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Comment by technofiend | Hacker News Reader

As with any vaccine the ideal outcome is the general population is vaccinated and we develop a herd immunity. For a deadly disease like HIV spending the effort to eradicate the disease would be for the best, but like HPV vaccination there's a moral judgment tied to it that will prevent some people from accepting everyone should be vaccinated.

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As a side note, it was ridiculous that it took so long for boys to start getting the HPV vaccine. If you're a public health person, even if your only concern is cancer in women, you still want to vaccinate boys to improve herd immunity. If you're a heterosexual man, even if you only care about cancer in women, you would like to have been vaccinated if you are a remotely decent person, because you don't want to give women cancer -- especially the women you have sex with, who, generally, are going to be people you care about. And additionally there are male health concerns related to HPV -- for heterosexuals, primarily oral cancer, and for homosexuals, possibly also anal cancer (these being generalizations, of course). These are nasty, lethal diseases. Surely they should be prevented as well? Given the multitude of common-sense reasons to do it, for the benefit of so many people, it was frustrating to watch it happen only with such a long delay.

Much of the opposition seemed to come from a vengeful kind of religious conservative who wants sex to have negative consequences. Those conservatives represent a familiar kind of evil.

Yet I suspect that some opposition also came from women who had a problem with protecting men's sexual health. This is a newer kind of evil, and even less sensible for women who are heterosexual, for the herd-immunity reasons I outlined in my first paragraph.

A more-widely-administered HPV vaccine was literally a win-win for everyone, gay and straight, female and male, and still it came about slowly and faced opposition. This made me despair of my fellow humans.

You do know that anal or oral sex with/by/for males isn't tied to sexuality. Straight heterosexual couples can have anal sex.

You're right, and I've added some defensive language, but please don't get distracted from the main point, which is that we had an opportunity to reduce the spread of a contagious cancer in people of all sexes, genders, and orientations, and yet we got into stupid fights instead of doing it quickly.

How would a man catch sexually transmitted anal cancer from another person, if not through homosexual activity?

Google (if you're not a work) "Anilingus".

Yet another reason to vaccinate.

Don't religious people claim that limiting your sex activity to one single person is the best way to prevent diseases at large scale? [obviously denying the frustration and alienation that goes with it]

What does "religious people" mean? ;-)

But sure, that works when people do it. Just like social distancing.

Relying on other people's good behavior at a large scale is a bad plan though.

Also not sure which number of partners brings the most frustration or alienation. One? Three? Zero? Each situation seems to bring its own problems. Life is suffering.

("One" is the best plan for most people, but it depends a lot on which one...)

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