It wouldn’t be an overstatement to call the HPV vaccine a medical miracle.
“It’s like the gift that keeps giving,” says Mark Jit, a professor of vaccine epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Not only is it the sole vaccine that can prevent cancer, “we discover it’s an even better vaccine as time goes on,” he says.
Since its development and rollout in the mid-2010s, the HPV vaccine’s prowess at heeding off cervical cancer rates has been remarkable. Over an 11-year period in the United Kingdom, cases of cervical cancer fell by 87 percent among those who received the vaccine compared to those who didn’t. It’s conceivable