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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   33731 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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it was common to object to the HPV vaccine.

Isn't this more of a 'why should my son take a shot so your daughter can (slightly) lessen the risk of her slutting around' thing than a true concern about vax safety?

Opposite valence- the culture war objection was ‘why are you assuming my daughter is a whore?’.

I mean, yes, but the fact that vaccine safety was brought up as a serious objection to it indicates that anti-vax sentiment on the right isn’t entirely foreign.

That was a big part of it, but maybe another part was it seems like it requires a few doses and lots of people are afraid of needles and want to minimize the number to just the bare essentials (an underappreciated element of vaccine opposition). I was too old by the time it became common, so HPV was never folded into my normal course of vaccination. I'm fairly pro-vaccine, so if I thought my monogamous self would benefit from it I would have consented. But then it became, "well, now I have to talk to my doctor about my lack of sexual partners, do I really want to have this conversation to get a shot that's not even marketed for my protection?"

Really, the fact that the HPV vaccine is marketed as protection from promiscuous sex is a bad, bad strategy because it pushes culture war buttons. But maybe that's the only reason at all it has any value. Does the HPV vaccine provide any protection against the many other kinds of HPV infections people can be exposed to, like warts on various parts of the body and things like that?

Does the HPV vaccine provide any protection against the many other kinds of HPV infections people can be exposed to

No. The line is that it protects against the 2-3 most dangerous ones in terms of causing cancer, but I'm not entirely sure how true that is.

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