It's barely been 2 days since the Indian government announced free HPV vaccine for adolescent girls and social media has erupted with all sorts of reactions.
While some of those reactions were outright hilarious (plot by a billionaire to facilitate his perversions), some were quite obnoxious, mixing every kind of bigotry you find on Indian social media to brainwash you into believing the Government is running a population control programme in disguise.
To be honest, any criticisms from outside the medical fraternity must be taken at their face value. What haunts me, is the number of doctors who are blatantly writing against the vaccine without understanding how it works and the amount of research conducted to reject this claim of the vaccine decreasing fertility.
It doesn't take you a medical degree to understand that the vaccine is made using recombinant DNA technology, not magic, not live virus, and definitely not anything that messes with your body’s ability to have kids.
All they do is take the gene for HPV’s outer coat protein (L1) and put it into yeast/ other harmless cells. These cells then make the protein again, which neatly assembles into virus-like particles (VLPs). They look like HPV, so the immune system pays attention, but they contain no DNA from the virus, meaning they can’t infect you, replicate, or do anything suspicious. Your immune system makes antibodies, flags the virus as a known enemy, and stays ready. That’s it. End of story.
And fertility? Completely untouched. The vaccine doesn’t go anywhere near ovaries, eggs, or the HPO axis. It doesn’t rewrite DNA, 'weaken' reproductive organs, or secretly sterilize people. Its only job is to teach the immune system to block HPV at the door. This technology has been tested and used for decades; even the Hepatitis B vaccine you give to 1 day old babies use this technology!
Now you might argue, there's articles saying amount of pregnancies were observed to be less in vaccinated women compared to unvaccinated women. Most of the results concluded with the same advice. More research needed. Some articles even went on to get redacted by the publishing journals. On the other hand, almost all of the peer reviewed studies mentioned that the vaccine provides effective and long term protection against the cancer.
We have been conducting vaccinations among poorer sections of our state for the last 6 months now and thankfully, we have barely seen any AEFIs or side effects. It does not mean the vaccine is 100% safe. However, protecting yourself at the cost of 1/1000000th risk of an anaphylactic reaction is worth taking, considering there's vaccines with higher AEFI rates than this one. Also, in our country, treating cervical cancer once diagnosed is equivalent to jumping to the wrong side of the below poverty line. The financial burden is immense. Not for the insurance holding, private-clinic going patients reading this, but for the ones who stay in government hospital queues for hours to get their BSL checked.
For once, the government has taken a wonderful step in improving public healthcare. Although we do need a robust AEFI managing and reporting system to make sure the process is carried out more efficiently. In these last 6 months of our vaccination drive, the highest resistance was met from the social media addicted parents who believe these fear-mongering doctors who post content without having complete knowledge of the subject.
Doctors, your words carry a lot of weight. Please don't jinx this by publically voicing your doubts. Parents, your 14 year old daughter has received about 22 doses of different vaccines till now. If she's fine, there's a good chance she can handle two more without worrying about compromising her fertility.