Everything about testing and distributing this vaccine is ridiculous and completely based on outdated assumptions about female sexuality. I agree 100% with this article. It's females who are responsible for birth control, it's females who are responsible enough to get a check up every year, and now it's females who are responsible getting vaccinated for STIs. I bet that if new vaccines are developed for other STIs, females will be responsible for getting all of them.

On top of all of this, women over 26 can't get vaccinated (or rather, insurance won't cover it, and it costs a good $500). This is absolutely ridiculous. It is approved in other countries for women in their 40s and 50s and has been found to be safer in older women. Suspicious of the motives for this, I wrote the FDA and asked for an explanation. They sent me back the legal documentation from the Merck (is it Merck?) clinical trials. Apparently, the FDA only approved it for women under 26 because Merck only tested it on women under 26. There is one small paragraph explaining something like they used genital warts as a proxy and the largest sample they could get of genital warts was of women under 26.

I buy the explanation *two* doctors gave me instead: the FDA (under the Bush Administration) assumed that all women over 26 are either a) married forever b) a slut anyway, so they've probably already got all the strains of HPV or c) an old maid- if they haven't had sex yet, they're not going to. Therefore, vaccination for women over 26 did not provide enough benefits to justify the costs. I was 28 when this vaccine came out, and I fell into none of these catagories. Sure, I may have been exposed to the strains in the vaccine already, but there's a good chance I haven't been. Because the FDA thinks I should be married by now, I've got to fork over cash I don't have to prevent cervical cancer, while slews of women two years younger than me got it for free.

Does anyone really think it's a coincidence that the cut-off age for the vaccine is the same age that was the average age of marriage for women at the time?

I am an economist and I'm all about cost-benefit analysis. But with any analysis, your assumptions have to correct. Merck/FDA assumed that girls would be the ones responsible to get the vaccine and assumed that an arbitrary age validates sexual activity. They created the analysis around the results they wanted.