If you have a limited supply the greater bang per buck would be to start with the young people who almost certainly haven't caught it yet and then work your way up.

Vaccines are subject to stringent safety standards since they’re administered to healthy people. The age limit may suggest that at the time of the recommendation, in the relevant jurisdiction, the manufacturer had not studied its safety and efficacy in >40 year olds.

(I also don’t think it’s an age limit as much as the upper end of a recommendation.)

2) Take a look in the mirror and try blaming the people who have made "getting a vaccine" a culture war political statement rather than something routine and uncontroversial. If vaccines were uncontroversial, medical exemptions from them would also be rare and uncotroversial.

Humor is welcome here, but it needs to have some substance behind it.

It's incredibly prevalent, but most people clear it within a couple years, and won't even know that they had it. The time to clear it is just variable and depends on your body's immune response, the longer you go without clearing it the higher the cancer risk.

Doesn't necessarily have HPV their whole life - time-to-clearance is somewhat variable.

And yes, both slower clearance and just more infections are both associated with increased risk.

Vaccinating older populations is similarly just a less clear-cut case, but it's a cost-effectiveness argument, not one purely driven by if the vaccine offers protection.

"We have a vaccine to prevent some very serious cancers."

"But it might turn my daughter into a hussy."

with radical information transparency, id expect both views to be equally easy to parse and to be recommended both, in which case the choice would be obvious to everyone, or at least they could very well describe their risk tolerance to different risks, or laziness, for why they made a certain choice.

i expect im not up to date on all the vaccines i should be, but its on laziness rather than gwtting bad information. ...also a lack of information on which ones i should have.

Such people have always existed, unfortunately. I don't think it's a result of anything particularly new.

Measles is highly infectious, you need a very high percentage of the population immune in order to maintain herd immunity. So long as you have herd immunity the only source of infection is travel--but note that this works both ways. It's much more likely to be Americans catching it while traveling than immigrants bringing it. They at least used to trace the original case in such outbreaks, it was normally someone who had been abroad.

We saw the same thing with Covid--quarantine against Chinese people, while ignoring Americans returning from the very same places even when they said they had symptoms. (And irrelevant besides, the strain from Europe quickly dominated.)

16/18 were chosen because they are highly carcinogenic and cause the most cancer, they are the two most aggressive high risk types. They cause 70% of all the cancer but are much less than 70% of the cases of high risk strains.

It takes real mental gymnastics to downplay how positive this vaccine is.

And note that it's possible for a vaccine to have a negative survival benefit yet be a good idea--in a population with herd immunity a vaccine provides little benefit to those who receive it so long as enough people receive it to provide the herd immunity. But if too many don't get it the risk from not getting it goes up considerably. Look at what has been happening with measles--measles was basically unheard of, the quacks said not to vaccinate (remember, Wakefield was attacking a specific vaccine that he stood to profit from the controversy, Worm Brain doesn't believe in infectious disease in the first place), now we have people dying of measles.

Sure. This one hasn’t.

That said, I frankly think people should be free to vaccinate as they please, and cities, states and private businesses free to include and exclude folks based on vaccination status as they please. (I’m also in favor of letting insurance companies choose if they want to cover diseases someone chose to get by going unvaccinated.)