Comment by jgerrish
8 hours ago
>> 4) the vaccines likely have little effect on anything unless you were vaccinated as a child (and are a biological woman).
> 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.
It’s “like pulling teeth” because the guidance isn’t changing (at least not because of evidence).
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.
It's a relatively new vaccine, this commonly happens for a few reasons:
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.