Archives

Categories

vaccinations

You might expect that a vaccine against a disease that causes cancer would be widely embraced as soon as it was proven safe. If the disease in question was transmitted by contaminated food or water, sneezing, or most of the other ways that diseases spread then it probably would be widely accepted.

However recently there is a recently released vaccine against Cervical Cancer. The virus in question is only transmitted sexually. Apparently 80% of women in the US will catch it before the age of 50 (so it’s obviously not scaring people away from unsafe sex).

There is a strong Christian lobby against the vaccine, their idea is that if sex doesn’t cause debilitating and/or fatal conditions such as cervical cancer then their daughters will have less reason to avoid it. The fact is that religious people are statistically more likely to practice unsafe sex (see this link) so it seems unlikely that preventing one of the STDs that religious people might catch will affect the amount of unsafe sex.

One thing that seems strange about the entire discussion is that no-one has raised the possibility of vaccinating boys. Vaccinating boys could lead to the virus being eradicated. Even if an eradication attempt fails it will help save some of the Christian girls.

Comments are closed.