By Courtney Le
I went to Vietnam last summer expecting to help treat common illnesses. What I didn’t expect was how many women would choose to quietly risk dying from cancer rather than remove their pants behind a closed curtain.
As a Vietnamese woman myself, watching my patients turn down a free Pap smear made one thing painfully clear: cost isn’t the biggest barrier—shame, stigma, and silence are. Now that I’m back in the Pacific Northwest, I can’t stop thinking about how those stories cross borders. Many of us here still have parents, aunties, or cousins in Vietnam. What we say at family dinners in Seattle can echo all the way back to Saigon.
Vietnam’s free national HPV vaccination rollout in 2026 is a historic opportunity. But unless we confront stigma, misinformation, and rural inequalities, a woman’s survival will still depend on where she lives and what she knows.
Cervical cancer isn’t rare in Vietnam. It’s the second most common cancer among women aged 15 to 44 and one of the deadliest cancers among women overall. Globally, it kills more than 300,000 women every year—80% of them in low and middle-income countries like Vietnam. What makes this especially devastating is that it’s almost entirely preventable. HPV causes nearly all cases, and just two strains account for 70% of invasive cancers. We have a vaccine that can stop this. But prevention doesn’t happen if women are too ashamed or misinformed to act.
I’ve heard the fears myself. In a 2025 study of Southern Vietnamese women by Vietnamese and U.S. researchers, many young and unmarried women said they avoided screening because they would have to “remove (their) pants” in front of healthcare providers. Some mothers believed the vaccine would make their daughters infertile. Others feared they couldn’t afford treatment if cancer was found.
So what good is a free, lifesaving vaccine if the women who need it most are still too afraid, too uninformed, or too isolated to receive it?
Nationally, only about one in four women in Vietnam has ever received cervical cancer screening. In the rural regions where I worked, where people waited hours in the heat for basic treatments, screening rates were even lower. Rural women face longer travel, fewer clinics, and lower health literacy. Many don’t know HPV causes cervical cancer or who should be screened. They describe the process as embarrassing or interfering with family obligations.
Vaccination rates tell a similar story. In southern Vietnam, very few women have been vaccinated—far from the WHO’s goal of 90% coverage by age 15. And because HPV vaccination is most effective prior to sexual debut, every missed dose today could become cancer a decade from now.
That contrast between what women fear and what they deserve is why this next step matters so much. For the first time, the HPV vaccine will be free, delivered through Vietnam’s trusted national immunization program—the same system that eradicated polio and neonatal tetanus.
But trust alone won’t fill the empty chairs I remember.
In Vietnam, I saw thousands wait five hours in the sun for basic pain medication. Parents lined up around schoolyards for free flu shots, new glasses, braces–anything that could help their families live healthier lives. But in the women’s health section, row after row of chairs sat empty. For a few hours, not a single woman came. I spent more time persuading women to care for themselves than actually treating them.
Those empty chairs were the clearest reminder that “free” is not enough when fear takes up more space than patients do.
The HPV vaccine can protect against the virus that causes nearly all cervical cancers. The financial barrier is finally gone. Now the burden is on us.
That includes those of us in the Vietnamese and broader Asian diaspora here in the Pacific Northwest. We’re the ones FaceTiming parents in Saigon, texting cousins in Da Nang, chatting with aunties over dinner in Seattle. Our conversations echo.
We need culturally sensitive education campaigns that reach rural villages, mothers, daughters, and the women who sit silently at the edge of medical tents unsure if their questions are welcome. We need doctors, community leaders, and even family members—here and in Vietnam—to talk openly about HPV, fertility fears, sexual health. We must frame prevention not as shameful, but as an act of love. And we need to treat cancer prevention with the same urgency and dignity we give to free glasses, free braces, and free ibuprofen.
If we can rewrite this narrative, the 2026 vaccine rollout will be the moment Vietnam, and those of us with roots there, decide that women’s lives and women’s bodies deserve the same protection and trust as every other part of our health system.
Preventable cancer should never be a death sentence. Not in Vietnam. Not in 2026. Not for the women we love, wherever they may live.
Courtney Le is a Vietnamese American undergraduate at the University of Washington studying public health. She recently assisted with medical outreach in rural Vietnam.
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