Has anyone chosen not to allow their daughter to have the hpv vaccine?

[namechanger70]

I am not madly keen on vaccinations per se but if they are necessary then my children will have them. My daughter is due to have the hpv vaccine soon. When I last looked into this several years ago there was a lot of bad news about this vaccine, its use was suspended, albeit temporarily, in some countries and you do not need to look very far to find accounts of tragic consequences for some. How much of this is true and what proportion of people it affects is a moot point.
Is there anyone on here that is knowledgeable on this subject and decided not to vaccinate their children with this vaccine? It is extremely difficult to make an informed decision; many articles may be scaremongering and I don’t think reading official sources is necessarily any better as they are only going to be pro vaccination. Happy to receive any constructive thoughts. Thanks very much.

It usually costs >£100 per injection and you need a course of two (u15) or 3 (older than that)

Boys will be done on NHS (in England) age 12/13 but with no catch up programme for those older.

@NotCitrus
"For reference, smears no longer rely on staff staring at slides looking for funny-shaped cells (and believe me, the couple hours I had to do that for at uni was more than enough), but now fluorescent dye shows up the dodgy ones - which is why they can use those more gentle brushes rather than the old smearers."

Where did you read this? This is not true. There is a test using fluorescent dye undergoing trials but it is not in use in the screening programme and is nowhere near it. The cervex brooms are used with liquid based cytology (since about 2001), nothing to do with fluorescent dyes either.
In the meantime the screening staff are still looking for dyskaryosis - abnormal nuclei (not necessarily funny shaped cells). Even with Primary HPV testing, the screening staff then read and interpret the cells from the HPV Positive samples.

The Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) is responsible for at least 95% of cervical cancers, around 85% of anal cancers, 70% of vaginal, vulval, and oropharyngeal (now the most common HPV associated cancer in the US) cancers, and 60% of penile cancers. How much more do you need to know??

I must be a bit slow as it never occurred to me that boys should also receive this vaccine. Mother of girls but yes, why aren't they routinely offered this?

My DD is a terrible needle phobic. The performance with her hpv vacc was a nightmare . We had to have the nurse come to our house to do the 2nd one. Having been CIN3 myself there was no way on this earth that she wasn't getting that vaccination.

In July 2018 the UK Government announced that the HPV vaccination programme will now be offered to both boys and girls www.gov.uk/government/news/hpv-vaccine-to-be-given-to-boys-in-england

Thanks janin that is one good thing the gov has done. As i said i didn't kniw as i only have dd's

Thanks for all of this. Some of you have missed the point though - I am not saying that the vaccine does not have huge benefits. What I was asking about was the risk of the vaccine itself . " It won’t harm them" (see above) is absolutely not the whole answer and of no comfort to those who do have adverse effects.

There have been quite a few links posted that show the vac is statistically extremely safe. If you're waiting for someone to come along and say it's guaranteed risk free, that's not going to happen. Nothing is completely risk free. But you're not weighing two balanced sides here; you're weighing research against anecdotal instances.

Without exception, all medical interventions have risks. We do them in cases where the benefits clearly exceed the risk, as is the case with the HPV vaccine.

You bear massively larger risks every time you put your child in a car, but you don't hesitate to do that every day.

Do this as a thought experiment. Recall the days before vaccines when families routinely lost children to infectious diseases. What choice would they have made if given the option to vaccinate?

@MissConductUS my grandmother lost two siblings to measles before the age of 8, and when I was little I met a friend of my mother's who had diphtheria before the days of vaccines. It left him deaf and with nervous system damage. When I was a kid there was never any question about whether or not you had a vaccine; you took whatever was offered.

sixcupsoftea

Same here

blueangel my grandmother lost two siblings in a diptheria epidemic.

Of course vaccines carry a risk - a very, very small one. We vaccinate when (at a population level) the risk of the illness outweigh the risks of the vaccine - generally by several orders of magnitude.

Everything we do is about balancing risks. You take a risk first (and indeed) every time you let your child go to the park or to the shops where the trip involves crossing a road. You balance that risk against the fact that they have to become functioning independent adults in a world which includes roads. Allowing your children to cross the road is significantly riskier than taking them to have a vaccination.