I was at the store today when I overheard two women talking. “Our pediatrician wants Sarah to get that Gardasil vaccine,” the first one said. “And I said absolutely not. She’s 9 years old. I am not giving her a shot for a sexually transmitted disease. That’s absurd. She can have the shot when she’s 18.”
For this woman, it wasn’t a question of vaccines themselves. This isn’t part of the delayed vaccination debate, or whether vaccines cause autism. This is simply a woman flatly deciding that her daughter certainly won’t be sexually active until she goes off to college.
I can’t say that I agree with her logic. Statistics say that nearly half of all teens are sexually active. With recent published reports that 1 in 4 sexually active teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease, it seems risky to assume a) that your daughter will still be a virgin at 18, or b) that she won’t be exposed to HPV before she gets that shot.
I don’t have a 9-year-old daughter, but it seems to me that if you believe in the value of the vaccine for the prevention of certain types of cervical cancer — and she must if she’s willing to give her daughter the vaccine at all — then the time to vaccinate is as early as possible, long before sexual activity is an issue.