Commentary: This cancer vaccine should spare future generations from ordeals like my wife’s

The cancer vaccine that targets HPV is being used around the world, but there has been some resistance in the United States. That changed when a head-and-neck surgeon put on a glove, poked the back of my wife’s throat and said one of her tonsils felt concerningly hard. We also learned something else: If a new vaccine had been available when my wife was younger, everything she was about to go through — daily radiation therapy, hospital stays, chemotherapy infusions, infections, starvation and constant pain, without assurance that any of this would work — could have been avoided. My wife’s cancer was caused by the human papillomavirus, which nearly every person will contract at some point in their lives, because nearly every person is sexually active at some point in their lives. President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for that job, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has previously sued the maker of the HPV vaccine Gardasil, calling it “dangerous and defective” and saying it had caused “severe and life-changing injuries.” Plenty of scientists and other journalists have fact-checked the widely circulated claims against Gardasil and found them to be exaggerated or outright false; I won’t duplicate their work here.