The HPV vaccination campaign aimed at 5th grade students in middle schools is struggling to bear fruit: less than 15% of the adolescents concerned have been vaccinated, according to the Minister Delegate in charge of Health and Prevention Frédéric Valletoux.
- 117,000 5th grade middle school students were vaccinated against the papillomavirus during the campaign launched at the start of the school year.
- This represents “13 to 15%” of 5th grade students. The target was 30%.
- A new communications campaign will be launched in the spring.
To catch up in terms of vaccination against the papillomavirus, France launched a campaign aimed at 5th grade students in middle schools in the fall of 2023. But the measure did not achieve the targeted objectives.
Guest of Political Questions on France Inter and franceinfo TV this Sunday March 3, the Minister Delegate in charge of Health and Prevention Frédéric Valletoux revealed that less than 15% of students had the injection.
HPV: only 117,000 5th grade middle school students are vaccinated
During the show, Frédéric Valletoux explained that “117,000 middle school students aged 5e are vaccinated” against HPV. This represents “13 to 15%” workforce. The minister recognized that the vaccination campaign, the objective of which is to prevent infections due to sexually transmitted strains of the human papillomavirus virus responsible for several types of cancer, “did not give all that [les autorités souhaitaient]”.
Indeed, the objective for this first campaign was to reach at least 30% of 5th grade students.e. The latter had been fixed based on “the experiment carried out in the Grand Est region” where this rate was reached after two years.
Papillomavirus vaccine: a new communication campaign in spring
To try to improve the results of the vaccination campaign, the authorities plan to launch a new communication campaign “in spring” for the attention of parents of students currently in 6th grade and who will therefore be in 5e at the next school year.
Also questioned by France Info this Sunday, Christèle Gras-Le Guen, professor of medicine and head of the pediatrics department at Nantes University Hospital, tried to explain the reasons for the low support for the campaign: “the first is that we had a goal of 30% linked to the results of a previous experiment but which was a two-year goal. So, it’s a little early to be able to claim to arrive straight away at 30%”. Moreover, for her, “we started from an extremely low rate in the population since, spontaneously, parents were not used until then to protect their children and adolescents against this virus”. She concluded that the march was “high”.
