A government medical panel on Tuesday recommended that the HPV vaccine given to girls should also be administered to boys to help prevent the spread of the virus through sexual intercourse.
The proposal is seen by many as highly controversial because it can protect against anal cancer. Many conservative parents feel as though their 11-12 year old sons have no need to get the vaccine because they’re ‘not gay’. The only other reason boys would receive the vaccine would be to protect girls from HPV, which does not currently seem to be a particularly motivating factor for parents of these boys.
An HPV vaccine for boys should absolutely be readily available to both boys and girls, if for no reason other than to level the playing field between men and women. If men are engaging in sexual intercourse just as much as women, they should be vaccinated against the disease for the sake of both their own health and that of their sexual partners.
Some conservatives believe that the shot encourages promiscuity in general, and that its administration to boys would encourage homosexuality. All illogical anti-gay sentiments aside, the shot is generally administered to pre-teens, pre-teens who would hopefully have very little to no involvement or even awareness about sex. Most would not even fully understand the implications of getting vaccinated, and as such, would not magically become promiscuous after the needle enters the arm.
Boys have a responsibility to vaccinate as well as girls if only for the general health of the population. If a young and healthy college student decided not to get a flu shot and subsequently became infected with the flu, perhaps it would not aversely affect the student in particular, but that student could hypothetically pass it on to someone much older and more vulnerable. The same is true for the HPV vaccine as it pertains to men and women. Vaccines are about protecting the general public and should be regarded as such.
It remains difficult to comprehend that the debate as to whether or not to administer vaccines to boys is even making headlines, because it should not be a newsworthy step to take, but a natural one.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
