So please don’t get it regardless of age. Its not really considered effective for women who have been sexually active for some time.
Which is why its only recommended for girls, not women.
https://www.ssi.dk/vaccinationer/boernevaccination/vaccinati....
Tldr; Dont rush to get a vaccine that is probably not effective for you. Make an appointment with your doctor and discuss it with her first.
I dont see any reason not to take if you get it for free and you are planning to be sexually active with multiple different partners.
Simplest route would be to call your primary doctor and ask if they can give it to you at your next annual checkup.
Your PCP may give a vaccine off-label though, which is how I got my Shingrix, though I had to pay out of pocket.
If you have a limited supply the greater bang per buck would be to start with the young people who almost certainly haven't caught it yet and then work your way up.
Sure you are more likely to have it the older you are but even then you are unlikely to have all the strains. The vaccine covers like 9 or 10 different strains so it can protect you from the other strains even if you already have one of them.
It's generally only when you get into the 60s and up that the justification for not recommending the vaccine changes. Once you get into those later years the immune response changes a bit and you get new concerns.
An example being herpes zoster (chickenpox) where after a certain age you are recommended to get the shingles vaccine instead of the chickenpox vaccine since the way the disease presents and how the body reacts to it changes with age (technically shingles can happen at any age but generally herpes zoster presents as shingles instead of chickenpox the older you get).
Vaccines are subject to stringent safety standards since they’re administered to healthy people. The age limit may suggest that at the time of the recommendation, in the relevant jurisdiction, the manufacturer had not studied its safety and efficacy in >40 year olds.
(I also don’t think it’s an age limit as much as the upper end of a recommendation.)
And how can you say the vaccine definitely works for populations it hasn't been tested on?
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/hpv/hcp/recommendations.htm...
It's a level of evidence that's generated (usually) prior to ACIP, and it is presented to them, while there is not necessarily a bright line threshold.
There used to be fears of "death panels" controlling access to medical care when Clinton tried to propose universal health care.
The CDC and FDA are about safety, not cost management. And they get significant complaints about how much they regulate pharma and are impediments to pharma for that!
Now the conspiracy theorists of the other side seem to be having their day in the public mind.
That was, for example, why boys were originally not part of the recommendation for the HPV vaccine. It would double to cost, while doing very little to prevent cervical cancer via indirect protection. Once the evidence accumulated that it was associated with other cancers, that stopped being true.
Similar logic applied to older women and men.
In any case, somebody thinking that evaluating safety and efficacy aside from cost considerations means that there's collusion with pharmaceutical companies would be a conspiracy theory.
you are one of the generals in this scenario, thinking that evaluating safety and efficacy aside from cost considerations couldn't possibly lead to higher costs because you yourself and everybody in your industry are so darn smart, clever and by god ethical.
what did you do before this? work on creating the covid 19 virus, or just calling people who questioned it "conspiracy theorists"? what's that, you were in caves tracking down the zoonotic transfer, which you'll find any day now, scientific consensus and all, peter daszak assured you you'll find it and he's beyond reproach!
and I resent you saying that I'm a conspiracy theorist because I have not said any of this is happening, I am pointing out the vector where it could happen (go back, look, where did I say any of this was happening?)
it's simply, methinks the lady doth protest too much
thinking that they are conspiracy theories? that's a conspiracy theorist.
let me guess, you work in this area too.
There are two factors here:
1) Vaccine-derived immunity is a function of the individual's immune response, which in general, weakens significantly with age. It is not unrealistic for a vaccine to simply fail to elicit any response in someone old enough.
2) It is very, very difficult to recruit folks without HPV that are over 40 for a clinical trial. Most people of that age, who were never immunized, most likely have had it. This significantly convolutes the signal.
3) This is all especially confounded once something becomes "standard of care". Every year there are fewer and fewer people age 40+ with HPV.
For these reasons, the vaccine is currently officially ??? in people over 40. Most doctors will prescribe it anyways if you ask. It may or may not infer immunity. It almost certainly will not harm you.
Brilliant.
As pm90 wrote, I strongly recommend getting vaccinated [2] unless a doctor tells you otherwise, even if you already have HPV or have had previous potential exposure.
[1] Circulating tumor human papillomavirus DNA whole genome sequencing enables human papillomavirus-associated oropharynx cancer early detection - https://academic.oup.com/jnci/advance-article-abstract/doi/1... | https://doi.org/10.1093/jnci/djaf249
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV_vaccine
(had three doses in my 30s via Planned Parenthood)
Isn't that basically everyone who's had sex with someone who had sex before the vaccine was common? I was denied when I asked my last doctor, on that logic. I'll ask my current doctor.
Definitely ensure you're requesting the 9 strain version.
The CDC says:
> Like all medical interventions, vaccines can have some side effects.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/hpv/hcp/recommendations.htm...
> A temperature of 100°F during the 15 days after vaccination was reported in 10% to 13% of HPV vaccine recipients. A similar proportion of placebo recipients reported an elevated temperature.
If you take some research subjects, do nothing to them, and then ask how they did 15 days after, I would be surprised if 10-13% reported a 100F fever during that time. But, that's a reasonable result from a saline or hpv injection.
I know you are very well intentioned, but American's actually have very good doctors.
I’ve had a few GPs in the past 20 years. They’re consistent.
I admit it’s weird. And ideologically I feel like a bit of a laggard.
But I’ve had both the conversation with my doctor, and the conversation with online “smart people who know better than my doctor” many times.
Doctors aren't setting the rules on who gets what vaccine and when. RFK Jr is. Health insurance companies are.
Please do not turn mainstream medical advice into a fringe position.
“The route of HPV transmission is primarily through skin-to-skin or skin-to-mucosa contact. Sexual transmission is the most documented, but there have been studies suggesting non-sexual courses.
The horizontal transfer of HPV includes fomites, fingers, and mouth, skin contact (other than sexual). Self-inoculation is described in studies as a potential HPV transmission route, as it was certified in female virgins, and in children with genital warts (low-risk HPV) without a personal history of sexual abuse. Vertical transmission from mother to child is another HPV transfer course” [1].
You’ve got a low probability of getting polio, but there’s no reason not to be vaccinated if you can.
Even if you already have a strain, there are multiple types. In fact, people who got a vaccine early on, should consider an updated shot for more complete protection.
Something like 80% of people are sexually active at all will be infected with HPV at some point. You may not have been sexually active, but your future partners may have been. I personally have a friend who went through stage 4 cancer contracted from her (now ex) husband.
So, of course not literally everyone needs to take it, assess your own risks, but it's quite an easy, highly effective vaccine: don't overthink it.
Wasn't it 3 doses before?
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.
Another thing to keep in mind was that the initial trials were only using cervical cancer endpoints - the association between HOV infection and cervical cancer is really strong. At that time, vaccinating boys provided only indirect protection (you couldn't infect a female partner), rather than direct protection (you won't be infected) in the context of cervical cancer.
Women prior to sexual debut were the biggest "bang for the buck" and the obvious first recommendation target.
Researchers both at universities and in private industry then started working on other populations based on alternative endpoints.
It was a stupid decision to leave out the boys. I mean hindsight is 20/20, but if heterosexual women were getting cervical cancer from HPV, and HPV is spread by sexual activity, then vaccinating the boys along with the girls would have been the logical thing to do in order to stop the spread.
I assume this wasn't done because they didn't do any studies on boys at first, because they were looking for cervical abnormalities to gauge vaccine effectiveness, and maybe it would have been hard to recruit a bunch of boys for a vaccine study that would probably not benefit them.
With that same hindsight we now know that HPV vaccination also prevents some oral cancers, and that leaving out the boys was a very stupid decision indeed.
These days most places do seem to also vaccinate boys. I got an HPV vaccine at some point in my 30s, and I pretty much had to wrestle my doctor into submission in order to get a prescription.
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).
2) Take a look in the mirror and try blaming the people who have made "getting a vaccine" a culture war political statement rather than something routine and uncontroversial. If vaccines were uncontroversial, medical exemptions from them would also be rare and uncontroversial.
More generally why should anyone be forced to take any vaccine? The controversial idea here is thinking it’s okay to mandate someone else do something to their body.
Meanwhile you're trying to mandate exposing other people to covid because you don't want a vaccine.
One of her friends likewise in the medical field with allergies was forced to get a vaccine or lose her job, and then proceeded to have significant medical issues afterwards from the allergy attacks
The vaccine regime has lost many supporters, myself included.
Gross, @DaSHacka. Absolutely vile.
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/ivac/the-power-of-a-single-dose...
Conversely, almost every adult over 45 is carrying some form of HPV and a few of those forms cause cancer. If any of those adults has unprotected sex with someone without HPV who is unvaccinated, they almost certainly will transmit the virus. Even if condoms are used, HPV can still be transmitted. This is a much more contagious virus than HIV.
The HPV vaccine is both extremely safe and extremely effective. Suggesting that every human consider getting the vaccine -- with appropriate consultation with their healthcare provider -- is sound advice.
You're very confused about the statistics here.
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.
I think it's weird and creepy people are selectively opting into vaccines that are not recommended for them.
It feels a bit like those ads that say "bring up Expedia with your doctor!"
This isn't a good PSA.
Should I be vaccinated against smallpox too? How about anthrax?
1 pin prick * 340,000,000 people > 340,000,000 people * 6.1 cases of cervical cancer * 0.9 efficacy / 100,000 people
Your world view assigns equally negative utility to at most 18,214 shots as 1 case of cervical cancer.
Put another way: If you were told you had to either take a shot every day, or you are guaranteed to get cancer, would you really choose the cancer?
It is shocking that there are still places in the world where this is controversial. You can tell a lot about the qualities of a society by the way they care for their own.
I feel your comment is a generalisation and could be construed as provocation/trolling. Probably not your intention, but just so you are aware how this is coming over.
Better maybe: “societies that have good health care thrive” or something like this. Sounds less judgmental and it doesn’t put all US Americans in one basket.
I fully agree on the content though, only criticising the form here.
Anyway, well done Denmark. We are trying to do the same thing here in Australia with some success. Not sure how it became about the US but good luck to you all as well.
> 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...
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2008/press-releas...
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
> No cases of invasive cancer were recorded in women immunized at 12 or 13 years of age irrespective of the number of doses. > Women vaccinated at 14 to 22 years of age and given 3 doses of the bivalent vaccine showed a significant reduction in incidence compared with all unvaccinated women
For the second group, cases dropped from 8.4 to 3.2 per 100k.
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...
Humor is welcome here, but it needs to have some substance behind it.
[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...
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.
I experienced zero side effects when I got HPV vaxxed at 38yo.
from https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/by_th...
Am I understanding that correctly?
It's incredibly prevalent, but most people clear it within a couple years, and won't even know that they had it. The time to clear it is just variable and depends on your body's immune response, the longer you go without clearing it the higher the cancer risk.
Doesn't necessarily have HPV their whole life - time-to-clearance is somewhat variable.
And yes, both slower clearance and just more infections are both associated with increased risk.
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.
What a great system.
Vaccinating older populations is similarly just a less clear-cut case, but it's a cost-effectiveness argument, not one purely driven by if the vaccine offers protection.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/... ("Kennedy played key role in Gardasil vaccine case against Merck")
> "Details of the Gardasil litigation show how Kennedy took action beyond sowing doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines in the court of public opinion and helped build a case against the pharmaceutical industry before judges and juries."
> "Kennedy, a longtime plaintiffs' lawyer, became involved in the Gardasil litigation in 2018 in collaboration with Robert Krakow, an attorney specializing in vaccine injury cases, Krakow said"
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.
Feels based anti-science.
>HPV vaccine is not risk free
No vaccine is "risk free." The entire point is that vaccinations overall have less risks than you would suffer if you had gotten the disease it's helping safeguard against.
Drugs, though, probably have very limited potential.
Bad news is that many countries came close to wiping out measles et al. too, but it takes sustained effort to keep things like that.
"We have a vaccine to prevent some very serious cancers."
"But it might turn my daughter into a hussy."
What happened to "I just want my children to be happy" ?
Like, anti-vaxers died at higher rates in Covid [1]. This will continue across disease outbreaks, particularly ones for which we have near-comprehensive vaccines like measles. And given antivax sensibility is heritable (through parenting, not genes), one would expect this to stabilize the population over several generations to one that doesn’t have this defect.
I had seen attempts to engage with these arguments in good faith. It was wasted effort.
in your fish analogy, you eat mecury directly, but wont eat fish that might have mercury.
the communicable disease is itself quite dangerous
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp048286
The docket shows us that pharmaceutical companies are serial felons who have paid some of the largest fines in history for lying about their products. It is prudent to be skeptical until proven otherwise.
Edit: To all the pro-Pfizer downvoters, feel free to take some Zantac. You have learned nothing.
A slur.
> “anti-vax" is a term used to dismiss [dissent]
No, it’s a term used to dismiss people who keep bringing up the same arguments that have been refuted over and over.
Prior to Covid, the antivaxx scene was vaguely left-and-green oriented, biomoms, vegans and other "very natural" people; you would expect them to vote for Greens or even more alternative parties. This changed abruptly and now the antivaxx scene is mostly rightwing, but the common base is still the same distrust.
I wonder if this is the price we pay for radical informational transparency. Nowadays, democratic countries with reasonable freedom of press cannot really prevent their own fuckups from surfacing in the worst possible way. Some people react by complete rejection of anything that comes from "official" channels and become ripe for manipulation from other actors.
with radical information transparency, id expect both views to be equally easy to parse and to be recommended both, in which case the choice would be obvious to everyone, or at least they could very well describe their risk tolerance to different risks, or laziness, for why they made a certain choice.
i expect im not up to date on all the vaccines i should be, but its on laziness rather than gwtting bad information. ...also a lack of information on which ones i should have.
Such people have always existed, unfortunately. I don't think it's a result of anything particularly new.
In the 1990s, you had maybe 15 minutes a day on average to consume news, either from a paper newspaper, or from an evening TV relation. Now, quite a lot of people spend 20 times as much time doomscrolling. Of course the impact will be much more massive.
Unlike the paper products, which just lie around when not actively seeked for, the algorithms determining your feed have a lot more agency.
Recognizing that technology is now so convenient, psychology manipulative, and operates in a furiously fast feedback evolutionary regime, and that it has radically increased the spread of cultural irrationality isn't about "blame" in a judgy moral way.
It is about characterizing major factors behind the problem.
The enormous amount of near instant coordinated (by intention or dynamic), interactive misinformation, made so conveniently available that large percentages of the population routinely and enthusiastically expose themselves to it, participate in reinforcing it, throughout their typical day, is very new.
> "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." -- James Baldwin
And 'nutjobs' may be pejorative, but I'll hold on to it as apt. At the same time I assign no blame, for it is an issue of cognition. The best way I can describe it is, intelligence is not a single factor. And it's not even a few factors. It's a massive bar graph, with 1000s upon 1000s of bars, each delineating a different aspect of intelligence.
A lucky few may score high on all those bars, yet even the most intelligent of us tend to score high on only some of those bars. And my point is, I've seen people immensely intelligent on some of those bars, yet astonishingly deficient on others.
We love to make fun of politicians, so I'll use one as an example here. Politicians tend to be incredibly personable, and very difficult to dislike in person. They exude congeniality, they read you like a book, and can often orate your wallet completely out of your pocket, and you'll thank them for it too. It's how they managed to go so far politically, yet some of these same politicians have severe and massive deficiencies in cognition.
Back to the pointed sticks, and the nutjobs who would wield them pre-tech, these people are simply as they are. Yet in the past, you'd see one nutjob in a community, and they'd be surrounded by normalcy, it would temper them, mitigate their effect, sand off their edges so to speak.
Yet as our communities grew in size and scope, these individuals could finally meet more of their ilk. A large city might have dozens of them, larger still cities hundreds, and they'd meet up. And as technology grew, and access to the printing press become possible for all, and for less and less cost, these same people could then send their madness in newsletter form to even those small communities where maybe only one nutjob existed.
But those people needed to still connect in some way. Maybe through an ad in the back of a magazine, or something akin yet far less gated by 'normals'.
Yet today? Now? Algorithms match you up with all those nutjobs. Where before you might live in isolation, and the friends you had might scoff at that weird idea you have, now you've found a community of hundreds, or thousands just like you! And they all affirm your madness, they pat you on the back, they congratulate you for seeing the light! They whisper all those sweet nothings into your ear, all those secret things you knew were true, and they listen to all you say on the subject.
For the first time in your life you have a home, a community, and before TikTok, or some weird forum, it would have never all been possible. You'd have been isolated, even in the age of magazines, and print, for you'd have never found one another.
And worse, now profit enters the system. Those who would steal, or thieve, or build bridges with sub-standard concrete for profit, or anything for money regardless of cost to us all, appear on this scene. They see those nutjobs, and they seek to profit from them. They own youtube, or tiktok channels, and often do not believe in anything but profit. They'll tell you anything you want to hear, espouse any crazy idea, and like that bridge built with substandard concrete, they'll take the money and run as society collapses around them.
This profit motive was always there, see cults. Yet the reach and scope was just not what it is today, there is so much more range given to a single person now.
Your local crazy used to get patronizing nods. Now they get 100 million views.
Measles is highly infectious, you need a very high percentage of the population immune in order to maintain herd immunity. So long as you have herd immunity the only source of infection is travel--but note that this works both ways. It's much more likely to be Americans catching it while traveling than immigrants bringing it. They at least used to trace the original case in such outbreaks, it was normally someone who had been abroad.
We saw the same thing with Covid--quarantine against Chinese people, while ignoring Americans returning from the very same places even when they said they had symptoms. (And irrelevant besides, the strain from Europe quickly dominated.)
Australia has almost eradicated cervical cancer through HPV vaccination efforts, other countries will get there as a function of uptake and cohort replacement. There is a recently developed blood test that can detect the biomarkers from HPV related cancers years before they would traditionally be diagnosed, but prevention via vaccination remains key.
https://www.who.int/news/item/17-11-2023-global-partners-che...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV_vaccine
https://academic.oup.com/jnci/advance-article-abstract/doi/1... | https://doi.org/10.1093/jnci/djaf249
It will continue to be necessary because there are more strains of HPV than those that are targeted by vaccines.
The way this article is broken into sections is a bit misleading - the recommendation for cervical cancer hasn't been annual screening for a long time. This is acknowledged in the text, but even there is unclear.
“In 2017, one of the first birth cohorts of women in Denmark who were HPV-vaccinated as teenage girls in 2008 reached the screening age of 23 years,” Nonboe explained."
It will take several more years to see the effects on other strains. It seems to have been wildly successful so far.
Now they are.
Which means some new strain will become common. Is there any data on how quickly/easily new strains show up? I assume it's not as fast as cold/flu, but if it is people will need a vaccine yearly, and that's not realistic.
HPV is a double-stranded DNA virus with very high replication fidelity. The emergence of types like 16 and 18 happened hundreds of thousands of years ago.
I did know it was quite slow but not just how slow. Very long term vaccine efficacy is expected.
16/18 were chosen because they are highly carcinogenic and cause the most cancer, they are the two most aggressive high risk types. They cause 70% of all the cancer but are much less than 70% of the cases of high risk strains.
It takes real mental gymnastics to downplay how positive this vaccine is.
Yes
https://ourworldindata.org/hpv-vaccination-world-can-elimina...
And note that it's possible for a vaccine to have a negative survival benefit yet be a good idea--in a population with herd immunity a vaccine provides little benefit to those who receive it so long as enough people receive it to provide the herd immunity. But if too many don't get it the risk from not getting it goes up considerably. Look at what has been happening with measles--measles was basically unheard of, the quacks said not to vaccinate (remember, Wakefield was attacking a specific vaccine that he stood to profit from the controversy, Worm Brain doesn't believe in infectious disease in the first place), now we have people dying of measles.
this reads like a big grain of salt on the results.
from the paper, its more specific that girls who got the DTP vaccine and also not another vaccine afterwards have a higher mortality rate.
but also that its wildly different by location
Sure. This one hasn’t.
That said, I frankly think people should be free to vaccinate as they please, and cities, states and private businesses free to include and exclude folks based on vaccination status as they please. (I’m also in favor of letting insurance companies choose if they want to cover diseases someone chose to get by going unvaccinated.)
That is exactly why we need to apply the precautionary principle for new drugs like this one.
> That said, I frankly think people should be free to vaccinate as they please
Never said they shouldn't be. Just need to be skeptical of organizations like GAVI and their PR, as they have a huge conflict of interest in promoting and profiting from these drugs.
That would be democratic and efficient.
2. It needs to be confirmed in ~10 years, but it seems very likely that women given the shots that protect against all high risk HPV types will see almost no infections from them.
This site is full of people perfectly capable of reading most studies. I would much rather see these links go to studies than endless clickbait articles about studies.
The conclusion of the study show that about 30% of the women in the study from 2017-2014 tested positive for one of several types of HPV infection. This does appear to be a reduction from an earlier 2013 study but the earlier study was by different authors with different methodology so gauging the scale of the reduction is not straightforward. My opinion is that a safe conclusion of the study is that HPV prevalence has not increased.
> 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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.sdu.dk/en/nyheder/faldende-fertilitet
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=western+democracies+decreasi...
