In summary
* An article published in The Lancet in June 2026 led to the headline “Young women now have ‘close to zero’ risk of cervical cancer death after HPV jab.”
* This post covers what HPV is, when the HPV vaccination programme was introduced in the UK and the vaccine coverage that has occurred since.
* It explains the background to this Lancet study and the age groups and period that it examined (2000-2024).
* Three main results were reported. The headlines came from the first finding “In women aged 20–24 years between 2020 and 2024, in whom vaccination coverage was around 88–90% at age 12–13 years, no deaths occurred, compared with 23·1 expected deaths based on historical rates, corresponding to a mortality reduction of 100%.”
* The paper delivered its own critique by reporting that there were no deaths in vaccinated or unvaccinated women and that the ‘no deaths’ “is likely to be a chance finding.” The media coverage missed this.
* This Monday note could have stopped there, but there were a number of other points worth sharing on this topic. These included trends in deaths rates from cervical cancer in the UK for the past 55 years; the impact of age on cervical cancer deaths and some interesting data on cervical cancer screening.
Introduction
On Thursday 18th June 2026, UK headlines reported that “Young women now have ‘close to zero’ risk of cervical cancer death after HPV jab” (Ref 1). The article behind the headlines was published in The Lancet. It was called “Cervical cancer mortality trends following HPV vaccination in England, 2001–24: an analysis of population-based mortality data” (Ref 2). It was written by Professor Peter Sasieni and Milena Falcaro.
Zoe
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