But Craig, who do you think (most of) these women are contracting HPV from? Both women and men can pass along HPV so even if men don’t have as great of risks as women, treating them with the vaccine also helps the women who are at greater risk of HPV related diseases.

Plus greater profit margins for the insurance companies, yadda yadda.

Public health is about identifying the largest impacts our oh-too-limited resources can have. With respect to HPV, male genital warts and various cancers are of course a real concern, but a concern that is really quite small next to that of cervical cancer in women–11,000 diagnoses and nearly 4,000 deaths annually in the United States.

Sometimes a picture really does convey a thousand words, and I would encourage a glance at a handy chart in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cases_of_HPV_cancers_graph.png

(The red part of of the bars shows cancers attributed to HPV infection.)

Again, resources being what they are, the approval process being as long and expensive as it is, the risk to women being so much greater than that to men, and, alas, the social factors around adoption being what they have been, I think everyone involved has done a pretty good job of setting priorities and deploying this product in a way that does the most good.

There are many things to regret about the process of approving, recommending, and normalizing vaccines in this country–from the anti-science attitudes that get so much play to the vile notion that fear of cervical cancer is a useful deterrent to promiscuity. But, as I say, public health practitioners have to operate in the landscape as it is, not the landscape as it ought to be. I think they’ve done a good job.