Vaccine preventable cancers

Key points

The EESC:

• encourages sharing of experience, good practices and intensive cooperation between Member States;
• recommends to enhance both demand and supply of vaccination and highlights the need for proper information, education and communication and underlines the role of the school healthcare system and parents in this endeavour. Cancer prevention should become a priority at the political level and accompanied by the necessary financial, material and human resources;
• calls for strong efforts to fight misinformation and disinformation by acquiring science-based evidence, as well as by spreading fact-based information through different channels including social media;
• believes that general practitioners, family doctors, school physicians and also civil society organisations can play an important role in providing proper information, decreasing fears and scepticism and guiding people to take vaccinations. To ensure that messages are attractive for younger people, the EESC advocates enhancing communication efforts through youth-led organisations;
• emphasises the need for gender equality in cancer prevention measures and calls for providing HPV vaccination to all girls and boys of a certain age, to intensify communication on the availability of HPV vaccination for boys and to gather and publish information on the vaccination rates of both boys and girls in various Member States;
• highlights the importance of easy access to vaccination in terms of geographic location, as well as the need for focused action to reach people from various disadvantaged groups and people with specific risks.