The new vaccine plan is ready: focus on HPV and vaccination calendar

It was long overdue and now it’s almost ready. The draft of the new 2023-2025 vaccine plan, in fact, should be approved by the State-Regions Conference by February. It reiterates “old” recommendations, such as the objectives of vaccination coverage, establishes priorities, such as the need to push the accelerator on HPV vaccines, and presents some innovations.

One above all: a new vaccination calendar, modified not so much in content as in format. The new calendar will in fact be distinct from the plan, which can be updated from year to year, in response to epidemiological needs and ready and to the innovations that arrive – as fast as never before, as Covid has shown us – from the world of research.

A new vaccination calendar

To tell all this, illustrating the main news of the vaccination plan is Paul Bonanni, professor of hygiene at the University of Florence and director of the Department of Health Sciences (DSS), member of the “Vaccini” working group of the Italian Society of Hygiene. “The calendar separate from the plan is an important novelty, which makes it possible to overcome the difficulties that have existed in the past, with vaccination plans that have expired but have remained in force for years without a new vaccination calendar”.

Similar situations, he recalls, have had the side effect of causing the regions to proceed in no particular order with the arrival of new vaccines, helping to exacerbate the well-known health differences across the country. “The new calendar, on the contrary, will be updatable from year to year, on the model of what other countries have already done, both in terms of product innovations and vaccination strategies”.

As can be read in the draft of the plan – anticipated by Quotidiano Sanità – the new calendar “in addition to presenting the vaccination offer actively and free of charge foreseen by age group, contains the vaccinations recommended for particular categories at risk (by medical condition, for occupational exposure, for occasional events, for social and economic vulnerabilities)”. There are no substantial innovations in the indications, Bonanni admits, with the exception of the indications on the quadrivalent vaccine against meningococcus after the first year of age has been completed.

Full speed ahead on HPV

The new vaccination plan – framed, as Bonanni recalls never before, in the international scenario, defined by documents such as the European Action Plan for Vaccinations 2015-2020 (EVAP), the WHO Agenda on Immunization 2030 and the WHO’s European Agenda on Immunization 2030 – above all marks the direction to take in the coming years, starting from the main critical issues at the moment. Both in terms of coverage and that, still painful, of confidence in vaccines. Thus among the 2023-2025 objectives – which include the ambition to eliminate measles and rubella, maintain the state polio free and finally complete a national vaccination register – a primary role is played by vaccinations against HPV (Human Papilloma Virus – HPV).

“Those against HPV are the vaccinations that have suffered the most from the lockdown, even if it must be admitted that we were already in a crisis before the pandemic – continues Bonanni – and yet, the vaccines against HPV, both for girls and boys, are a tool that works exceptionally well and should be seen as true anti-cancer tools.”

So then, the plan reads, it is both necessary to strengthen vaccination campaigns and to promote access to vaccinations, with open days and catch-up activities, for example. If on the one hand it is necessary to stimulate vaccinations, on the other it will be important to involve general practitioners, paediatricians of free choice, specialists and pharmacists, to promote and offer them, the plan continues.

“For the first time in the new vaccination plan it is clearly reaffirmed that vaccines can help combat the phenomenon of antibiotic resistance – continues Bonanni – both directly, as a means of prevention against bacterial diseases, and indirectly, by discouraging the ‘inappropriate use of vaccine-preventable viral diseases, such as the flu’.

More generally, the message that the new plan wants to give, in addition to the strategies to be pursued, is to underline the value of vaccines beyond their ability to ward off diseases and prevent incorrect use of drugs. It is no coincidence, in fact, that the new vaccination plan refers to the ethical value of vaccines, both for oneself and for others: “You still have the freedom to adhere to vaccinations or not – concludes Bonanni – but it is important to help create awareness on the subject of vaccines, also by sharing all the information on how the vaccine surveillance system works, as reiterated in the plan, and to counter all the ideological structures that can harm themselves and others “.