Who will fund this nationwide vaccination program or will it become another unfunded mandate? Schools today are all facing funding issues with those in my area cutting teaching positions. You will also incur substantial back office cost as this is a multistep vaccination which will require monitoring to achieve compliance.

All politics are local and school boards are elected. My personal feeling is, that for the bulk of the country, school boards are not going to want to be involved in a politically divisive issue. School boards are just trying to get Sally through school and meet basic academic standards. They are not worried about her long term health.

Precedent. Is this first and foremost an academic or public health issue? I would have to say no. So, the issue then becomes, do we use our school systems to promote public policy involving long term personal health issues and what about the next great thing? There are any number of groups that want access to our schools for very dubious reasons, will this open the door?

My personal hope is that all insurance and health plans would cover the cost of the vaccinations. This would allow for immediate usage and cover a larger range since there would be no age target. Funding would come through reduced medical cost at some future date. This would not be a public issue so politics is removed. We have not set a precedent that may be distorted at some future date for less than honorable purposes.

Steve Lucas

The school system’s medical decision making should be limited to those very few decisions that have a direct and substantial impact on the other children at the school, and emergency treatment of the child. If they feel that the child’s health is otherwise at risk, but this risk does not threaten the other children, report it to child protective services and let family court deal with it.

The argument that this has substantial impact on long term cancer treatment is specious. We do not tolerate school systems making other cancer treatment decisions. Those belong to parents and doctors. This vaccination belongs in that same category.

(I would similarly object to any effort by school systems to prevent parents and doctors from giving children this same vaccination. This particular case is a school system that wants to override the parents in favor of vaccination. I can think of other school systems that would want to override parents and prevent vaccination.)

And the essayist is grossly mistaken by assuming that this vaccine is being given too early, since “Infection with this virus requires intimate contact, of the kind that doesn’t occur in classrooms.” Does she really believe that since intercourse generally doesn’t occur in a classroom setting that it doesn’t happen among teens? Having managed pregnant girls as early as 10-11, I can say she is really living in a false reality.

We need to vaccinate early for this virus. We’re not only talking about genital warts, which for the most part are cosmetic and innocuous (ignoring the occasional cases that cause dystocia or are associated with verrucous carcinoma). We’re talking about squamous cell CA of the cervix, vulva and vagina, and if a woman is affected by it, it is as serious as HIV, which the author views as “more insidious” in her complete article in the NYT.