The horrible people who prefer cancer to vaccination

I’m getting really fed up and pissed off at these utterly heartless bastards who would sacrifice someone’s health for the sake of their own paranoid fantasies.

By the Daily Mail’s own admission in the article, HPV is responsible for 700 deaths from cervical cancer every year. But they “revealed”, in their best stoke-the-controversy fashion, that the NHS is paying for this treatment “at the cost to the taxpayer of £241 per course of treatment”. So little to prevent death from cancer, but too much for the Daily Mail and the absurd arguments of the “National Family Campaign” or “Family & Youth Concern”.

The argument that being vaccinated against a sexually-transmitted disease makes you leap into bed is so silly on the face of it that it’s difficult to comprehend the kind of person that could believe it. Every single statement made in that article makes me want to reach out and slap someone, hard.

“It could be seen as helping to promote or encourage sexual activity in girls before they are physically or mentally mature.” (Hugh McKinney, National Family Campaign)

There are two points here, neither of which follow from the facts. First, that being vaccinated promotes sexual activity. Strange that the MMR vaccine doesn’t promote teenage pregnancy — even though mumps is a cause of male sterility and rubella causes developmental defects during pregnancy. Second, that vaccine can make someone have sex before they are mature. The only thing that will prevent that is adequate sex education and fewer religious twats turning sex into a forbidden fruit.

“Why should we spend so much money on vaccines against diseases which are totally preventable in other ways? We should be discouraging young people from having intercourse at an even younger age rather than promoting it.” (Dr Trevor Stammers, Family & Youth Concern)

The “other ways” hinted at here are not listed. I can only guess he means that great placebo panacea, abstinence. Of course, abstinence doesn’t prevent HPV transmission, unless what Dr Stammers really advocates is lifelong celibacy. If no-one had sex until the age of twenty five, then it would take longer before infected people spread the virus — but it would spread. There is no magical cut-off point of maturity past which HPV is no longer a threat.

Family & Youth Concern’s statement is completely irrelevant. They’re only there to issue their default opinion — promoting moral panic about the “permissive society” — which happens to align quite nicely with that of the Daily Mail.

Thankfully the commenters on the article are pretty much on the ball (for a change). There is one nutcase who seems to think that Nu Labour (sic) are doing this to “breed” the next generation of voters (!). Even amongst Daily Mail readers that’s a minority opinion. Bookdrunk also has more and some interesting links to previous HPV and sex education stories.

What do you think — are these anti-HPV campaigners seriously deluded or simply scum?