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Comment by foobiekr | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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