It is actually not straightforward to do. Safeway Pharmacy refused to actually give me the vaccine when I showed up saying I'm not in a group that's eligible. One Medical told me that it would be a $400/shot 3-shot regimen. I'll probably just travel to India some time to visit family and get Cervavac there instead of Gardasil here. It's about $20/shot.

And note i believe they just increased the recommended age of administration up to ~40yo? Throat cancer sucks. Get the vax.

Any way to test for previous exposure? I'd be pretty surprised if I didn't already have antibodies. I suppose it doesn't matter though.

It's not approved for those over 45. (AFIAK, simply because so few people in that age group would have risk without having had prior exposure. Basically only those who had divorced or lost their long time partner.)

If you’re not sexually active, is it still worth doing?

I'm male and read about this exposure vector back in 2012 when it was only rolled out to 12 year old girls, with a further guideline that nobody over 26 should take it.

this was pre- antivaxxer anxiety, and just run of the mill 'is the government condoning sex' anxiety, and it was controversial for that reason alone

the issue was that if you've been exposed already then the vaccine doesn't work. they had a test for women that can prove they've been exposed or not, and most adults have. they don't have a test for men that can prove they've been exposed or not, and most adults have. At the time, they had also only considered males to be carriers, with no cancers themselves.

so for the US government to recommend a limited stock and get insurers on board, it was all based on probabilities of exposure and utility.

I was younger at the time, naturally, I paid $600 out of pocket to get it across 3 doses because I figured it was worse than that, or I could get some 'male ally' brownie points from women. I wasn't wealthy then but figured this experience couldn't be taken from me even if I went bankrupt.

Since then, they've further linked it to throat cancers in males, because of our mouth's contact with genitals, and insurers are told to cover it across all genders and up to mid 40s. that's not really much of a difference now though, since the checkpoint is basically the same group of people, 13 years later.

They're still assuming older people are not worth bothering with, due to likely exposure.

There is an amusing side of this if you are male and not vaccinated yet, since nobody can tell if you've been exposed still: keep your sexual relationships with younger women. lol. in case you needed an excuse - higher probability they're vaccinated.

... did you finish the series? I think for adults it should be 3 doses. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/hpv/hcp/administration.html

> It consists of just 2 doses.

Wasn't it 3 doses before?

I went to my local megacorp pharmacy out here in California, and asked about the COVID vaccine that’s no longer recommended by our anti-vaxxer overlords.

Apparently, it’s about as easy to get as an old-school medical marijuana card.

Results vary by state though. No need to travel to Canada or Mexico (yet).

If you live outside of the US, you should get vaccine too. Even one dose is effective.

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/ivac/the-power-of-a-single-dose...

I've been through this with medical providers, and they say it's not recommended for me.

I don't take medical advice from internet strangers, especially when it contradicts my doctors'.

I'm not particularly interested in discussing the how's and why's. My doctor said he doesn't recommend I get it, so I don't.

RFK Jr may be a bit biased, his opposition has been profitable

> Kennedy for years has earned referral fees from Wisner Baum, a Los Angeles personal injury law firm that is currently suing Merck, alleging the pharmaceutical giant failed to properly warn the public about risks from its vaccine against human papillomavirus (HPV), Gardasil, according to financial disclosure documents filed by Kennedy with the Office of Government Ethics.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rfk-jr-confirmation-robert-f-ke...

> it was to decrease cervical cancer

HPV can cause cancers in the cervix, vulva, vagina, penis, anus and back of the throat [1].

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/hpv/about/cancers-caused-by-hpv.html

The lead time from infection to cancer is very long, we would not expect to see too much of a drop *yet*. But testing for those strains seems to be as useful for screening as a pap smear.

This seems to have some data that suggests they have seen a decline: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijc.35081

There's a chart about 2/3 down the page that shows a drop in several age groups, and a particularly striking drop in the 20-29 age group: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/cms/asset/fd3e820c-4610-4c4e...

There are multiple strains of HPV and most people haven't been infected with all of the strains.

from https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/by_th...

Potentially, yes. HPV infections are cleared over time, and there are many strains of HPV.

In a sense no, hence the choice to vaccinate younger children who will mostly not be sexually active yet.

But because the modern versions of these vaccines cover many strains (initial vaccines were two, Denmark chose a 4 way vaccine, now a nine way) it's very possible that you get a meaningful benefit by being protected from say six strains your body has never seen, even though the three it has already seen wouldn't be prevented.

I've heard of it being administered post exposure as a way to help the body fight the existing infection. Seemed a little odd when I first heard it as HPV should clear on it's own.

Yes, Michael Douglas had a throat cancer he said was from "oral sex" meaning HPV infection, and I remember social media berating him for saying that as if it were impossible, but it really is.

Random anecdote: with whole genome sequencing, which is fairly common among the rich with cancer, you can sometimes find the exact cancer driving genes that the HPV has amplified. I remember looking at one case where the HER2 gene was amplified with many copies, and you could see it attached to chunks of HPV genome. Fortunately there's now many drugs that specifically target amplified HER2, originally developed only for breast cancer, where there are diagnostic test to find the subset of breast cancers with the amplification.

Australia rolled out the HPV vaccine for girls in 2007. Boys were included in the program in 2013. Modelling says that "elimination" depends on both the vaccine and a screening program [3].

[1] https://www.cancercouncil.com.au/news/australian-success-sto...

[2] https://www.ncirs.org.au/sites/default/files/2022-07/HPV%20F...

[3] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2...

Depends on your health insurance. My previous insurance company paid back the full cost when I was 30 years old. I can recommend checking https://www.entschiedengegenkrebs.de/vorbeugen/kostenerstatt... (and then also confirming that with the insurance company over text, just to be safe)

Can you pay for it?

It's okay, he'll have us treat cervical cancer with a juice cleanse and vibes.

I remember this being a big controversy in Texas in the 2000s. Our Republican governor, forcing girls to get the vaccine! What does he think Texan girls are, lusty?

Not like disease prevention is a universally good thing and some people tend to have sex.

At the end of the day, religious radicals like STDs because it enforces their worldview that having multiple sexual partners in a lifetime is a sin.

We have the first leaders.

Also throat, mouth, tongue, anal and penile cancers.

It turns out a human body has a lot of surfaces facing the "outside" in some sense and we forget about the parts we can't see. Most of this surface is not covered in what we'd conventionally consider skin. It's bit like if you were looking at surfaces in a house and forgot the walls and ceiling.

Amazing how badly the United States is regressing. Literally measles is making a comeback due to idiots like RFK.

Unlike the measles, HPV is not a good eradication candidate due to the existence of non-human reservoirs.

That link says:

> What have we learnt from this study?

> Infection with HPV types covered by the vaccine (HPV16/18) has been almost eliminated. Before vaccination, the prevalence of HPV16/18 was between 15–17%, which has decreased in vaccinated women to < 1% by 2021. 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.

The conclusion seems to be that the vaccine is extremely effective at preventing infection by the strains included in the vaccine. One might reach a stretch conclusion and infer that the 9-valent vaccine would be even better as it would (probably) dramatically reduce the risk of several of the remaining “high-risk” variants.

The study is linked early in the article and is fairly dense, the article summarized it well and is a lot more readable.

16/18 are the most carcinogenic strains, they have been close to eradicated in Denmark. "Denmark close to wiping out leading cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out" is the full headline and 100% accurate.

Those were the only two high risk strains covered by the vaccine used in the time frame studied. The study covers the first cohort of girls given the 2008 version of the vaccine when they recently reached age to start screening. It is expected to not see other strains affected in this study, even though current vaccines are broader. The total number of high risk HPV cases in the study went down post-vaccination.

The notion of numbered strains of HPV is about diverging lineages going back hundreds of thousands of years in a highly conserved, slowly mutating virus. They are not comparable to things like seasonal COVID or flu strains.

> about 30% of the women in the study from 2017-2014 tested positive for one of several types of HPV infection.

That number was referring to different strains not covered by the vaccine. The study says the rate of infection dropped to less than 1% among those strains the vaccine protects against.