Had the flu jab this year? And if so, may I ask whether it has given you a reckless urge to go around inhaling other people's saliva? Surely now that you're immune from those viruses skulking on surfaces and in bodily fluids, you'll want to lick public hand-rails just for the hell of it? Or hurl yourself into the path of a tramp's wet sneeze? No? Thought not. And yet there are people who think that if we give teenage girls the new cervical cancer vaccine, it will turn them into wanton nymphomaniacs.

Stephen Green, of the lobby group Christian Voice, has said of the groundbreaking Cervarix jab: “Anyone giving this drug to a girl is telling her: 'I think you are a slag'.” A spokesman for the Islamic Medical Association said that it will make girls think it's OK to “pick up... boys and sleep around”. If we were looking for champions of skewed logic, I think we've just found them.

A Roman Catholic school in Prestwich recently refused to allow the vaccination on its premises because “we do not believe that school is the right place for the three injections to be administered”. Some parents refuse to let their daughters have it on moral grounds, claiming that it sends out the “wrong message”. Tell that to Jade Goody, 28, who this week began chemotherapy for advanced cervical cancer that was missed by routine screening and now has a 50/50 chance of survival.

This week the vaccine, being offered to 12 and 13-year-old girls in UK schools, is headline news again, and not in a good way. Debbie Jones, from Orkney, is furious that, although she and her husband refused permission for their 13-year-old daughter to have the injection (because she is diabetic they worried about side-effects), it was shoved in her arm anyway, allegedly against her will. Now an NHS inquiry is under way and members of the public are bombarding the father's blog, urging him to report it to the police as a physical assault on his child.

This is an unfortunate incident all round. If this version of events is correct then obviously it will do the campaign no favours - health professionals overriding the wishes of parents is wrong. But the other danger is that it will be seized upon by some parties as further evidence that the Government is on a sinister mission to corrupt our children and have them all fornicating by Year 9. It is grist to the mill for those with an interest in sowing distrust in inoculations, as the ill-informed campaign surrounding the MMR vaccination managed spectacularly.

But to deny your daughter this vaccine without a sound medical reason is tantamount to child neglect. You don't have to be promiscuous to become infected with the human papilloma virus (HPV), which causes most cervical cancer: just one sexual partner will do.

A consultant gynaecologist recently bemoaned the absurdity of this debate, pointing out that HPVs are ubiquitous; they are present on human skin. Almost all women acquire HPV on their cervixes, and mostly their natural defence systems deal with it. For an unlucky minority this doesn't happen and some go on to get cervical cancer - simple as that. To eliminate this risk is a wondrous gift from science. But we are ever more ungrateful recipients.

An under-reported story from the Department of Health this year revealed that, thanks to the immunisation programme, meningitis C has been all but wiped out in this country. For the first time since records began, there were no deaths last year from the C-strain of meningococcus among under-19s. Yet I don't remember many street parties celebrating this news.

Are we thankful enough for such advances? I don't think so. We take them for granted, regarding immunisation programmes as at best a necessary chore and at worst a State attempt to poison our kids. Too many parents now see inoculations as something they can opt out of, knowing that their offspring will benefit from other people's children having had them. We have forgotten the terror of rampant, incurable illness: maybe we should bring back the bubonic plague to refresh our memories.

Imagine if schools from the 1950s onwards had followed the example of St Monica's High School in Prestwich and banned the polio sugar lump? Or the TB jab - because a school was an “inappropriate venue” to administer it.

Monsignor John Allen, its parish priest, the headmaster and chairman of the governors (all men, note) insist that their decision to ban Cervarix was “not a moral judgment”. Are they sure? Last year Monsignor Allen said this of the vaccine: “Parents must consider the knock-on effect of encouraging sexual promiscuity. Instead of taking it for granted that teenagers will engage in sexual activity, we can offer a vision of a full life keeping yourself for a lifelong partnership in marriage.”

I think that people who reject sex education and vaccines and preach morality in its place, whistling in the dark and hoping for the best, are themselves dangerous. They would put at pointless risk even the young girl who makes a single “mistake” or, God help us, the rape victim. If you don't tell children about sex, they won't go off and do it, they reason, from somewhere in la-la land. Well that worked out real swell for abstinence-only sex educationist Sarah Palin, whose 17-year-old daughter is currently preparing to give birth.

You don't have the rabies vaccine then try to get bitten by a rabid dog, just as you won't have a dose of Cervarix and turn into a sex maniac.Those girls who would have said no to sex in the first place will still say no, and those who would have said yes will still go ahead and do the deed. The only difference is that it's less likely to kill them.

Men are at their most romantic at age 53, a poll reveals. As the years advance they are more likely to surprise their partner with thoughtful gestures such as a poem, rose petals in the bath or a bottle of champagne. More romantic is one way of putting it. More desperate is another.

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