The U.S. Citizenship and Naturalization Service added the HPV vaccination requirement in July, when it revised the Centers for Diseases Control’s (CDC) Technical Instructions to Civil Surgeons for Vaccination Requirements. The Service is also requiring immigrants applying for citizenship to be vaccinated against hepatitis A, rotavirus, meningitis and chicken pox. But those are highly contagious disease, while HPV is not.
The new regulation is causing quite a bit of controversy because current U.S citizens are not required to have the Gardasil vaccine. “If the government is trying to take care of everyone, they should be doing it also with the citizens,” Ginky-Lee Torres, an immigration lawyer, told a North Carolina TV station.
Even the CDC – which recommends Gardasil for girl and women ages 11 to 26 – has not advocated mandatory vaccination for anyone.
The FDA has approved new language for the Gardasil label that states the vaccine also protects against cancers of the vagina and vulva, which affect more than 5,000 women in the U.S. each year. It was not immediately clear what the additional indication would mean for sales of the vaccine, which have fallen short of the company expectations, partly because of safety worries.
According to Forbes.com, Merck has already scaled back full-year sales estimates for Gardasil from between $1.9 billion and $2.1 billion to between $1.4 billion and $1.6 billion.
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