Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, on what days the Joint Committee on Vaccinations and Immunisation met in each of the last three years; when the Joint Committee plans to meet in the next two years; at which meetings the Joint Committee discussed gender neutral HPV vaccinations; and what estimate his Department has made of the number of (a) boys and (b) men who remain unprotected against HPV-caused cancers.

The Joint Committee on Vaccinations and Immunisation (JCVI) meets on the first Wednesday of February, June and October. The Committee held an extraordinary meeting in August 2016 to discuss influenza. There are no plans to change the current meeting schedule.

Gender neutral human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination was discussed by JCVI in February and October 2015, June 2016 and October, June and February 2017.

There is no estimate of the number of boys/men who remain unprotected. The indirect protection to males afforded by the adolescent girls HPV programme is considered substantial. JCVI’s Interim Statement on Extending HPV vaccination to adolescent boys is available at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/jcvi-statement-extending-the-hpv-vaccination-programme

The HPV programme for men who have sex with men (MSM), who receive little indirect protection from the girls programme, aims to protect MSM considered at highest risk from HPV infection and disease. The estimated impact and cost-effectiveness of the HPV MSM programme is available at:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5404831/pdf/ciw845.pdf