The article literally has a health professional admitting that the studies used to justify just giving it to women, and the practice of just providing it to women, were sexist / behind the times in terms of equity. There were studies showing it impacted male health, even back in 2007, that were ignored for purposes of policy / vaccine distribution. The gov basically said HPV = cervix (even though science said otherwise, outside of focused cervical cancer studies), and used that to justify only providing medical care to women. That’s gender based discrimination. Even the notion of ‘herd immunity’, based on just vaccinating women, completely ignored the case of gay men: the 2007 studies included information on penile/anal cancers, as well as mouth/neck cancers, resulting from HPV: they knew it impacted more than “just” cervical cancers/illnesses. Here’s one of them: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK321770/ . That one, you can even see they explicitly highlight gay men as being a group that requires more data – as its a group that had been ignored.

Further, science/politicians “realising the mistake” and making corrections later, doesn’t change that it was gender discrimination. Crash test dummies were, for a long time, just based on male body types. Regulations / governments were ok with this. More recently, scientists realised women body shapes would behave differently in collisions, so they started including those in the mix. That doesn’t change the fact that the historic use of ‘just’ male body crash test dummies, is an example of gender based discrimination against women. There are tons of similar examples, where the male case was preferenced in studies, and legislation/regulations were built around those biased views. Science iteratively figuring out its own biases is part of the process, but it doesn’t absolve past wrongs - especially once those biases are used to justify the distribution of public funds to aid a specific niche group, at the expense of other groups.

If you want to absolve the sexist stuff in the HPV vaccine distribution, from my perspective you’re using the same sort of reasoning that would absolve a lot of the past wrongs perpetuated while ‘science’ figured out the racial/gender stuff, as well as governments preferencing male-cases by simply ignoring other views. And the same “well, it was done like that everywhere” comment would also still apply. I don’t see why you’d treat this case differently, unless you had some sort of inherent bias against thinking of men as potential victims of discrimination… Even as the scientific community turned their back on guys with dick cancer.

*Adding a note, because I don’t think I’m ‘reaching you’ with the comments about there literally being a health professional saying “It was an equity issue to deny this treatment to boys”: ie. “It’s not just ‘me’ (some rando online) saying this, but here’s a quote from a verifiable health professional supporting what I said”. I’ve provided my take on the subject, and I’ve provided a quote from a health professional supporting my position. You’re not providing anything to support your view point, you haven’t cited anything despite demanding that I cite sources. You’re not discussing this topic with an open mind, nor are you demanding any rigor / scrutiny in terms of your own viewpoints. Because of this, I’m going to stop bothering to respond to you at this point, if you post more. I have laid out a fairly straight forward position on gov vaccine patterns with HPV, and it syncs up with my memory of vaccines in grade school and being denied access to the Heb B vaccine (without paying). I’ve provided source material to support my position, citing both vaccine docs from the cdc, journalist articles from reputable news agencies (cbc), and studies from national health archives. You’ve contributed basically nothing, except insults and dismissive crap. Good luck out there.