Uplifting News

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.

Even back in 2016 there was a push to correct this.