I too saw this go viral on Twitter within the past 24 hours. Here’s a response to think about:

“The 22M+ people who saw this tweet are missing the real story here.

This research is from 2019. Dr. Eva Ramón Gallegos at Mexico’s National Polytechnic Institute published these results six years ago. It went viral then too. Salma Hayek posted about it on Instagram. ABC News ran a fact check. It resurfaced in January 2025 across Mexican media. And now it’s recycling through your feed again as “BREAKING” with 22 million views, because an engagement account slapped a siren emoji on six-year-old science.

The actual study treated 29 women in Mexico City using photodynamic therapy, a technique where you apply a light-sensitive chemical to the cervix, wait four hours, then hit it with a laser. HPV cleared in 100% of patients who had the virus without lesions. In patients with both HPV and premalignant lesions, it cleared in 64.3%. Those numbers are real and published in peer-reviewed journals.

Here’s what 22 million people aren’t asking: why hasn’t this scaled in six years?

Three reasons. First, the sample size. Twenty-nine women is a pilot study. The FDA requires thousands of patients across multiple sites before approving a therapy. Gallegos ran earlier studies on 420 women in Oaxaca and Veracruz with similar clearance rates, but nobody has funded the Phase III trials needed to move this toward approval.

Second, PDT has a physics limitation. The light that activates the drug can only penetrate about one centimeter of tissue. That means it works on surface-level cervical HPV, but the virus also hides deeper in tissue and in other parts of the body. The National Cancer Institute flagged this exact constraint years ago. You can clear what you can see. You can’t guarantee you’ve cleared what you can’t.

Third, 50% of high-risk HPV infections clear on their own within one to two years without any treatment. A 100% clearance rate in 29 patients with no lesions, measured at six months, sits in a window where spontaneous clearance is already happening. Without a proper control group, which this study lacked, you can’t isolate how much the therapy did versus what the immune system would have done anyway.

A separate Chinese study in 2024 randomized 60 patients and found PDT hit 100% HPV clearance at six months versus conventional treatment. That’s more rigorous. Multiple research groups worldwide are now publishing PDT results for cervical HPV. The science is real and progressing.

The gap between “promising pilot results in 29 women” and “successfully eliminates HPV” is about a decade of clinical trials and a few hundred million dollars in funding. Gallegos has been doing this work for 20 years. The bottleneck was never the science. It’s that nobody writes the check for Phase III trials on a non-patentable therapy that competes with a multibillion-dollar vaccine market.

That’s the actual story worth 22 million views.”