HPV Vaccination for Girls in the USA

No end of stories about this. Google News link here.

Here are the arguments:

• Several HPV strains play a role in (ok, "cause") cervical cancer
• Cervical cancer is expensive to treat
• Cervical cancer kills a lot of people
• HPV is spread by sex

The anti-vaccination side, incidentally the same that's anti-sex-education, states that this will encourage kids to have sex. Bollocks. What do they think the highest teen pregnancy rate in the developed world in the USA means? It means that kids are having sex anyways, and because they know less, more bad things happen. Or maybe because abortion is hard to get too. Either way, the numbers are clear that American teens know diddly about sex, and are paying a high price for the religious "protection."

The pro-vaccination side states that people (and so girls sometime after the years after 11 or 12, the years they recommend administering the vaccine) will have sex, and less cervical cancer is a good thing for everybody, since all of us that matter pay into health insurance of some sort, and that needs to cover the medical costs for the treatment for the majority of people.

It's sad that this argument is actually happening. With the sexual ignorance plentiful in the USA already, it's clear that the target age group won't really know what the innoculation they're getting is actually for. Tell them it's against cervical cancer, and innoculate them. There is nothing in this paragraph that would actually encourage a pre-teen to have sex after (hopefully years after).

Making a fuss over it only raises the profile of the fact that this is protection against an STD. Now perverts all over are trying to figure out how to lure young girls off myspace who have had the shot to say "you're protected from everything, you should have sex with me" and other stupid stuff like that. I suppose that's what the religious right wanted all along: Ban the Internet. It's bad that people can communicate, since they can misuse communication to pervert our children. You can say the same about speech at bus stops.