The human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine has resulted in an almost 90% reduction in the number of HPV infections in young women since 2010 (Mesher et al, 2018). Research has determined that the prevalence of HPV infections, which cause the majority of cervical cancers, fell by about 80% between 2010 and 2016 in women aged 16-18 years.
The provision of HPV vaccination for boys was secured at the end of July 2018 when the Government announced it would extend the use of the vaccine to boys aged 12-13 years (Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), 2018)—a vaccine that can prevent HPV-related cervical, vaginal, penile, anal and oral cancers as well as genital warts. Vaccination has been offered to girls aged between 11 and 13 in England since 2008. Public Health England also carried out a catch-up programme for those girls aged 13-18 who had missed the vaccination. However, the public health minister, Steve Brine, has confirmed that there will be no such catch-up programme for boys. This decision is unacceptable.
The public health minister said in a letter to the shadow public health minister that older boys are already benefitting from ‘herd protection’ (an indirect protection from infectious disease due to the immunity of a significant proportion of the population) because of the earlier vaccination introduction for girls. It was suggested that including a catch-up programme would place additional pressure on NHS delivery services and because of this it will risk delay or disruption to the roll-out of the routine HPV programme for boys or to other vaccination programmes.
HPV vaccination must be made available to all boys who are still at school so that as many as possible are offered protection from this virus that can cause cancer. Globally, other governments have done this, for example, the Australian Government ran a catch-up programme when in 2013 it introduced HPV vaccination for boys (Patel et al, 2018). Why would the public health minister believe boys in England should be different?
No date has, as yet, been set for the introduction of the vaccination for boys, though it could be that the programme will commence in the academic year 2019-2020. This will mean that there will be yet another cohort of boys who we have failed to protect from the HPV virus. The belief of herd immunity is in this instance not good enough, particularly for those men who have sex with men and who have not been vaccinated.
The DHSC should be charged with introducing the vaccination programme for boys and dismiss any idea of waiting for the 2019-2020 academic year to start. It must revisit this reckless idea of not offering a catch-up vaccination programme for boys as soon as possible. Rejecting the catch-up vaccine for boys aged 14–18 years demonstrates the ongoing contempt the Government has for experts in the field and this appears to have been the case since calls were made to provide the vaccine for boys and girls. It has taken 10 years for the vaccine to be made available for boys and this has unduly put boys at unacceptable risk. Not providing catch up for boys flies in the face of both equality and improved health, the opportunity must be seized now to vaccinate as many boys as possible while they are still at school and the Government should be urged to re-consider this matter.
This is a priority and there must be thought given to the logistics of extending the vaccine to boys. The number of clinics offering the vaccine needs to be significantly increased and where nurses are concerned in the implementation of the vaccine then their numbers must be reassessed to ensure that the programme is implemented quickly and safely.