Skip to main content
ABC News
States Vary Enormously On HPV Vaccination Rates

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released its newest estimates of HPV vaccination rates among teens, and the vaccination rates for the cancer-causing virus are far lower than for other diseases. HPV vaccination rates also vary dramatically from state to state.

Only 40 percent of girls and 22 percent of boys ages 13-17 had finished their course of three shots for HPV by 2014. For comparison, 88 percent of boys and girls in the same age group received their Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis) shot.1 The United States has set a goal of vaccinating 80 percent of girls against HPV as one of its Healthy People 2020 objectives, and, according to Shannon Stokley, an epidemiologist in the Immunization Services Division of the CDC, “We have a long way to go to get to 80 percent; it’s hard to tell if we’re going to reach it by 2020.” However, Stokley told me she believes the success of the Tdap vaccine shows that these rates are achievable, if states and doctors keep educating parents about how vaccinations can protect their children from cancer. Although many people who get HPV do not develop cancer, the virus is the cause of almost all cervical cancers and 91 percent of anal cancers.

The good news is that, even when vaccination rates are lower than those of other diseases, there can be big herd immunity effects for sexually transmitted infections. Unlike many infectious diseases, STIs aren’t spread through mere proximity, so one way to understand the impact of vaccination rates for STIs is to look at the chance that at least one partner in a sexual encounter will be vaccinated. As long as one partner is vaccinated, the chain of contagion is broken. In the U.S. as a whole, 53 percent of randomly chosen heterosexual teen couples would include at least one vaccinated partner.2

STATE GIRLS (13-17) VACCINATED BOYS (13-17) VACCINATED HETEROSEXUAL COUPLES WITH 1+ PARTNER VACCINATED
Rhode Island 53.7% 42.9% 73.6%
D.C. 56.9 34.5 71.8
New Hampshire 50.1 33.0 66.6
Vermont 49.8 30.5 65.1
California 47.7 31.1 64.0
North Carolina 54.0 20.9 63.6
Massachusetts 49.5 27.3 63.3
Connecticut 48.5 27.0 62.4
Puerto Rico 49.9 23.7 61.8
Pennsylvania 48.2 26.0 61.7
Delaware 42.3 31.0 60.2
Illinois 47.7 22.6 59.5
Maine 43.0 27.5 58.7
Georgia 47.1 21.0 58.2
Washington 43.8 24.6 57.6
New York 40.1 28.5 57.2
Hawaii 38.0 30.9 57.2
North Dakota 41.7 25.3 56.4
Nebraska 43.3 22.8 56.2
Wisconsin 40.9 23.6 54.8
Colorado 42.1 21.9 54.8
Maryland 39.4 24.5 54.2
West Virginia 40.0 23.5 54.1
Michigan 40.9 22.1 54.0
New Mexico 39.9 23.3 53.9
Louisiana 38.4 21.5 51.6
Indiana 44.4 12.8 51.5
Montana 42.9 13.0 50.3
Virginia 35.9 22.5 50.3
Minnesota 42.5 13.6 50.3
Ohio 35.2 23.3 50.3
Oregon 43.1 12.3 50.1
Iowa 37.6 18.7 49.3
Oklahoma 36.4 19.9 49.1
Idaho 38.3 17.2 48.9
South Dakota 33.1 23.5 48.8
New Jersey 34.5 21.2 48.4
Arizona 35.8 16.7 46.5
South Carolina 35.9 16.1 46.2
Kentucky 37.5 13.3 45.8
Texas 33.9 17.7 45.6
Alaska 34.4 13.3 43.1
Nevada 32.5 15.7 43.1
Wyoming 33.6 12.2 41.7
Alabama 35.3 9.0 41.1
Florida 28.5 17.5 41.0
Kansas 24.8 19.5 39.5
Missouri 28.3 11.3 36.4
Utah 26.0 12.4 35.2
Arkansas 23.4 11.4 32.1
Tennessee 20.1 14.0 31.3

By this metric, Rhode Island (74 percent of pairs would have at least one partner vaccinated) and Washington, D.C., (72 percent) had the lowest risk for couples.3 Washington, D.C., is one of two jurisdictions that required HPV vaccination to attend school in 2014. The other, Virginia, has much lower vaccination rates (36 percent of girls and 23 percent of boys).begin requiring HPV vaccination to attend school in fall 2015.

">4

Of the five worst-performing states, three have no laws about HPV vaccinations (Tennessee, Arkansas and Kansas) and two have begun HPV education campaigns (Utah and Missouri). The Kaiser Family Foundation found that most states (29) have no HPV vaccination mandates, education programs or funding to cover the cost of the vaccine.

When it comes to improving herd immunity, it matters whom you vaccinate. Higher-performing states have higher vaccination rates for girls, but vaccination rates for boys vary less.

libresco-datalab-HPV-1

Using the CDC data, we can calculate that, on average, states do better to increase vaccination rates among girls than among boys. Here’s what happens to the chance that at least one person in a heterosexual encounter will be vaccinated when all states increase their vaccination rate for girls, boys or both by a fixed number of percentage points.

INCREASE IN VACCINATION
+5 +10 +15
Girls +4 +8 +12
Boys 3 6 9
Both 7 13 19

Vaccinating girls makes more of an impact because, when it comes to sexually transmitted diseases, it can help to have lopsided vaccination rates. If all girls were vaccinated, every heterosexual pair would include a vaccinated partner. If half the population were vaccinated (an even share of both boys and girls), only 75 percent of boy-girl pairs would have at least one vaccinated partner.

For that reason, a 2011 study in the Journal of Infectious Diseases found that, provided vaccination rates in girls were high enough, there wasn’t enough benefit in vaccinating boys to justify the cost. But, when vaccination rates among girls are low, as they are in the U.S., adding boys can be worth the cost. The study found that the cost didn’t justify vaccinating boys when coverage among girls reached 70 percent. No U.S. state has reached that level; only four states have vaccinated more than half of their girls, and none has vaccinated more than 60 percent. Stokley says this makes immunization of boys critical; the vaccination rates for girls are too low for teens of either sex to trust too much to herd immunity.

CORRECTION (Aug. 5, 5:40 p.m.): An earlier version of this post omitted New Jersey from the table of states’ vaccination rates. We have updated the table.

Footnotes

  1. The numbers are better if you compare the number of teens who got at least one of three HPV shots (60 percent of girls, 42 percent of boys), but a single shot doesn’t confer full protection, and even these numbers lag the Tdap rates.

  2. HPV can be spread through any kind of close genital contact, including oral, vaginal and anal sex. Our focus is on male-female pairs simply because they are the most common form of pairing.

  3. Mississippi had vaccination rates available only for girls and was excluded from this analysis.

  4. Rhode Island will begin requiring HPV vaccination to attend school in fall 2015.

Leah Libresco is a former news writer for FiveThirtyEight.

Comments