https://www.infirmiere-canadienne.com/blogs/ic-contenu/2026/05/25/chercheur-nouvelle-ecosse-noah-doucette
Noah Doucette focuses on raising awareness about the importance of the HPV vaccine and ensuring more people receive it
By Laura Eggertson
May 25, 2026
Courtesy of Noah Doucette
“The equitable thing would be to make it accessible for everyone,” Noah Doucette says of the HPV vaccine. “Make it more accessible for people because that can reduce health-care utilization, and in turn, potentially save some money.”
Noah Doucette was just 20 years old when a doctor diagnosed him with human papillomavirus (HPV) during his second year at Cape Breton University’s School of Nursing.
Doucette, who had not been vaccinated against HPV, had never heard of the virus, which is the most common sexually transmitted infection around the world.
He was unaware of HPV’s role in causing cancer in both males and females, including throat, penile, anal, cervical, vaginal, and vulvar cancer.
Doucette was also surprised to discover that although all provinces and territories offer free HPV immunization programs in schools, the programs vaccinated boys years later than girls.
“Why was I not vaccinated if other people were vaccinated?” he wondered.
Although many people have HPV and never know it because they don’t have symptoms, some strains of the virus can progress and cause cancer.
Fortunately, that was not the case for Doucette. But his questions propelled the Nova Scotia nurse into a research career focused on raising awareness about the importance of the HPV vaccine and ensuring more people receive it in Canada.
Lived experience fuels research
Now a PhD student at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Doucette is using his lived experience to fuel a research project focused on understanding the barriers that exist for populations that are under-vaccinated for HPV.
Those populations can include men who have sex with men, transgender people, newcomers to Canada, people living with disabilities, and those in rural or remote communities without access to a family doctor or nurse practitioner, he says.
As a member of the community of men who have sex with men, the need to increase vaccination rates and mitigate the effects of HPV in this population is particularly important to Doucette.
“They have a profound risk of HPV, as they do not benefit from women being vaccinated because they engage in sexual practices with men,” Doucette says. “We’re seeing a lot of anal, penile, and oropharyngeal, or throat, cancers in men.”
“That’s one of the driving factors behind why I want to do my research.”
As a result of his first study, Doucette discovered that much of what people know about the vaccine against HPV emphasizes only its role in protecting against cervical cancer.
“There’s a lot more to this vaccine than cervical cancer in females,” he says.
Throat cancer surpasses cervical
Throat cancer, not cervical cancer, is now the most common HPV-related cancer in the country, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada. The rising number of men with an oral HPV infection is driving that increase, Doucette points out.
“We need to increase knowledge and make sure under-vaccinated groups recognize vaccination could prevent many conditions, including cancers and genital warts, right now and later on in life,” Doucette says.
The emphasis around cervical cancer in public health messaging about the vaccine, as well as the later start to vaccination programs for boys, can contribute to barriers to vaccination. Both are among the reasons fewer men seek immunization against HPV than women do, Doucette says.
“The discourse that HPV is a women’s health issue can impact a lot of people’s decision-making,” he says.
The stigma that still exists for men who have sex with men is also a barrier to vaccination, because it can keep people from having open discussions with their health-care providers, which might reveal their risk, Doucette adds.
One Canadian study published in 2019 reported 90 per cent of male university students aged 17-23 had not been vaccinated against HPV, compared to 49 per cent of females who were unvaccinated.
The way vaccine programs rolled out may be one of the factors contributing to this gap, Doucette says.
Beginning in 2007, Nova Scotia — like most other provinces and territories — provided immunization against HPV to girls, because of research demonstrating the vaccine’s effectiveness against genital warts and cervical cancer.
Once subsequent research showed the vaccine’s effectiveness at preventing certain strains of HPV that cause genital warts and cancer in males, provinces and territories began expanding their programs to school-aged boys. Nova Scotia’s expansion of the HPV vaccination program came in 2015, two years too late for Doucette.
“When I went through school it was not offered in the publicly funded school-based system,” he explains.
Male/female immunization gap
The gap between male and female vaccination rates against HPV is closing in school-aged boys and girls, but in adults over 18, almost twice as many women as men (22.5 per cent vs. 12 per cent) were vaccinated, according to the 2023 Adult National Immunization Coverage Survey.
There’s still work to do in the other populations where immunization is low, to combat misinformation and improve access — and funding — for vaccines against HPV, Doucette says.
In a paper he published in August 2025, Doucette called for community-based research programs, more outreach to nurses, doctors, and other health-care providers, and less gendered communication strategies in public health campaigns.
Learning from the communities at risk about what would best lower vaccine barriers is an important place to start, he says.
Changing the narrative could help more people recognize their own risk, he says.
Doucette believes more equitable and inclusive vaccine promotion could help improve uptake and plans to make recommendations based on the results of his doctoral research.
He also encourages municipal, provincial/territorial, and federal governments to make a stronger commitment to eliminating all HPV-related diseases.
Although people can still receive the vaccine after they leave high school, provinces and territories do not cover the cost for all age groups, meaning that price can be a barrier. Full vaccination in Nova Scotia for people older than 21 requires two shots, at a cost of more than $200 per immunization, Doucette says.
Expanding who is eligible to receive the publicly funded HPV vaccine, which Health Canada has authorized for use in people aged up to 45, would remove the cost barrier.
“The equitable thing would be to make it accessible for everyone,” says Doucette. “Make it more accessible for people because that can reduce health-care utilization, and in turn, potentially save some money.”
Nursing and research roles
When he is not focusing on his PhD research, Doucette works as a medical/surgical nurse on the kidney and liver transplant unit at the Victoria General Hospital in Halifax.
Although he loves his bedside work because of the one-on-one interaction with patients, research allows Doucette to have an entirely different impact in the health-care world, he says.
“Recognizing both types of nursing as channels of each other is really important,” he adds.
In the scant hours when Doucette is neither working nor conducting research, he enjoys spending time with his partner and with his cat, Opie, as well as walking or running, travelling, and visiting his family in Cape Breton.
Once he completes his PhD, Doucette hopes to remain in the research world.
“It’s challenging, but it’s very interesting, very rewarding, and continuously sparks your curiosity about how to solve the bigger problems,” he says.
The need to bring communities together to reduce HPV-related cancers will continue to drive Doucette in the coming years.
“I know that the issue is well beyond people who identify as men — ultimately HPV does not discriminate,” he says. “Unless we work together, we’re going to have a hard time getting this under control.”
Laura Eggertson is a freelance journalist based in Wolfville, N.S.
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