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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

I don’t get it. Everyone online gives advice like “Ask your doctor to get the vaccine even if you’re male” but the pharmacies here in SF refused to give it to me. They said that it’s not indicated for a 35+ yo male.

So I get the theory of this thing. But has anyone actually tried this? Finally I got OneMedical to prescribe it for me for some $1.2k at which point I decided I’ll just get it abroad during some planned travel.

I decided years ago I’d do this because I was going to have girls and I wanted to minimize my daughters’ risk of cancer.

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Try Planned Parenthood.

Over a decade ago I tried getting the HPV vaccine in my early 20s, but the doctor told me it wasn't recommended for men and that insurance won't cover it. I was young and didn't have the money to pay out of pocket.

I went to Planned Parenthood and got the vaccine last year. At some point they changed the recommendation to men under 45 now and I got all 3 shots free.

Honestly, though I'm glad to have finally got the vaccine it's been a pretty frustrating experience.

Oh that's interesting. Thank you. I have a friend who works there as a provider. I should be able to check before going.

That's great!

For more context, I have Anthem Blue Cross health insurance. The cost might depend on your insurance.

The FDA has approved it for men up to age 45. I myself got it in my late thirties at a pharmacy. For one of the shots, the pharmacist hassled me a little, asking if I was high risk, but acquiesced when I told them I was. For the other two, they just gave me the shot. It was also covered by my insurance.

I'm over 30 and got it from CVS. No questions asked, and my insurance fully covered all the doses.

Just sign up for it at costco online.

Oh, that's much less: $300/dose and there's 3 doses. So that's $900 roughly. Thank you.

Holy cow. In France it's like 3 times less (https://base-donnees-publique.medicaments.gouv.fr/medicament...).

Right? That's why I think I'm going to get it in India. Cervavac should be fine.

> I decided years ago I’d do this because I was going to have girls and I wanted to minimize my daughters’ risk of cancer.

I don't understand: how would your daughters be more/less likely to get cancer based on whether you were vaccinated? There's obviously the (hopefully extremely) roundabout way in which there is a direct path of sexual partners leading from you to your future daughters, but is there something else I'm missing?

And if you don't have it by age 35 (and married, per your comment below), how likely are you to even get it at this point? Are you thinking you could hypothetically pass it to them by kissing your babies on the mouth, after contracting it in the future?

The vaccine is likely to do very little damage to me, but cervical cancer is a big bad. I think I'm just accounting for some risk that we discover a non-sexual mode of transmission.

Seems unlikely that there's a way for fathers to accidentally give HPV to their daughters and we haven't figured it out yet.

I would think that kissing a baby on the lips would be the best chance, and if that were the case it'd be super obvious because there'd be a bunch of toddlers with HPV, which would cause alarm.

How did you know you were going to have girls?

Carrier screening revealed a shared genetic risk so my wife and I decided to do IVF and PGT qualified our female embryos as unaffected (coincidentally, it’s autosomal recessive).

If you want to read more: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/IVF

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