Denmark close to wiping out cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out

That's right; that particular HHS Secretary comment was about Hepatitis B.

> "“Hepatitis B vaccine was made for prostitutes and for promiscuous gay men,” Kennedy said in an interview on his Children’s Health Defense show in 2022."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/06/25/rfk-jr-vacc...

The WaPo article doesn't bother to refute RFK's lies, but here's /r/medicine responding to them (in the context that's topical this week—RFK ordering the removal of the Hepatitis B vaccine from the children's schedule):

> "Let's be even more clear about this. If you contract Hep B in the first year of life, more than 90% develop the chronic form, and the need for liver transplant is much higher.... Worldwide, the second most common route for children under 5 to catch HBV is from other children, and that's not by doing IV drugs or having sex. (First most common is vertical, through mother.)"

https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1niml9d/kennedys_...

It's not just the past empirical observed rate, it's the type of virus it is/other things that we know about it.

On top of being structurally a dsDNA virus which doesn't change much, HPV is subject to "purifying selection": because of the way it is built and the mechanism it uses to interact with host cells, it is very difficult for it to have productive mutations that don't immediately die out. It's highly constrained in a way that eg influenza, COVID, HIV, are not.

Some pathogens are just easier to deal with than others:

We have been curing syphilis since 1943 with just penicillin. It doesn't develop resistance because it doesn't have horizontal gene transfer and the mechanism it has that penicillin targets is too critical and conserved, it just can't mutate away from it.

Polio mutates quickly, but is extremely constrained, almost all mutations are defective, and the capsid structure is highly conserved. That vaccine has been in use since 1955 without losing effectiveness or introducing new variants.

The biology of HPV says it will be more like those cases, and since the introduction of the vaccine in 2006, that's what studies have been finding empirically.

To emphasize the difference in meaning of "strain" for HPV: There are 200+ HPV genotypes that have been numbered this way, but they are all of ancient origin. There are observed shifts in prevalence of different genotypes, but not newly evolved genotypes.

We also only care about targeting oncogenic strains. If we open up selective pressure for non-oncogenic strains to be more relatively successful and take over, great.

This is a totally predictable result, there are dozens of HPV strains and the vaccine will immunize against 9 of them that are high risk.

So, unless you are a sex worker or similar, it's unlikely you "have" all of them to the point where the vaccine is completely useless. You might later get infected with a strain that you didn't yet have, and it's precisely the one that kills you.

The original criteria was for people who had not already been exposed.

And over 45s that engage in casual sex have almost certainly been exposed. Those who don't have prior exposure probably have few or one partner in a marriage or marriage-like situation and thus are not likely to be exposed. Yes, they could be cheated on or the like but exposure is not expected so effectiveness can not be measured.

Ivermectin is also used to treat COVID in countries that have endemic parasite outbreaks. COVID responds well to steroids, but so do parasites. Giving steroids to someone with parasites causes the parasites to become much stronger, and trigger reactions from the immune system: fever, etc.

I ideally you could test for parasites, but time and resources don't allow for that in many countries. So if it's generally safe to just give ivermectin along with steroids when treating COVID - in countries where parasites are common.

Maybe I'm wrong about this. Maybe I'm making it up. Don't listen to what I say. Listen to your doctor.