It is a figure that would have sounded utopian twenty years ago: zero. Between 2020 and 2024, not a single woman aged 20 to 24 in England died of cervical cancer – the first time since such records began.
That is the conclusion of an analysis published in the journal The Lancet. Researchers led by Peter Sasieni and Milena Falcaro of Queen Mary University of London examined every recorded cervical-cancer death among women aged 20 to 34 from 2001 to 2024. Using a statistical model, they compared the deaths that actually occurred with those that would have been expected without vaccination.
The effect is greatest among the youngest
The benefit is clearest among the women vaccinated at age 12 or 13 – that is, before they could ever be exposed to the virus. Around nine in ten of those cohorts took up the vaccine. Without it, the study estimates, roughly 23 women in this group alone would have died. In total, the English programme has so far prevented around 200 deaths.
Almost all cervical cancers are caused by human papillomavirus (HPV), one of the most common sexually transmitted infections. Protection works best when it is built up before the first contact with the virus – which is why vaccination happens early.
The authors stress that this tally is only the beginning: because cervical cancer usually turns deadly later in life, the number of lives saved is likely to rise sharply over the next two decades as the vaccinated cohorts grow older.
Germany still has room to improve
The success depends on high vaccination rates – and those are slipping even in England. In Germany they are lower to begin with: according to the Robert Koch Institute, only about 55 percent of 15-year-old girls and 36 percent of boys the same age are fully vaccinated. Herd immunity would require around 80 percent.
Germany's Standing Committee on Vaccination recommends the well-tolerated, insurance-covered vaccine between the ages of 9 and 14. HPV causes some 8,000 serious cancers in Germany each year, killing about 2,000 people. Experts favour invitation and reminder systems and vaccination offered directly at schools – models already established in England and Scandinavia.