HPV Jab Cuts Cervical Cancer Deaths in Young Women to Near Zero
A Lancet analysis says girls vaccinated at 12 or 13 now have a close-to-zero risk of dying from cervical cancer before 30.
For the first time on record, no woman aged 20 to 24 died of cervical cancer in England across a five-year stretch, the period from 2020 to 2024, according to an analysis published in The Lancet on Thursday. The researchers at Queen Mary University of London tie the result directly to the HPV vaccine those women were offered at school.
The headline finding is blunt. Girls vaccinated against human papillomavirus at age 12 or 13 now carry what the study calls a close to zero
risk of dying from cervical cancer before the age of 30. In that 20-to-24 group, vaccine coverage sat near 90%.
England began offering the HPV jab to girls aged 12 to 13 through schools in 2008, and extended it to boys in 2019. The Queen Mary team examined cervical cancer mortality data back to 2001, which let them set the women who came through the vaccinated cohorts against those who did not. The divergence is what you would hope to see if the vaccine works as designed: HPV causes the large majority of cervical cancers, and clearing the infection in adolescence heads off the disease decades later.
A few caveats keep the result honest. Cervical cancer is rare in women under 25 to begin with, so the number of deaths in this band was always small, and a run of zero, while genuinely new, rests on low counts. The vaccine guards against the HPV types behind most cervical cancer, not all of it, which is why screening still matters as these cohorts move into their 30s and 40s. And women who missed the school programme remain at the risk they always faced. The protection is real. It is also specific to who got the jab, and when.
The practical takeaway for a worried reader is narrower than the headlines suggest, and more durable for it. If you were vaccinated at school, the data now backs the promise made at the time. If you were not, or you are past the programme's reach, the routine cervical screening invitation is still the thing that catches disease early. The World Health Organization has set a goal of vaccinating 90% of girls against HPV by age 15 worldwide. England, an early and high-coverage adopter, is now one of the first places to show what reaching that number actually buys: a generation of young women for whom a once-feared cancer is becoming a death that statisticians can no longer find.
