[chimeracoder]

> I don't understand why they recommend against it. I guess the monetary costs don't outweigh the benefits, but that's only if you care more about saving money than potentially preventing cancer. It's not like the vaccine going to hurt you.

All vaccines have a nonzero risk of adverse outcomes. That can be as simple as the risk of physical injury due to incorrect administration of the needle. That's weighed against the risk of nonvaccination.

In almost all cases, the balance is so extremely skewed that it's safe to issue general recommendations in favor of vaccination. For HPV, the issue is that there's literally zero benefit after exposure, and it's difficult/infeasible to test for exposure, but from epidemiological data we know that most people over the age of 25 have already been exposed.

> In my opinion men should also be vaccinated for it

The recommendation is for all genders, and has been for well over a decade.

[volkl48]

Noted in my other comment, but mentioned here as well:

- Exposure to a strain is not the same as exposure to all strains. Few are likely to have been infected with all of the strains that the vaccine protects against, and infection by multiple strains is not a rare event.

- There's research being done on if the vaccine can reduce symptoms to people who already have HPV. Early results seem promising. Certainly nothing large enough for the CDC to be making recommendations on yet (that I know of/could find from a quick search), but worth noting - there may well turn out to be a significant benefit to the vaccine even after exposure, we just seem to be relatively early in that research.

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6541142/

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38068369/