite earlier professed beliefs.
Citation needed. In Germany, the HPV vaccine is recommended only to below 14 year olds, so as to reduce precisely that risk.
https://www.rki.de/SharedDocs/FAQs/DE/Impfen/HPV/FAQ-Liste_H...
