No worries. My own posts frequently suffer the same problem - and I should deservedly be hit upside the head hard for that “shitty parent” comment. Thank you for the relatively gentle smack instead of what I actually deserved!
You are right, of course, in that warts don’t mean automatic cancer. But, since most cases of cevical, and a large number of cases of vaginal cancer ARE caused by HPV, where is the problem in reducing the risk by using a vaccine? That is my thinking. We go to the beach, the kids get sunscreen applied. Just in case. They all get the MMR vaccine (as seperate doses - I still don’t trust the combined dose) as I am not risking their health down the line.
We, as one of the very very few things the UN actually was forced to do right by, I believe, the USA, even wiped out smallpox by vaccinating every last person on the planet. I actually remember the day it was announced as an extinct disease. Why not HPV?
Oh, the vaccine isn’t perfect, but it protects against (I think - it used to be 4 but has been uprated since I last looked) 10 of the strains of HPV that are definitely known to cause cancer.
My kids were, and grandkids are, taught abstinence. On some it worked - on my elder daughter, having given us 6 grandchildren and counting already, I don’t think that lesson took particularly well!
They were/are also taught - by me - what safe sex is and where the condoms, spermicide and barriers are kept since we don’t have the option of home schooling here and I well remember what it is like to be a randy teen and a father before 20!
I will do everything in my power to keep them safe from harm without raising them to be coddled wimps. Like you, I strongly dislike being told how to raise my kids, but if something comes up that helps them they get it, if I have to eat lettuce sandwiches for a month to pay for it.
Without the vaccine, the chances of my grandaughters developing cervical cancer is low but measurable. With the vaccine it is much, much lower. Worth it, in my book.
I think on this topic we’ll have to agree to disagree, since you won’t persuade me and I won’t persuade you. But thank you for the spirited discussion!
I’m glad we all avoid distempers, dyspepsia and anginas, whether chav, mod, rocker or oxbridgite.
To me, I would have been happier to know as a a parent that the the vaccine stops some common forms of warts. I don’t like warts. I hates warts. I have a wart-remover first-aid pack which freezes them off ready in the bathroom cabinet.
I bought that when I happened one morning to see a wart growing on my fingertip. Awful, awful, horrid. Ran to the druggist right away and spent $25 for it. It was my first wart in at least four decades.
Used to get them all the time as a kid. I grew up in swampy area and had many water-loving reptiles as in interesting things to capture, examine and keep awhile. Then I didn’t mind warts, or getting all mucky, climbing some moss-slime covered tree.
But it is wrong for the reasons the stalwart and four-square Rick Santorum pointed out, to compel a vaccine in what is not a emergency or extremely urgent public health situation, even if that compulsion allows a possible (albeit a not-so-easy procedural hurdle) opt-out. And it is MOST wrong, from the stand point of liberty and of rule of law in a representative democratic republic, for any magistrate, executive, minister or president to give such a ORDER, as if he is a regent.
Such an demand upon the public is properly had via the legislature in ordinary circumstances, or via a full regulation creation process that includes public hearings, testimony and counter-testimony, and then ruling by some expert committee or citizen jury.
For such a decision to be reached by one man and so ordered is NOT democracy. It is dictatorship. It is proper for the President of the US to make such an order to the general public only in the most chaotic and extreme of emergencies. In his role as Commander in Chief the President can order the military to get vaccinated, but it stops within that group.