Merck Production Issues Mean Around 1.5M Teenage Girls In Poor Countries Likely Will Never Receive HPV Vaccination

The New York Times (4/18, Nolen) reports, “Nearly 1.5 million teenage girls in some of the world’s poorest countries will miss the chance to be protected from cervical cancer because the drugmaker Merck has said it will not be able to deliver millions of promised doses of the HPV vaccine this year.” The company “has notified Gavi, the international organization that helps low- and middle-income countries deliver lifesaving immunizations, and UNICEF, which procures the vaccines, that it will deliver only 18.8 million of the 29.6 million doses it was contracted to deliver in 2024, Gavi said.” This “means that more than 10 million girls will not receive their expected HPV shots this year – and 1.5 million of them most likely will never get them because they will be too old to qualify for the vaccine in subsequent years.”