Many vaccines become 'perfect' by causing the disease they treat to die out in the local community.
It doesn't need to be perfect at the individual level to cause that - and in fact many vaccines at the individual level actually have pretty bad metrics - like for example only preventing half of cases.
You're seeing this in vivo with polio - POLIO!! - starting to make a reappearance in some of the more extremist Hassidic communes in NYC. Those groups do not get vaccines.
This is how vaccines are expected to operate. You don't need perfection, just enough to drive the reproduction rate below 1.
However, note that this is in a population where there will no doubt be leaks. Even if everyone in the area got the jab that doesn't mean they won't have sex with people who didn't. Thus an infection rate of zero is a good showing.
They claim a victory (no cancer in some conditions)
But don't show the all cause mortality for same sample.
You should be skeptical of a study not showing all causes mortality on their own sample.
It's very easy to do, you count the dead and living for both samples at the end of the experiment.
Yet, they don't. Weird isn't?
Reminder that HPV in men has a similar association to oral/anal cancer, and this vaccine (ideally the quadrivalent version) prevents it too [0]. HPV vaccine campaigns often emphasize vaccinating only girls, but boys should be vaccinated too.
The vaccine prevents against up to 9 HPV, including many genital wart [0] strains.
So I was wrong about herpes but my point was that it protects males against STIs and is just a handy vaccine to protect sexually active men against something they don’t want (some genital warts) and that seems like a greater motivator than reducing transmission to protect women from cervical cancer.
5-year survival rate of throat cancer is 82%, 5-year survival rate of cervical cancer is 92%, and incidence of HPV-related throat cancers among men is higher than cervical cancer on it's own and rising (probably due to changes in sexual behavior) [0]. While total incidence of HPV related cancers is higher in women than in men and that's bad enough, there is not a lot of difference. It's a problem on its own.
It’s the incidence that is important here. So while there’s higher survivability for cervical cancer, there are many more deaths. (At least until this vaccine)
So people are concerned with the risk of having throat cancer more than the risk of death if they get it. And this seems reasonable. As I have a very high risk of death in many improbable situations and I care more about lower risk of death in very common situations.
10k cases of throat cancer in men each year in the US [0]. Although HPV-related cancer, oropharynx, is less than that and harder for me to find a good incident rate. Almost 14k cases of cervical cancer in women each year in the US [1]
But that's my point: the incidence of cervical cancer in women and throat cancer in men is in the same order of magnitude, but the incidence of cervical cancer is stable or even declining due to screenings and HPV vaccination, while the incidence of back of the throat cancer in men is five fold higher than throat cancer in women already. And what's more, it is rising - also five fold over the past decade - due to (unprotected) oral sex becoming more common.
Why did she believe that? I like to believe are politicians aren’t completely insane so what pseudo/bad whatever studies led her to believe vaccines cause mental retardation?
Well there is research around it, it isn’t robust enough to make stupid claims like that, but you could make a decent case that older vaccines contained things (Thimerosal) which could be causing problems. Maybe she doesn’t understand most new ones don’t?
> you could make a decent case that older vaccines contained things (Thimerosal) which could be causing problems
No, not really; there's no case to be made there. Long and conclusively debunked, and the removal of it from most vaccinations didn't change autism etc. rates at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal_and_vaccines
> Maybe she doesn’t understand most new ones don’t?
Little in Michele Bachmann's career gives me reason to give her that much benefit of the doubt.
If you don’t understand such things, that’s fine, so long as you keep your ignorance to yourself.
If you don’t understand such things and make unsubstantiated, incorrect claims on a national stage as a presidential candidate, I have a lot less tolerance.
> That selling can be big business. One of the leading anti-vaccine advocates, Joseph Mercola, is believed to bring in millions each year through his companies, which sell an array of branded natural supplements, beauty products and even pet supplies.
If he only brings in millions, he's being trounced by the pharmaceutical companies that bring in billions. From a product that it's mandatory for children in some states to take, and for which pharmaceutical manufacturers are given special legal protection from liability. The perfect business model.
> If he only brings in millions, he's being trounced by the pharmaceutical companies that bring in billions.
Sure, but I look more askance at someone being paid millions for disproven bullshit than someone being paid billions for effective medical treatments. Both are motivated actors, but one's purely a bullshit artist.
How do you know it's effective medical treatment when the industry spends tens of billions of dollars on advertising and lobbying to convince you it's an effective treatment and suppress any negative press on it?
Funny, Apple started pushing stories to me that MEASELS IS EVERYWHERE now, get vaccinated. The advertising fund is a concern. I’m all for trust of pharmaceutical companies but a lot needs to change first.
I’m saying it’s hard to separate reporting from advertising.
Also, you simply said there was no measles. I said news cycle today shows differently but the real point is if your biggest supporter is big pharma, maybe you are less inclined to investigate certain things and more inclined to accept additional fancy dinners with their experts and maybe, just maybe, that influences what is reported and how.
Sick people with life-threatening diseases are incredibly impressionable and a lucrative customer base.
… and dead people tell no tales. They can’t warn others against ineffective treatments and the preventive measures that they would love to have access to.
> Why did she believe that? I like to believe are politicians aren’t completely insane
I'd hope that any appreciable amount of time spent looking into Michele Bachmann would disabuse you entirely of the notion that the presumption of good faith is appropriate for all politicians.
Even one of the original developers of the vaccine questioned the benefits: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gardasil-researcher-speaks-out/ . In VAERS post-market data there are more issues associated with Gardasil than any other vaccine prior to the covid vaccines. You just don't hear about it because pharmaceutical companies spend an incredible amount of money on advertisement and lobbying.
> Even one of the original developers of the vaccine questioned the benefits
You mean
"She says data available for Gardasil shows that it lasts five years; there is no data showing that it remains effective beyond five years."
well, there wasn't any 5+ years data in 2009.
Weird that when this comes up in the antivaxxer catechisms it's always this story from 2009 and never Dr. Harper's 15 years of work since then firmly establishing the efficacy, safety, and longevity of the vaccine, and setting up vaccination and screening programs world wide to hopefully eliminate cervical cancer within the next few decades.
"Approximately 28 million doses of Gardasil 9 distributed in the United States; 7,244 reports of adverse events (AEs); 97% of AEs classified as non-serious and 3% classified as serious"
3% of 7,244 is 217. 28,000,000 / 217 is one serious adverse reaction per 129,000 recipients, or 1/14th as common as HPV-related cancer.
In other words, if you care about your health, you're 14x better off getting Gardasil than waiting to see if you get cancer from having HPV.
I believe the real reason she was against it was a widespread belief that HPV vaccination—considered a sexual health thing—was tantamount to encouraging promiscuity among recipients.
This is one of the many reasons that "parental rights" people are dead wrong. People as young as 12 should have the absolute right to seek and get, in confidence, this vaccine and other health care. Nobody should give any weight to whether their parents want them to not have this vaccine.
Probably because they felt the need to draw the line somewhere to prevent hypothetical five year olds from demanding a dangerous cocktail of innoculants from every pharmacy in town, and probably the sense that at 12 you've developed enough for your sense of agency to be respected.
> they felt the need to draw the line somewhere to prevent hypothetical five year olds
> probably the sense that at 12
I think you get the point. 12 is entirely arbitrary. Some children might well be able to make sound choices like this at that age. Some definitely will not. You're advocating for a line at which parents lose their right to be parents while maintaining the rest of the responsibility for raising the child. You want to put the government in control. I think you need more than a sense before taking that step.
This is one of those ideas that sounds good mostly to people who don't have the responsibility of being parents.
Yes, I get the point that you couldn't muster an actual argument so resorted to an overly broad question that intentionally ignored context.
And I'm not advocating for anything, I just hate the insincerity that comes from people asking questions like that. Its also a little whiffy that you're trotting out the 'some kids will make good choices' bit with regards to this age range and the ability to ask a doctor for a vaccination - we normally reserve that line of reasoning where making a bad decision is attractive and an adult might also not behave responsibly.
Also point of order - what are you talking about, 'government control'? The topic at hand was literally whether 12 was an appropriate age to start respecting a persons wishes when it came to seeking a vaccination. It is troubling that you see that as government control, and troubling that you see this as 'losing your right as a parent'
> Yes, I get the point that you couldn't muster an actual argument
Don't be a dick. It was a legitimate question. And no amount of insinuations or insults on your part changes that. Your points are very weak for someone advocating for getting the gov't more deeply involved in everyone's affairs.
And if you don't think some 12 year olds are wildly incapable of making good medical choices, I don't know what to say.
I don't get it - the government is what gives you your current legal authority over your offspring, and someone suggests less of that power, and you're saying the government is getting more involved? It makes it difficult to take you seriously.
I picked 12 because that is the age of medical privacy in my state. It is consistent with the grade level at which schools teach comprehensive sexual health.
Children have rights. Parents have responsibilities.
Vaccines are a medical miracle. Never except that being an anti-vaxxer (or a "vaccine skeptic", which is the sanitized name for the same thing) as being on equal footing. Vaccines are evidence-based. Anti-vaxxers are vibes-based.
Age of consent laws have nothing to do with parents' rights; that's about the child's rights. I don't think any of us want a world where a parent can consent to sex on behalf of their child.
> In many U.S. states, children can legally marry at an earlier age than they can consent to sex, leading to situations where sex between spouses may be a criminal act. Some states exempt sex between married spouses from their definition of statutory rape, which may create perverse incentives for child marriage, according to researchers from McGill University.
Child rape is a situation where it shouldn't matter how many people approve.
If your twelve year old wants to have sex, and you with your "parents' rights" endorse that choice, you should go to jail. Because your right as a parent to make decisions is in conflict with the right of the child not to be subject to statutory rape.
The poster upthread asserts a similar conflict between the rights of the parent to make decisions and the right of the child to lifesaving medical measures.
Actually you make a good point. Nobody should be penetrating children, regardless of what the parents think — kids can get irreversible medical procedures when they turn 18.
Vaccination being irreversible, that's pretty clearly in conflict with the child's right not to die horribly of preventable diseases like polio.
As a parent, you get to make all sorts of decisions. As with all other rights, it's still not unlimited. Certain decisions are not solely yours; certain decisions aren't ever yours.
The right not to die of disease (were it to exist) would be a statutory right and not a fundamental one. I'd rather discuss fundamental rights which are a very different thing than the shopping list that is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
But I'll go one step further. Children have no fundamental right to even seek a vaccine independent of their mother and father. If they did, the tanks would be rolling into Lancaster County right now.
> Children have no fundamental right to even seek a vaccine independent of their mother and father. If they did, the tanks would be rolling into Lancaster County right now.
Are the children of Lancaster County pushing to be vaccinated and being denied by their parents?
Compulsory vaccination statutes don't imply anything about whether a toddler has the fundamental inherent right to wander the neighborhood looking for immunizing material. I don't know why you brought it up.
Vaccines are not life-saving care by any definition. Not least of all because it does not cure or treat disease. I believe it's even illegal for a doctor to tell a patient otherwise. So this, too, is irrelevant.
>Are the children of Lancaster County pushing to be vaccinated and being denied by their parents?
Presumably they're pushing to do a whole lot of things. Not least of all staying up past bedtime.
> Compulsory vaccination statutes don't imply anything about whether a toddler has the fundamental inherent right...
They do demonstrate a pretty clear scenario where some rights is trumped by other things. We are discussing a potential such scenario; parents' rights versus a child's opting to get a vaccine that's most effective if administered as a minor.
> Vaccines are not life-saving care by any definition. Not least of all because it does not cure or treat disease.
The comment which started this was implying that parental rights (in scare quotes) fell to the rights of children. All of your arguments focus on community rights and democratic power overcoming parental rights, something which is beside the point. If it requires democratic power and doesn't apply universally (spatially and temporally), even within that particular jurisdiction, it can hardly be said to be merely the recognition of a child's fundamental right. And the article you linked says that the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that "[a] 17-year-old Connecticut girl with a highly curable cancer is not mentally competent to make her own medical decisions" (emphasis mine).
Also, your arguments about landmark cases in which state power overcame parental rights in rare situations would tend to demolish the idea that parental rights are some fringe legal and philosophical movement cooked up by anti-vaxxers, which is the implication which began this thread. Especially because the court recognizes the existence of parental rights even while ruling to override them. Additionally, the purported legitimacy of being forcibly vaccinated by the state would demolish any bodily autonomy argument which could be made to assert a child's right to vaccinate.
>Sure they can
A dodge. If there are theraputic vaccines (arguably a contradiction in terms), then they are legally distinguishible from non-theraputic ones. The original comment (about "parental rights") was clearly referring to this particular non-theraputic HPV vaccine and others like it. Let's stay on topic.
>A dodge. To be clear
I don't think it's at all illegitmate to presume that at least one Amish child in the history of Amish children has desired a vaccine and was told no by his or her parents. Throw in literally every other similarly-situated religious group and we're talking about a significant number of people.
If the right is truly fundamental, it's a right denied regardless of whether the child lawyered up and took it to the Supreme Court. The Amish community would be massacred Waco-style if there were even hints that this precious, fundamental right was being denied to children (if you may recall another child-protecting operation). That is, of course, assuming that anyone genuinely believed this right to exist. Which as a general matter they do not and never have.
The fringe movement is the one putting parental rights in scare quotes and treating children as adults (except when in the womb, never there).
So, in summary, people who put parental rights in scare quotes while asserting invented rights as a means to acquire access to children are indeed the reason for which civilization has developed the venerable age of consent law.
The continuing focus on cervical cancer and women’s sexual health in the context of HPV (vaccination) is my biggest pet peeve ever.
HPV causes penile, anal, mouth-throat and cervical cancer.
I‘d argue that all of those cancers are much, much worse than cervical cancer. After all, they can cause permanent disfigurement, chronic pain, inability to ever speak again and loss of the penis. Infertility? Woe is me!
Anyone who is not celibate should really get the HPV vaccines. Tell a teenager he‘s risking to lose his dick and he‘s gonna get vaccinated tomorrow.
10 to 20 years ago, you got a lot of pushback if you wanted this vaccine as a male, with some insinuations about gayness, or it being "too late" if you wanted it in your early 20s when you heard about this benefit. To this day I don't have it as a result.
I agree it should be more broadly recognized as not being only for women but cervical cancer causes something like 340k deaths vs. the other ones being 1-2 orders of magnitude lower so it’s not surprising that attention has been focused there.
Even if this was the only issue cervical cancer potentially caused (it’s not, you forgot death, among others), this is a really insensitive comment.
Awareness of other cancers doesn’t need to come at the cost of reducing cervical cancer awareness. Seems like a really immature thing to have a pet peeve about.
Cervical cancer kills. I don’t think you mean “it’s worse for a man to lose his penis than for a woman to die” but that’s how it’s coming across. And that’s unfortunate because your point is entirely valid: men are not nearly terrified enough of HPV.
100% of all cervical cancer patients already don't have a penis. There are about 10 times the number of deaths each year from cervical cancer as there are from penile cancer, and scooping out parts of your innards is not just infertility but is far more invasive and liable to complications than just slicing off your dangly bits. Sounds a bit like an argument from misogyny.
Do you think infertility is the only consequence of cervical cancer? Do you mock children with with leukemia saying, "Oh, you feel a little tired? Get over yourself?"
For many people treatment goes smoothly and the can get on with their lives. For some they get treatment, it comes back, they get more treatment, it comes back, and they die, and there is a range of options in between. Maybe they don't die but they can no longer have intercourse. Maybe the financial strain of many rounds of treatment puts them in life-changing debt.
Don't be so glib with the misfortune of other people.
It seems a little strange to me that the people interviewed in this article find this is so remarkable. Only 40,000 people belonged to the group that got the vaccine before 14. If the incidence rate were the same as for the unvaccinated (8.4 per 100k) you would have expected roughly 4 in the group to have gotten cancer. If the incidence rate were the same as for those vaccinated after 14 (3.2 per 100k), you would have expected only ~1 to have gotten cancer. Maybe I'm missing something here?
The incidence rate is per year and the study was over an average of 32 years per patient. At that rate you'd expect around 105 incidents instead of 4, although there are other considerations like age to take into account.
> HPV vaccination is not recommended for everyone older than age 26 years. Some adults ages 27 through 45 years who were not already vaccinated might choose to get HPV vaccine after speaking with their doctor about their risk for new HPV infections and possible benefits of vaccination for them. HPV vaccination of adults provides less benefit, because more people in this age range have been exposed to HPV already.
The CDC does not recommend against getting vaccinated for people in their 30s. They don't issue a general recommendation for vaccinating people in their 30s.
> I'll update that to "The CDC doesn't recommend it", in that case.
As a native speaker, even that language feels as though the CDC discourages vaccination despite the literal meaning not implying that. This is a case where it's probably best to be more verbose and explain in full details.
I don't know why the CDC themselves choose to use this language. It's confusing.
I don't understand why they recommend against it. I guess the monetary costs don't outweigh the benefits, but that's only if you care more about saving money than potentially preventing cancer. It's not like the vaccine going to hurt you. But the HPV vaccine is not particularly cheap, so it sounds like the insurance companies have lobbied against it or something. In my opinion men should also be vaccinated for it since they are often carriers and can be affected too.
Since nearly everyone is infected with HPV, if you've had sex with a few people you're almost certainly already infected and therefore the vaccine will be of no benefit.
I guess if you were 50 and still a virgin, and planning to change that, it might be worth it.
How can you be sure there would be no benefit? When my mom was diagnosed with stage four HPV-positive cancer, they still gave her the vaccine on the off chance that it would induce an immune response.
Yes, but being infected with one strain isn't the same as being infected with all of them in terms of the risks. You are unlikely to have all the strains known to cause problems already.
-------
Additionally (something I only became aware of from knowing a person dealing with it) - there's a modest body of clinical research suggesting that vaccinating for HPV in someone who already has it and is symptomatic (warts) can significantly lessen or eliminate their symptoms.
It was recommended for the person I know on that basis by their doctor as a thing to try, and they've noticed significant improvement. Anectdata, but mentioning anyway.
These are very small studies and I won't claim that this is definitive (nor that I've put that much effort into a review of all literature), but to provide some support for my claims that this is a thing being suggested/investigated in research:
I believe that it's too early in the research for that to be factoring into the analysis going into current CDC recommendations, but it's an additional possible upside of vaccination (reducing symptoms/likelihood of symptoms, even if already infected) if the research continues to pan out.
Not quite, though the messaging on this is muddy. The CDC simultaneously says:
> HPV is so common that nearly all sexually active men and women get the virus at some point in their lives. [1]
and
> During 2013–2014, any genital HPV prevalence among adults aged 18–59, was 42.5% in the total population, 45.2% among men and 39.9% among women; high-risk genital HPV prevalence was 22.7% in the total population, 25.1% among men and 20.4% among women. [2]
It's not approved above age 45 and thus insurance isn't going to pay. But that's simply a matter of not testing. It was intended to be used before exposure and the pool of people >45 who aren't exposed and might be is pretty low.
However, there is a case where it makes sense: Someone who went into a monogamous relationship early and it has now ended. I'm not a sex-only-in-marriage type but I ended up taking my first partner down the aisle--chances are I was never exposed. I'm still with her, but all relationships end eventually.
I don’t understand either. My doctor recommended I get it despite being older, because it’s possible there are strains of HPV it protects against that I have not yet been exposed to. He also said it could theoretically help clear an existing infection faster.
> I don't understand why they recommend against it. I guess the monetary costs don't outweigh the benefits, but that's only if you care more about saving money than potentially preventing cancer. It's not like the vaccine going to hurt you.
All vaccines have a nonzero risk of adverse outcomes. That can be as simple as the risk of physical injury due to incorrect administration of the needle. That's weighed against the risk of nonvaccination.
In almost all cases, the balance is so extremely skewed that it's safe to issue general recommendations in favor of vaccination. For HPV, the issue is that there's literally zero benefit after exposure, and it's difficult/infeasible to test for exposure, but from epidemiological data we know that most people over the age of 25 have already been exposed.
> In my opinion men should also be vaccinated for it
The recommendation is for all genders, and has been for well over a decade.
> It's still the riskiest pharmaceutical product the average young person will take.
That'll almost certainly be Tylenol.
> No other pharmaceutical product has been deemed so risky that it couldn't exist unless people were prevented from suing its manufacturers.
That's not why the program exists. It was deemed risky for the national security of the United States to lose its ability to manufacture vaccines because twelve lay people in a jury room decide to bankrupt a drug company.
"The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP or NVICP) was established by the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA), passed by the United States Congress in response to a threat to the vaccine supply due to a 1980s scare over the DPT vaccine. Despite the belief of most public health officials that claims of side effects were unfounded, large jury awards had been given to some plaintiffs, most DPT vaccine makers had ceased production, and officials feared the loss of herd immunity."
Imagine trading a low risk in the distant future for a low risk in the present for a healthy child?
Any business person knows things that potentially happen in the distant future are to be heavily discounted, while present day risks carry full values.
> Any business person knows things that potentially happen in the distant future are to be heavily discounted, while present day risks carry full values.
Any parent knows that a business folding and a child dying aren't quite the same thing.
Your child isn't going to die from cervical cancer. Kids don't get it.
Your child may die or be seriously injured by HPV vaccines. There are about 80 open class action lawsuits in process over it.
We took most of the other vaccines, but my partner and I decided the HPV vaccine was too dangerous right now, while we have happy healthy kids, to worry about the small chance that an unproven cervical cancer vaccine will work thirty years from now.
> Your child isn't going to die from cervical cancer. Kids don't get it.
This is remarkably ignorant.
The vaccine prevents HPV infection. Kids absolutely do get that. HPV infection can lead to cervical cancer, and we're on an article about how it's thus most effective if administered before the age of 14.
> It's still the riskiest pharmaceutical product the average young person will take.
Acetaminophen is the riskiest pharmaceutical product the average young person will take.
It's so risky that EMS and ED staff are extremely well attuned to detecting and deploying effective interventions so that even when one doesn't die due to the entire scientific might of medicine being thrown at them, about a third of people who overdose and survive will have kidney and stomach problems for the rest of their (quite frankly, miserable) lives.
The antivax morons would be better served by being antiaceta.
Noted in my other comment, but mentioned here as well:
- Exposure to a strain is not the same as exposure to all strains. Few are likely to have been infected with all of the strains that the vaccine protects against, and infection by multiple strains is not a rare event.
- There's research being done on if the vaccine can reduce symptoms to people who already have HPV. Early results seem promising. Certainly nothing large enough for the CDC to be making recommendations on yet (that I know of/could find from a quick search), but worth noting - there may well turn out to be a significant benefit to the vaccine even after exposure, we just seem to be relatively early in that research.
It's a bit confusing, but often when a government agency issues a statement about something being "not recommended" it is intended to mean the government is not strongly encouraging people to do [whatever]. This is very different from the government recommending against people doing [whatever]. So here the CDC is basically saying we don't say people over 26 should definitely get an HPV vaccination, but we don't say they shouldn't either.
Talk to your doctor, be honest about your sexual history and current situation. It made sense for me to get the vaccine, but may not make sense for all, or at least not make sense enough to be approved by your insurance.
A note about current sexual situation too: This first came out when I was in college. My (female) roommate wanted to get it immediately, even though she was very open about only having been with the man she was seeing at the time.
When I asked her about it, since it seemed like her risk of contracting HPV would be very low, she mentioned she was doing it to mitigate the risks she faced as a woman who was barely 5 feet tall and didn't weigh 100 pounds soaking wet. She said she already has to keep her head on a swivel against the possibility of assault, and she'd really rather not have to worry about a virus that could cause cancer in addition to that risk.
I had the privilege of not ever having had to pay much attention to the risk that my current sexual situation might change without my consent, but it was sobering to be reminded that was something that she had a reason to have on her radar.
Yes, please, even if you've had HPV before, get this vaccine. The medical literature says there are benefits in almost every person, even if your insurer does not.
> In a retrospective analysis of data from two qHPV vaccine efficacy studies in young women who underwent cervical surgery or were diagnosed with genital warts or vulvar/vaginal disease related to infection present before vaccination (Figure 1), prior qHPV vaccination was associated with a significant reduction (46.2−64.9% for those who underwent cervical surgery; 35.2% for those diagnosed with infection-related disease) in any subsequent HPV-related disease, including high-grade disease.6 Other studies demonstrated that HPV vaccination before and after surgical treatment for cervical lesions reduced the risk of subsequent cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) grade 2 or higher, related to HPV16/18 (88.2% efficacy 60 days or more post-surgery),8 and the risk of recurrent CIN 2–3 post-surgery was higher in qHPV vaccine non-recipients compared with recipients (hazard ratio [HR] 2.840).
Seems to say that for a subset of people HPV infection is latent. But current vaccines aren't useful against latent infections. Quick skimming says therapeutic vaccines are an area of research. "Numerous DNA-based vaccines have been developed to target persistent HPV infection and are currently in various stages of clinical study"
Yes absolutely. Even if you have already been exposed, the vaccine has been shown to prevent manifestations and/or recurrence of HPV-induced pathologies. It's not necessarily in standard of care, but the literature is pretty overwhelming here.
I recently heard a doctor mention that cervical cancer typically crops up around age 40. As a result, a study like this is a bit premature. It's not bad news, of course, but it's also not exactly good news.
The lifetime risk of ever getting cervical cancer is about 1%. So, $30,000 per prevention if you just count the girls, or $60k if you vaccinate the boys as well.
A policy simply doing -some- good is not sufficient justification given a finite amount of resources to implement it. You need to compare policies against the alternative uses of the resources.
Neither is the fact that "lives will be saved" a sufficient justification. You need to compare that against the lives saved with the alternative policy options available with the given resources.
It's funny how people who are afraid to click a link with a unknown domain will take any vaccine they're offered. A computer can be fixed or discarded if it's damaged by software, not an option with your body.
The USA has the most aggressive vaccine schedule for children in the world. If Vaccines are so effective we should see either lower per capita health care costs and/or superior aggregate health statistics. However US pee capita health cost are substantially higher than any other country and the health indicators are poor.
If you regressed health level on vaccination it would likely come out a non-factor. The mania around Vaccines is profit driven; greedy pharma bullies and scares everyone into buying their product, because it's the only class they have that doesn't require waiting for someone to get sick.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadIt doesn't need to be perfect at the individual level to cause that - and in fact many vaccines at the individual level actually have pretty bad metrics - like for example only preventing half of cases.
However, note that this is in a population where there will no doubt be leaks. Even if everyone in the area got the jab that doesn't mean they won't have sex with people who didn't. Thus an infection rate of zero is a good showing.
Please share. What's the health cost of getting this vaccine?
They claim a victory (no cancer in some conditions) But don't show the all cause mortality for same sample.
You should be skeptical of a study not showing all causes mortality on their own sample. It's very easy to do, you count the dead and living for both samples at the end of the experiment. Yet, they don't. Weird isn't?
[0] https://academic.oup.com/jnci/advance-article-abstract/doi/1...
I think a more practical benefit to boys is the prevention of many strains of general warts and general herpes.
The vaccine prevents against up to 9 HPV, including many genital wart [0] strains.
So I was wrong about herpes but my point was that it protects males against STIs and is just a handy vaccine to protect sexually active men against something they don’t want (some genital warts) and that seems like a greater motivator than reducing transmission to protect women from cervical cancer.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV_vaccine
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/hpv/parents/cancer.html
So people are concerned with the risk of having throat cancer more than the risk of death if they get it. And this seems reasonable. As I have a very high risk of death in many improbable situations and I care more about lower risk of death in very common situations.
10k cases of throat cancer in men each year in the US [0]. Although HPV-related cancer, oropharynx, is less than that and harder for me to find a good incident rate. Almost 14k cases of cervical cancer in women each year in the US [1]
[0] https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/laryngeal-and-hypopharyn...
[1] https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/cervical-cancer/about/ke...
But that's my point: the incidence of cervical cancer in women and throat cancer in men is in the same order of magnitude, but the incidence of cervical cancer is stable or even declining due to screenings and HPV vaccination, while the incidence of back of the throat cancer in men is five fold higher than throat cancer in women already. And what's more, it is rising - also five fold over the past decade - due to (unprotected) oral sex becoming more common.
No, not really; there's no case to be made there. Long and conclusively debunked, and the removal of it from most vaccinations didn't change autism etc. rates at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal_and_vaccines
> Maybe she doesn’t understand most new ones don’t?
Little in Michele Bachmann's career gives me reason to give her that much benefit of the doubt.
If you don’t understand such things and make unsubstantiated, incorrect claims on a national stage as a presidential candidate, I have a lot less tolerance.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/05/12/9936151...
> That selling can be big business. One of the leading anti-vaccine advocates, Joseph Mercola, is believed to bring in millions each year through his companies, which sell an array of branded natural supplements, beauty products and even pet supplies.
Sure, but I look more askance at someone being paid millions for disproven bullshit than someone being paid billions for effective medical treatments. Both are motivated actors, but one's purely a bullshit artist.
You're supporting my point, not contesting it.
Also, you simply said there was no measles. I said news cycle today shows differently but the real point is if your biggest supporter is big pharma, maybe you are less inclined to investigate certain things and more inclined to accept additional fancy dinners with their experts and maybe, just maybe, that influences what is reported and how.
… and dead people tell no tales. They can’t warn others against ineffective treatments and the preventive measures that they would love to have access to.
I'd hope that any appreciable amount of time spent looking into Michele Bachmann would disabuse you entirely of the notion that the presumption of good faith is appropriate for all politicians.
You mean
"She says data available for Gardasil shows that it lasts five years; there is no data showing that it remains effective beyond five years."
well, there wasn't any 5+ years data in 2009.
Weird that when this comes up in the antivaxxer catechisms it's always this story from 2009 and never Dr. Harper's 15 years of work since then firmly establishing the efficacy, safety, and longevity of the vaccine, and setting up vaccination and screening programs world wide to hopefully eliminate cervical cancer within the next few decades.
For instance, HPV causes about 37,000 cases of cancer each year: https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/hpv/statistics/cases.htm
That works out to about 1 in 9,000 Americans. What are the rates of bad reactions to Gardasil that are worse than cancer? According to the CDC, at https://www.cdc.gov/hpv/hcp/vaccine-safety-data.html,
"Approximately 28 million doses of Gardasil 9 distributed in the United States; 7,244 reports of adverse events (AEs); 97% of AEs classified as non-serious and 3% classified as serious"
3% of 7,244 is 217. 28,000,000 / 217 is one serious adverse reaction per 129,000 recipients, or 1/14th as common as HPV-related cancer.
In other words, if you care about your health, you're 14x better off getting Gardasil than waiting to see if you get cancer from having HPV.
Her stated reasons were bullshit smokescreens.
Why the arbitrary line at 12?
Why does 12 sound arbitrary to you?
Because it is?
> they felt the need to draw the line somewhere to prevent hypothetical five year olds
> probably the sense that at 12
I think you get the point. 12 is entirely arbitrary. Some children might well be able to make sound choices like this at that age. Some definitely will not. You're advocating for a line at which parents lose their right to be parents while maintaining the rest of the responsibility for raising the child. You want to put the government in control. I think you need more than a sense before taking that step.
This is one of those ideas that sounds good mostly to people who don't have the responsibility of being parents.
And I'm not advocating for anything, I just hate the insincerity that comes from people asking questions like that. Its also a little whiffy that you're trotting out the 'some kids will make good choices' bit with regards to this age range and the ability to ask a doctor for a vaccination - we normally reserve that line of reasoning where making a bad decision is attractive and an adult might also not behave responsibly.
Also point of order - what are you talking about, 'government control'? The topic at hand was literally whether 12 was an appropriate age to start respecting a persons wishes when it came to seeking a vaccination. It is troubling that you see that as government control, and troubling that you see this as 'losing your right as a parent'
Don't be a dick. It was a legitimate question. And no amount of insinuations or insults on your part changes that. Your points are very weak for someone advocating for getting the gov't more deeply involved in everyone's affairs.
And if you don't think some 12 year olds are wildly incapable of making good medical choices, I don't know what to say.
Vaccines are a medical miracle. Never except that being an anti-vaxxer (or a "vaccine skeptic", which is the sanitized name for the same thing) as being on equal footing. Vaccines are evidence-based. Anti-vaxxers are vibes-based.
(In fact, parents' rights to consent to underage marriage in some states is currently a loophole in this regard. https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/child-marriages...)
> In many U.S. states, children can legally marry at an earlier age than they can consent to sex, leading to situations where sex between spouses may be a criminal act. Some states exempt sex between married spouses from their definition of statutory rape, which may create perverse incentives for child marriage, according to researchers from McGill University.
If your twelve year old wants to have sex, and you with your "parents' rights" endorse that choice, you should go to jail. Because your right as a parent to make decisions is in conflict with the right of the child not to be subject to statutory rape.
The poster upthread asserts a similar conflict between the rights of the parent to make decisions and the right of the child to lifesaving medical measures.
As a parent, you get to make all sorts of decisions. As with all other rights, it's still not unlimited. Certain decisions are not solely yours; certain decisions aren't ever yours.
But I'll go one step further. Children have no fundamental right to even seek a vaccine independent of their mother and father. If they did, the tanks would be rolling into Lancaster County right now.
You're in luck, then; SCOTUS has deemed even compulsory vaccination to pass muster here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts
We've got plenty of precedent that parents can't always opt out of life-saving care for their children, too. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cancer/connecticut-teen-curab...
> Children have no fundamental right to even seek a vaccine independent of their mother and father. If they did, the tanks would be rolling into Lancaster County right now.
Are the children of Lancaster County pushing to be vaccinated and being denied by their parents?
Vaccines are not life-saving care by any definition. Not least of all because it does not cure or treat disease. I believe it's even illegal for a doctor to tell a patient otherwise. So this, too, is irrelevant.
>Are the children of Lancaster County pushing to be vaccinated and being denied by their parents?
Presumably they're pushing to do a whole lot of things. Not least of all staying up past bedtime.
They do demonstrate a pretty clear scenario where some rights is trumped by other things. We are discussing a potential such scenario; parents' rights versus a child's opting to get a vaccine that's most effective if administered as a minor.
> Vaccines are not life-saving care by any definition. Not least of all because it does not cure or treat disease.
Sure they can. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapeutic_vaccines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabies_vaccine is a good example of a vaccine frequently administered while infected to treat a disease.
Even without those, "not getting cancer" seems pretty clearly life-saving at a population level.
> Presumably they're pushing to do a whole lot of things. Not least of all staying up past bedtime.
A dodge. To be clear: if an Amish child wanted to get vaccinated, and their parents forbade it, I'd want our legal system to side with the child.
Also, your arguments about landmark cases in which state power overcame parental rights in rare situations would tend to demolish the idea that parental rights are some fringe legal and philosophical movement cooked up by anti-vaxxers, which is the implication which began this thread. Especially because the court recognizes the existence of parental rights even while ruling to override them. Additionally, the purported legitimacy of being forcibly vaccinated by the state would demolish any bodily autonomy argument which could be made to assert a child's right to vaccinate.
>Sure they can
A dodge. If there are theraputic vaccines (arguably a contradiction in terms), then they are legally distinguishible from non-theraputic ones. The original comment (about "parental rights") was clearly referring to this particular non-theraputic HPV vaccine and others like it. Let's stay on topic.
>A dodge. To be clear
I don't think it's at all illegitmate to presume that at least one Amish child in the history of Amish children has desired a vaccine and was told no by his or her parents. Throw in literally every other similarly-situated religious group and we're talking about a significant number of people.
If the right is truly fundamental, it's a right denied regardless of whether the child lawyered up and took it to the Supreme Court. The Amish community would be massacred Waco-style if there were even hints that this precious, fundamental right was being denied to children (if you may recall another child-protecting operation). That is, of course, assuming that anyone genuinely believed this right to exist. Which as a general matter they do not and never have.
The fringe movement is the one putting parental rights in scare quotes and treating children as adults (except when in the womb, never there).
So, in summary, people who put parental rights in scare quotes while asserting invented rights as a means to acquire access to children are indeed the reason for which civilization has developed the venerable age of consent law.
HPV causes penile, anal, mouth-throat and cervical cancer.
I‘d argue that all of those cancers are much, much worse than cervical cancer. After all, they can cause permanent disfigurement, chronic pain, inability to ever speak again and loss of the penis. Infertility? Woe is me!
Anyone who is not celibate should really get the HPV vaccines. Tell a teenager he‘s risking to lose his dick and he‘s gonna get vaccinated tomorrow.
Maybe today that has been fixed.
Well, and a couple hundred thousand deaths annually worldwide. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/cervical-ca...
https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/caac...
Even if this was the only issue cervical cancer potentially caused (it’s not, you forgot death, among others), this is a really insensitive comment.
Awareness of other cancers doesn’t need to come at the cost of reducing cervical cancer awareness. Seems like a really immature thing to have a pet peeve about.
Do you think infertility is the only consequence of cervical cancer? Do you mock children with with leukemia saying, "Oh, you feel a little tired? Get over yourself?"
For many people treatment goes smoothly and the can get on with their lives. For some they get treatment, it comes back, they get more treatment, it comes back, and they die, and there is a range of options in between. Maybe they don't die but they can no longer have intercourse. Maybe the financial strain of many rounds of treatment puts them in life-changing debt.
Don't be so glib with the misfortune of other people.
Is this the place where I can tell you to fuck off?
Statistical literacy is difficult to develop, statistical intuition even moreso, even among well-intentioned and very intelligent people.
Also, this cohort would be age 28-36 years currently. The lowest median age for HPV cancer diagnosis is 50. https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/hpv/statistics/age.htm
https://www.cdc.gov/hpv/parents/vaccine-for-hpv.html
> HPV vaccination is not recommended for everyone older than age 26 years. Some adults ages 27 through 45 years who were not already vaccinated might choose to get HPV vaccine after speaking with their doctor about their risk for new HPV infections and possible benefits of vaccination for them. HPV vaccination of adults provides less benefit, because more people in this age range have been exposed to HPV already.
The CDC does not recommend against getting vaccinated for people in their 30s. They don't issue a general recommendation for vaccinating people in their 30s.
That's an extremely important distinction.
As a native speaker, even that language feels as though the CDC discourages vaccination despite the literal meaning not implying that. This is a case where it's probably best to be more verbose and explain in full details.
I don't know why the CDC themselves choose to use this language. It's confusing.
I guess if you were 50 and still a virgin, and planning to change that, it might be worth it.
And if you’re 45, then insurance won’t cover. Even if you test negative for hpv.
-------
Additionally (something I only became aware of from knowing a person dealing with it) - there's a modest body of clinical research suggesting that vaccinating for HPV in someone who already has it and is symptomatic (warts) can significantly lessen or eliminate their symptoms.
It was recommended for the person I know on that basis by their doctor as a thing to try, and they've noticed significant improvement. Anectdata, but mentioning anyway.
These are very small studies and I won't claim that this is definitive (nor that I've put that much effort into a review of all literature), but to provide some support for my claims that this is a thing being suggested/investigated in research:
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6541142/
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38068369/
---------
I believe that it's too early in the research for that to be factoring into the analysis going into current CDC recommendations, but it's an additional possible upside of vaccination (reducing symptoms/likelihood of symptoms, even if already infected) if the research continues to pan out.
Not quite, though the messaging on this is muddy. The CDC simultaneously says:
> HPV is so common that nearly all sexually active men and women get the virus at some point in their lives. [1]
and
> During 2013–2014, any genital HPV prevalence among adults aged 18–59, was 42.5% in the total population, 45.2% among men and 39.9% among women; high-risk genital HPV prevalence was 22.7% in the total population, 25.1% among men and 20.4% among women. [2]
1: https://www.cdc.gov/std/hpv/stats.htm
2: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db280.htm
However, there is a case where it makes sense: Someone who went into a monogamous relationship early and it has now ended. I'm not a sex-only-in-marriage type but I ended up taking my first partner down the aisle--chances are I was never exposed. I'm still with her, but all relationships end eventually.
All vaccines have a nonzero risk of adverse outcomes. That can be as simple as the risk of physical injury due to incorrect administration of the needle. That's weighed against the risk of nonvaccination.
In almost all cases, the balance is so extremely skewed that it's safe to issue general recommendations in favor of vaccination. For HPV, the issue is that there's literally zero benefit after exposure, and it's difficult/infeasible to test for exposure, but from epidemiological data we know that most people over the age of 25 have already been exposed.
> In my opinion men should also be vaccinated for it
The recommendation is for all genders, and has been for well over a decade.
That'll almost certainly be Tylenol.
> No other pharmaceutical product has been deemed so risky that it couldn't exist unless people were prevented from suing its manufacturers.
That's not why the program exists. It was deemed risky for the national security of the United States to lose its ability to manufacture vaccines because twelve lay people in a jury room decide to bankrupt a drug company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Vaccine_Injury_Compen...
"The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP or NVICP) was established by the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA), passed by the United States Congress in response to a threat to the vaccine supply due to a 1980s scare over the DPT vaccine. Despite the belief of most public health officials that claims of side effects were unfounded, large jury awards had been given to some plaintiffs, most DPT vaccine makers had ceased production, and officials feared the loss of herd immunity."
Imagine trading a low risk in the distant future for a low risk in the present for a healthy child?
Any business person knows things that potentially happen in the distant future are to be heavily discounted, while present day risks carry full values.
Any parent knows that a business folding and a child dying aren't quite the same thing.
Your child may die or be seriously injured by HPV vaccines. There are about 80 open class action lawsuits in process over it.
We took most of the other vaccines, but my partner and I decided the HPV vaccine was too dangerous right now, while we have happy healthy kids, to worry about the small chance that an unproven cervical cancer vaccine will work thirty years from now.
This is remarkably ignorant.
The vaccine prevents HPV infection. Kids absolutely do get that. HPV infection can lead to cervical cancer, and we're on an article about how it's thus most effective if administered before the age of 14.
Acetaminophen is the riskiest pharmaceutical product the average young person will take.
It's so risky that EMS and ED staff are extremely well attuned to detecting and deploying effective interventions so that even when one doesn't die due to the entire scientific might of medicine being thrown at them, about a third of people who overdose and survive will have kidney and stomach problems for the rest of their (quite frankly, miserable) lives.
The antivax morons would be better served by being antiaceta.
- Exposure to a strain is not the same as exposure to all strains. Few are likely to have been infected with all of the strains that the vaccine protects against, and infection by multiple strains is not a rare event.
- There's research being done on if the vaccine can reduce symptoms to people who already have HPV. Early results seem promising. Certainly nothing large enough for the CDC to be making recommendations on yet (that I know of/could find from a quick search), but worth noting - there may well turn out to be a significant benefit to the vaccine even after exposure, we just seem to be relatively early in that research.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6541142/
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38068369/
When I asked her about it, since it seemed like her risk of contracting HPV would be very low, she mentioned she was doing it to mitigate the risks she faced as a woman who was barely 5 feet tall and didn't weigh 100 pounds soaking wet. She said she already has to keep her head on a swivel against the possibility of assault, and she'd really rather not have to worry about a virus that could cause cancer in addition to that risk.
I had the privilege of not ever having had to pay much attention to the risk that my current sexual situation might change without my consent, but it was sobering to be reminded that was something that she had a reason to have on her radar.
Also, HPV causes head and neck cancers in men and women. These are very unpleasant and not recommended: https://jakeseliger.com/2023/09/09/life-swallowing-tasting-a...
> In a retrospective analysis of data from two qHPV vaccine efficacy studies in young women who underwent cervical surgery or were diagnosed with genital warts or vulvar/vaginal disease related to infection present before vaccination (Figure 1), prior qHPV vaccination was associated with a significant reduction (46.2−64.9% for those who underwent cervical surgery; 35.2% for those diagnosed with infection-related disease) in any subsequent HPV-related disease, including high-grade disease.6 Other studies demonstrated that HPV vaccination before and after surgical treatment for cervical lesions reduced the risk of subsequent cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) grade 2 or higher, related to HPV16/18 (88.2% efficacy 60 days or more post-surgery),8 and the risk of recurrent CIN 2–3 post-surgery was higher in qHPV vaccine non-recipients compared with recipients (hazard ratio [HR] 2.840).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10038021/
Seems to say that for a subset of people HPV infection is latent. But current vaccines aren't useful against latent infections. Quick skimming says therapeutic vaccines are an area of research. "Numerous DNA-based vaccines have been developed to target persistent HPV infection and are currently in various stages of clinical study"
My thought is watch this space.
In Québec they did the vaccination to all the kids at 12yo, boys and girls.
Up to the voters I guess.
The cost to vaccinate all americans is on the order of $100B.
Neither is the fact that "lives will be saved" a sufficient justification. You need to compare that against the lives saved with the alternative policy options available with the given resources.
The USA has the most aggressive vaccine schedule for children in the world. If Vaccines are so effective we should see either lower per capita health care costs and/or superior aggregate health statistics. However US pee capita health cost are substantially higher than any other country and the health indicators are poor.
If you regressed health level on vaccination it would likely come out a non-factor. The mania around Vaccines is profit driven; greedy pharma bullies and scares everyone into buying their product, because it's the only class they have that doesn't require waiting for someone to get sick.