As far as I know they still won’t give it to me in the USA because I have a penis.
i had a horrible fight with my mom when i went to the gynecologist for the first time (age 20) and found out that she should have given me the shot as a teenager. i begged her to get my little sister vaccinated and she freaked out on me because she had been told by all her medical church frieds it was “unnecessary” because they are deep into purity culture and thought she would not have sex until she married her virgin husband. they also convinced her it was dangerous, years after that was debunked. i dont think she ever got it, and when my sister was 18 i talked to her about getting it and she was not interested…
p.s. i would like to add that the same purity bullshit is why my mom refused to take me to a doctor when i had white-knuckling period pain and had learned that birth control can help. she said “that will just make you fat” and did not take me. 12 years later i found out i have severe endometriosis and actually got a doctor to give me a hysterectomy when i was under 30 and had no kids. added bonus there was some gender euphoria, so thank you Endo. lol
Religious thinking is a scourge on humanity.
Get it as a guy too. My second shot is in a week’s time.
If it’s causing cancer for women, it’s probably causing cancer for guys too, and it stops the spread
Love to see it! The HPV vaccine is available for boys now as well!! Everyone should get it if they can
My neighbor won’t let her kids get it because of a weird mix of antivax sentiment that sprang up when Biden became president - and also because HPV can be sexually transmitted and she doesn’t want her kids having premarital sex.
Could you imagine getting cancer because your mom is a moron? Those poor kids.
It’s so short sighted!
They have raised the upper limit on ages that can get the vaccine, so hopefully her kids will get caught up when they’re out from under her roof.
Yeah, I wonder about that though. Do you know what childhood vaccines you got? Does your current doctor have a record? I feel like when I was an adult and established care, I had to fill out some forms myself and just say “yeah I got the standard vaccine schedule.” If my mom had objected to some random vaccine and didn’t tell me, I probably would have no clue.
You can get titer tests that measure how many antibodies you have for particular diseases.
The logic there is insane.
“Oh cool I got a vaccine. I suppose now I’ll live a life of promiscuity!”
“Nooo, the potential HPV was supposed to scare you into modesty!”
I wouldn’t really call it “logic”.
I was actually disappointed when they did the initial rollout and it wasn’t available to boys (see, those without uteruses). Cause, like, that’s how vaccines work best. You get it to protect everyone, not just yourself. But I guess that’s not how the medical industry is designed.
I was 12 at the time and confused why I couldn’t get it. Anyways, I got it the first year it was available to me. Hurt like all hell, especially that last shot.
I had a three-parter shot. The first one and the last one were fine, but the lady who did the second one seemed to have mistaken giving a shot with pitching a baseball. She hit me so fast and so hard it left a goddamn bruise. And I mean, not the kind you might get from an injection site - it was big.
I have no problem getting shots. I was an adult at the time, it’s not like she had to do it quickly for a squirming kid. I have no idea why she did it so fast and violently.
It was an uphill battle to get it rolled out for girls initially. There was a lot of fear mongering about how this would turn them all into sluts.
Fucking stupid argument, most people who have HPV don’t even know it, how preventing the virus would change anything in their behavior?
Because they felt it would give permission for girls to have sex without consequence. And you know how much conservatives love for there to be punishments for girls and women having sex.
Yes, I’m aware that humans are prone to flights of fancy. Doesn’t change the fact that I’m disappointed that a science field doesn’t listen to science when making decisions.
I think they needed to do more testing and such before rolling it out for boys and men. Because they could prove the cervical cancer link more easily and they could get it approved for girls first.
It’s disappointing, but it’s available now.
I would love to believe it was some decision making tree, comparing number needed to treat vs number needed to harm, but the most likely explanation is that there was funding for cervical cancer that this worked off of, and that was used to get the first human test subjects (all women, cause men don’t have cervixes, silly. Just ignore all the men with cervixes).
Never mind that 90% of drugs only go through testing with just men cause “women are just men with different hormones patterns and more statistical noise”. But the reverse logic is clearly not respected, we have to test this drug on men before we can approve it for them. Ah patriarchy, if it isn’t you, it’s capitalism.
Usually patriarchy and capitalism team up to ignore women’s health issues honestly. I’m sorry this one got caught and they prioritized girls and women first.
Because of HPV’s causal association with cervical cancer, the original vaccine trials focused on females, and consequently, the vaccine was approved for females aged nine to 26 years. This approach was perfectly reasonable, given what was known at the time. Unfortunately, this approval also fit within an existing cultural narrative that HPV was a woman’s problem. We have come to refer to this overidentification of HPV with females, and its subsequent impact on primary prevention efforts, as the “feminization of HPV.” The process of feminization occurs when an issue is socially constructed as focused on females,3 which can impact how issues are perceived by the public and addressed by the government and other organizations.
The feminization process was, in some sense, the result of an accidental synergy between the known science and our long history of sexism. The decision to license the vaccine only for females was a “perfect storm” of science, politics, economics, and socially constructed beliefs regarding gender roles. In the forthcoming shift from the quadrivalent to the nonavalent vaccine that will undoubtedly involve confusion regarding guidelines, dosage, clinical practice behavior, and health messages, new approaches could correct gender disparities in vaccine delivery. We call for a three-part strategy to address the feminization of HPV, which we hope will foster equity in the prevention of HPV-related diseases.
I knew very little about HPV until I became symptomatic last summer. I had just turned 39 and had an extremely painful and difficult few months dealing with it. I’m now vaccinated and see a proctologist every few months to manage minor ongoing symptoms.
Talk to your doctor about getting the vaccine if you haven’t already! It’s super common and can be extremely unpleasant to catch. And if you care about the AFAB partners in your lives, get the vaccine to protect them! There is no test for men to determine if they have HPV unless they are symptomatic, and you can be a carrier for years before symptoms show, if they ever do!
It also helps prevent cancer in boys and men!
I’m so sorry you had to deal with HPV, that really sucks.
Thanks. I blame the awful sex education I received growing up in the South in the US for under preparing me.
It’s been available for males for 20 years
Yep but it’s not as widely known which is why I try to mention it on articles like these :)
I wish I had access to it when I was a kid. I think the first time I saw an ad for it was well into my 20s. And IIRC in my late 20s when I asked a gyno about it, she said it probably doesn’t make sense for me to get it as I’m “too old”.
They raised the age limit up to 45, so it’s possible that you can get one now.
The limits were much lower when it first came about.
It took about 20 years to get to this point. I almost lost my sister to this shit about 30 yrs ago. God I hate antivaxxers.
The HPV vaccine has also been linked to preventing throat cancers in men and woman linked to oral sex HPV transmission.
I work with a lot of MDs and they are urging everyone they know to get this vaccine. One of those colleagues personally treated two different cases of throat cancer in a span of months. Both of those cases were related to HPV and unfortunately both of those patients died from a potentially preventable disease.
I was right at the cutoff age when it was first rolled out. 23 or 24. I basically ran to my gyno and was like. Now.
She was like. “Can do.”
I just wanted to lower my chance of cancer.
Who can afford cancer in this economy ?
This was the same conclusion as as a decade ago. We waste millions in this research just to deal with antivaxers and church types.
Can’t wait for them to try and outlaw this and try to frame it as some sort of gift to women.
“Women should be punished for having sex” is a common repressive patriarchal structure, yep.
I remember waaaaay back in 2007, when Texas Governor Rick Perry tried to include the HPV shot in the standard school vaccination requirements. And the party turned on him like a rabid dog. It haunted him all the way into his 2012 Presidential campaign.
The GOP was hopping on that anti-vax bandwagon decades earlier than a lot of people realize.
I think this vaccine was especially upsetting for right wing folks, since it is for a sexually transmitted virus, and works best if given to people before they become sexually active. Telling God-fearing Christians that they need to vaccinate their pre-pubescent girls for sexually transmitted diseases was always going to be a tough fight.
Great news according to the headline but wow that site is unreadable pop-up cancer.
What site did you read it from? The thread for me has a BBC News link, for all the faults with the BBC, their websites are very clean and functional.
Not the person you replied to, but I viewed it on my phone where I don’t have an ad-blocker, and I got bombarded by ads. There was a full-screen ad that hid the page when the page first loaded, and then there are full-height ads embedded in the article every few paragraphs. I’m sure it’s a lot cleaner if you have an ad-blocker.
I can not replicate it at all, with all adblock disabled, using VPN, different browser. Strange.
Why are people under 16 allowed to have a cervix in the UK in 2026?
How has this not been banned yet?
In the US they don’t test men for HPV because there’s no approved treatment
Research has shown that the HPV test may lead to inconsistent results with men. This is because it is difficult to get a good cell sample to test from the thick skin on the penis. Most people will not have visible symptoms if they are exposed to HPV. Therefore, for most, the virus is subclinical (invisible). This is especially true for males.
If a male is exposed to the cell-changing types of HPV, he would be unlikely to have symptoms. If there are no symptoms for males, it is hard to test for it. https://www.ashasexualhealth.org/what-men-should-know/
Getting vaccinated is the best option for men for a variety of reasons.
