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Comment by etcetcetcetceta | Hacker News Reader

Suspect this is caused by demographic shift, don't know any people who have even the remotest HPV vaccine hesitation over the past twenty plus years.

Know that it is common among certain demographics though.

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About ten years ago I was at a party and an Australian coworker and I were talking. I casually mentioned the HPV vaccine since his daughter was entering her teens. He declared, “I’m not going to turn my daughter into a whore.”

You may be right that the demographics are shifting but not necessarily in a good way.

Which brings to mind a horrifying and inappropriate counterarguement to such twisted puritianical logic - who says she is consenting if she gets infected? Is it worth adding cancer to a rape victim?

Even without that, the position implies they haven't understood that she's an individual and so her future is her own to determine, at least to a much greater extent than this acknowledges.

What ever happened to parents who just wanted their children to be happy? Maybe she wants to be a whore. The more figuratively you're happy to deploy that term the more likely her choices overlap.

That sort of thinking isn't recent, it's a mindset still kicking around from the days of old. If one were to guess why there's been no serious attempt to make vaccines for common STDs - any idea was killed off. It's a wonder that HPV vaccine escaped this odd mindset.

I last noted this backwards thinking when an early vaccine for covid at the University of Queensland was developed using a protein portion of HIV ... did this old cabal flex its power. Quite sad, despite the reasons given not to use the developed vaccine, didn't pass the pub test.

I absolutely agree that getting the vaccine is obviously the correct thing to do, but:

>"I casually mentioned the HPV vaccine since his daughter was entering her teens."

Is a little weird to do, and seems like it might be downplaying some provocative or nosy behavior.

what kind of demographics? I don't think HPV vaccine is a subject I've ever heard about in the social circles I've been in (whatever the opinion on the vaccine).

Two in particular, those with a distrust of or ignorance to authority, and those with a paternal expectation of abstinence (with extreme punitive consequences for defiance) and therefore no need for such a vaccine.

The former of course is (uncomfortably) why we have seen a resurgence in smallpox, measles, and scabies.

that's not really clear... Like if I knew enough those those two groups to identify them with those descriptors, I would have already understood who they were from the fact they tend to refuse HPV vaccines

perhaps just stick to subjects you're more informed on

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