A 70% effectiveness rate for a vaccine that will need to be taken again in the future and is for a rare and very treatable cancer but is being marketed to elementary school girls is running into resistance; educated mothers. Arguments for the HPV vaccine are not great and skeptical mothers are not buying it despite hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing. Yet.
And it isn't cost keeping parents from allowing the HPV vaccine to be administered to sixth graders, it's the education of the parents. The more educated they are, the less they consent - even when the financial and healthcare barriers are removed.
So what should be done? Spend more money framing the debate, concludes a new analysis in this week's PLoS Medicine. Gina Ogilvie and colleagues surveyed parents of grade 6 girls (age 11) in a publicly funded school-based program in British Columbia, Canada, to determine the level of uptake of the first dose of the HPV vaccine, and to examine the factors involved in their decision to allow receipt of the vaccine.
Sixty five percent of the 2,025 parents who completed the survey had consented to their daughter receiving the first dose of HPV vaccine. By contrast, more than 85% of the parents reported to have consented to hepatitis B and meningitis C vaccinations for their daughters. Of those who did not consent, almost a third of the parents said concern about the vaccine's safety was their main reason and one in eight said they had not been given sufficient information to make an informed decision.
Both of those are pretty good reasons not to rush to experiment on your 11 year old.
Parents who did not choose to have their daughters vaccinated cited unknown safety of the HPV vaccine first and then age followed by a lack of information.
The authors report that a positive parental attitude towards vaccination and a parental belief that HPV vaccination did not promote sexual practices in 11 year olds increased the likelihood of a daughter receiving the HPV vaccine.
Having a family with two parents or three or more children and having well-educated parents decreased the likelihood of a daughter receiving the vaccine.
Yes, the more educated the parents, the less likely they were to give consent to the HPV vaccine. Scientists always wanted more skeptical consumers and apparently they are here.
Competing interests: McNeil is a member of the Canadian National Advisory Committee on Immunization. Dobson is presently a member of the British Columbia Immunization Sub-committee which advises the provincial government on practical issues related to the implementation of publicly funded immunization programs. From 2000 to 2008 Dobson was a member of the National Advisory Committee on Immunization for Canada. In 2008 Dobson attended an Advisory Board for Merck for a vaccine not yet licensed. This was not the vaccine used in the Provincial HPV vaccine program discussed in this paper. Dobson was paid an honorarium work on this advisory board.
Citation: Ogilvie G, Anderson M, Marra F, McNeil S, Pielak K, et al. (2010) A Population-Based Evaluation of a Publicly Funded, School-Based HPV Vaccine Program in British Columbia, Canada: Parental Factors Associated with HPV Vaccine Receipt. PLoS Med 7(5): e1000270. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000270