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Weeping at the Congressional Briefing
If you could prevent your child’s cancer with an HPV vaccination, would you?
The first tear fell as the video was ending. Jason Mendelsohn, seated on the speaker’s panel, brushed it from the corner of his left eye. My attention captured, I watched as he brushed another one from his right eye. A woman in the row in front of me snuffled and now, I had welled up myself. Later, scientist Julie Torode, Ph.D., would choke up and apologize several times while delivering her presentation.
Men and women crammed the bland government-issue space for the “Let’s End HPV-Related Cancers” Congressional Briefing yesterday. We had convened at the Sam Rayburn Building. The seats filled and a crowd stood at the back of the room. Interns held their sack lunches, listening intently. Lisa Moore, a thirty-year-old Indiana woman with cervical cancer, had just shared her thoughts by video — the belief that “If something like this is preventable, I don’t understand why people don’t want it prevented. If this was a leukemia vaccine, or breast cancer or prostate cancer or anything not related to sex there’d be no question. Cancer sucks…it takes everything, and it kills ya.” Lisa Moore died in 2017. Her experience sums up the conundrum created by human papilloma virus.
