Two New Westminster brothers are thrilled the province will soon provide free human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination to Grade 6 boys as well as girls, but they say officials will now have a tough time convincing boys HPV is not a girls-only problem.
“We’re going to have to encourage quite a lot of boys to get it because I told some of my friends and it went around the school a little, and there’s quite a lot of them who don’t want it,” Nelson Roy told the Record. “I think it’s just because it’s been a shot that’s only been given to girls in schools for quite a while. … Boys have been given the idea that they don’t need it.”
The B.C. Health Ministry announced Friday HPV vaccination for Grade 6 boys would be included in the province’s publicly-funded immunization program starting in September.
Nelson and his twin brother Elliot, both Grade 8 students at École Glenbrook Middle
School, first criticized the government for excluding boys from the vaccination in a letter to the Record when they were in Grade 6.
The family had watched a documentary on HPV -- a virus that causes 70 per cent of cervical cancers in women and is associated with cancers of the mouth, nose, throat, anus and penis in men.
“We heard what it could do to people and apparently how the vaccine should be taken around 12 or 11,” Nelson told the Record in September 2014, “so then when the vaccinations at our school came up and it said that only girls could, we were a bit upset about it.”
They would eventually take their protest to the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, which agreed to hear their complaint.
They also teamed up with the Canadian Cancer Society last year to call on the government to include boys in the HPV vaccinations.
The boys’ human rights complaint went to a mediation session in September 2015, after which the government asked for more time, according to the twins’ father, Michel Roy.
“They were going to have to resolve it one way or another, and the policy change was, of course, the thing that we were seeking all along,” he said, “so I really hope that the boys did make a difference.”
Michel credits the boys’ letter to the Record for getting the ball rolling, but he said it wasn’t always easy for the twins to keep up the fight.
“There were many times when Nelson and Elliot would say, ‘Nobody cares. Our friends at school don’t understand. They think we’re crazy because we want more shots.’”
Michel hopes the policy change announced last week has driven home an important lesson for his boys: “If you see something that is unfair, there are ways of resolving these things and making fairness happen.”
When it comes to the province’s immunization program, meanwhile, Michel agrees with Nelson that health officials are now going to have to work hard to get boys on board after years of girl-centric marketing around the HPV vaccination.
“So many parents don’t even know about HPV,” Michel said. “Everyone you mention it to, they say, ‘Really? I didn’t know boys could get it.’ That speaks to not quite a bang-up sell job.”
