‘Don’t slip up on HPV jab for boys timeline’

PLANS to roll out the HPV vaccine to boys next year have been welcomed – but the Government has been told it must commit to this timeline.

It was revealed yesterday that the Government is preparing to ‘put in train the procedures’ which are required to extend the potentially life-saving jab to boys, as it is currently only offered to girls in first year of secondary school.

This comes on foot of a draft report from the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa), which determined a gender-neutral programme for the vaccine for the cancer-causing human papillomavirus ‘would have considerable benefits’.

A public consultation on the issue will conclude on September 7, but Taoiseach Leo Varadkar confirmed recently that the Government is ‘going to put in train the procedures needed to introduce that next year, to extend the vaccine to boys’.

Campaigner Stephen Teap – whose late wife Irene was affected by the CervicalCheck controversy – hailed the roll-out of the HPV vaccine to boys as being ‘a very positive step in the right direction’.

Also, Labour’s health spokesman Alan Kelly yesterday described the move as being ‘extremely welcome’. Mr Kelly said his party ‘has been leading the campaign’ to make the jab gender neutral, and that Labour has ‘worked hard to ensure crossparty support and political will to providing the vaccine to boys’.

He continued: ‘The timeline that the Taoiseach has set out must be adhered to so that we can have herd immunity and protect the population into the future.

‘Extending the HPV vaccine to boys is a common sense, evidence-based measure which is already in place in countries like Australia.’

It is estimated that the extension of the HPV vaccine programme to include boys will cost an additional €10.4million over five years.