For the first time ever, no young women in England died of cervical cancer. In the U.S., RFK Jr.’s vaccine skepticism stalls HPV progress

For the first time since records have been kept, a five-year stretch passed in England without a single young woman dying of cervical cancer. Between 2020 and 2024, not one woman aged 20 to 24 died of the disease—a cohort that, absent vaccination, would have been expected to lose roughly 23 of its members to it. The finding comes from a landmark study published June 17 in The Lancet by Queen Mary University of London professors Peter Sasieni and Milena Falcaro. Both spent two decades building the evidentiary chain: HPV causes cervical cancer; vaccination stops the infection; vaccination should, eventually, stop the dying. “For more than two decades, our team has been building evidence to show that HPV causes cervical cancer and that vaccination prevents infections, precancerous changes, and the disease itself. This is the first study to highlight the impact of HPV vaccination on cervical cancer mortality,” Sasieni said in a statement from QMUL. “It’s amazing news that no women aged between 20 and 24 died from cervical cancer in the whole of England between 2020 and 2024. That remarkable fact is thanks to nearly 90% of Gen Z women having received the HPV vaccine through the school vaccination and catch-up programs.” “Our findings provide the first robust national-level evidence, albeit observational, that high HPV vaccination coverage is associated with a substantial reduction in cervical cancer deaths,” the authors wrote. The study analyzed England’s cervical cancer mortality data from 2001 through 2024 among women aged 20 to 34, comparing actual deaths with expected deaths based on pre-vaccination historical rates. The researchers found a 100% reduction in cervical cancer mortality among women aged 20 to 24 between 2020 and 2024, as compared with historical rates. During that time period, the vaccination coverage for that cohort was around 88 to 90% at ages 12 to 13. In earlier cohorts with somewhat lower coverage, mo