Here’s how to derail one of the best advances in women’s healthcare in years: take one aggressive drug-company effort, add a stealth campaign by far-right organizations who equate sexual safety with promiscuity, and throw in a dash of scare tactics by those who oppose all vaccination.  Voila, a backlash strong enough to derail a safe and effective vaccine against the virus that leads to cervical cancer. 

Nationwide, legislation requiring vaccination against human papilloma virus (HPV) is quietly being put on ice now.  Meanwhile over six million Americans will get a new case of the virus this year, 10,000 women will get cervical cancer, and more than 3,500 women will die from cervical cancer. 

Clouds of inappropriate lobbying by the vaccine’s maker should not obscure the fact that mandatory vaccination itself remains innocent, and imperative. 

Vaccination must be made mandatory or it will never be widespread.  Historically the only way that the government and private insurers cover the costs of vaccination and ensure public education is when vaccination is required to attend school.  Requiring the vaccine also will ensure that young women get the vaccine when it is most effective – well before their first exposure to HPV. 

Parental rights arguments are no more than a red herring that far-right groups have successfully used to distract parents.  Chastised when they initially opposed the vaccine by arguing that safer sex promotes promiscuity, far right groups are now mischaracterizing the vaccine as an attack on parents’ rights.  They deliberately disregard the opt-out provisions forty-eight states already allow for religious reasons.  Eighteen states also allow philosophical, personal or conscientious belief exemptions. 

These opt-out provisions are vital.  Certainly all states should have opt-out provisions and many could be better designed.  Mandatory vaccination legislation provides an opportunity to include such revisions where needed. 

In alliance with groups who oppose all vaccines, far right groups have successfully belittled HPV by portraying the virus as not-so-contagious since it is spread by sexual contact rather than through a sneeze.  Yet young people ages 15 to 24 comprise almost half of those infected with HPV. Encouraging a false sense of security about the spread of the disease is an extreme disservice to parents, and endangers their children’s health. 

A vaccine that forces us to talk about the reality of teen sexuality is always going to be an uphill battle.  Yet more than 70% of young women do have sex  by the time they are 19 years old.  Faced with this reality, parental reaction should be to vaccinate; better safe than sorry.  Purity and pap smears alone will not protect from the potentially deadly virus.

If we lose this chance to make the vaccine mandatory we will be denying vital protection to the women who need it most.  Informed parents with resources will still learn about and access the vaccine for their children.  It is those in poverty,  predominantly minority groups, who will continue to experience disproportionately high rates of HPV and cervical cancer.