Advantaged Households Have Lower Intent to Vaccinate Teens Against HPV

FRIDAY, March 1, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- A significant proportion of adolescents who are unvaccinated or not fully vaccinated against human papillomavirus (HPV) are from advantaged socioeconomic households, according to a study published online Feb. 19 in The Lancet Regional Health: Americas.

Kalyani Sonawane, from the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, and colleagues compared the factors associated with parental HPV vaccination intentions between socioeconomically divergent groups. The analysis included data from 212,643 adolescents (105,958 unvaccinated or not fully vaccinated) participating in the 2017 to 2021 National Immunization Survey-Teen.

The researchers found that in the advantaged group, 64.7 percent of parents of unvaccinated adolescents (equating to 2.4 million U.S. adolescents) had no intention to initiate the HPV vaccine versus 40.9 percent of parents in the deprived group (equating to 0.2 million adolescents). In the advantaged group, the most frequent reason for lacking intent was "safety concerns" (25.5 percent), whereas in the deprived group, "lack of knowledge," "not recommended," and "not needed" were common reasons (nearly 15 percent each). The advantaged group had a higher lack of intent to complete the HPV vaccine series (43.9 percent; 1.1 million adolescents) versus the deprived group (25.2 percent; 0.08 million adolescents). More than half in the advantaged group (58.4 percent) and more than one-third in the deprived group (37.1 percent) cited "already up to date" as the primary reason for not completing the HPV vaccine series.

"Interventions that provide facts on vaccine safety and effectiveness and debunk HPV vaccine myths at an individual- and/or community-level, along with strong recommendations by health care providers, will be necessary to avoid stagnation of HPV vaccine rates and to continue making progress towards achieving the 80 percent national goal," the authors write.

One author disclosed ties to Merck.

Abstract/Full Text