The HPV backlash
Now leading throat cancer charity says it’ll sue NHS if it persists in refusal to offer boys as well as girls the jab that can prevent killer virus
A CHARITY that supports victims of Britain’s fastest-growing form of cancer is threatening to sue the NHS over its refusal to vaccinate boys against the virus that causes it.
The Throat Cancer Foundation argues the policy is blatant sex discrimination and will condemn thousands to a painful death or months of gruelling treatment in adulthood.
In a dramatic boost to this newspaper’s campaign to vaccinate boys aged 12 and 13 against the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), lawyers representing the foundation last week told the NHS they will seek a High Court judicial review unless the policy is changed.
Girls have been vaccinated since 2008, but the NHS Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) claims vaccinating boys would not be ‘cost-effective’ – saying it is cheaper to treat the tumours than vaccinate lads, which would cost £22million a year.
Spread by sexual contact and kissing, HPV causes thousands of mouth, throat, anal and genital cancers each year. In addition, the incidence of HPV-related head and neck cancers – already the fourth most common type among men – is projected to more than double by the early 2020s.
Patients go through months of surgery, chemo and radiotherapy, and if they survive, are usually left with permanent side-effects.
In an unrelated development last week, NHS England announced it will start offering HPV vaccine to gay and bisexual men who attend sexual health clinics up to the age of 45 – but not adult women.
Critics argue this will only deepen the scope of the discrimination.
The Throat Cancer Foundation’s lawyer, Rosa Curling, from solicitors Leigh Day, said the vaccine apartheid policy breaches the Equality Act. She added: ‘This situation cannot be allowed to continue. This cancer-preventing vaccine must be provided to both genders without further delay.
‘A recommendation by the JCVI to deny boys the HPV vaccination would be discriminatory, and in our view, unlawful.’
The JCVI has been ‘reviewing’ whether to recommend the vaccine for boys since 2013, but at one of its thrice-yearly meetings last week, it did not even discuss the matter.
Jamie Rae, the Throat Cancer Foundation chairman and an HPV cancer survivor, said: ‘Throat cancer caused by HPV is a ticking time-bomb. The rates are going up and up, but this terrible disease is avoidable. Not offering the vaccine to boys directly discriminates against them and is putting their health at risk.
‘In not recommending vaccination for boys, the JCVI are acting unlawfully.’
Mr Rae said offering vaccine to adult gay men was no solution. He said heterosexual men are just as much at risk, ‘and to be offered a vaccine later in life is not equal to the protection offered to females who are typically immunised in their first year of high school.’
Peter Baker, director of HPV Action – a campaign group supported by 40 leading health organisations including the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the Royal Society of Public Health – said: ‘The decision to vaccinate gay men opens up new inequalities, and for those men, it is too little, too late.’
Urging Mail on Sunday readers to support our campaign by writing to their MP, he pointed out that 80 per cent of all adults have been infected by HPV, of whom an increasing number will develop cancers.
Mr Baker said: ‘Vaccinating adult men is a classic case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.
‘They will be vaccinating people who have already been infected. The only way to protect men is to vaccinate boys.’
Speaking on behalf of the NHS, Michael Edelstein, an epidemiologist who works for Public Health England, said gay men would be offered the vaccine because they are a ‘high risk group’.
He agreed that in theory, boys of 13 could demand the vaccine by saying they might be gay, but added: ‘Our evidence shows that this is likely to be unusual.’ He added that a pilot programme had suggested that ‘men aren’t coming to sexual health clinics just to request an HPV vaccine’.
‘Discriminatory and unlawful’