No doubt Governor Perry made a tactical mistake with his vaccine mandate for HPV, he admitted it and I believe that at least his heart was in the right place.. However Michele Bachmann (a candidate who as I have said before makes my skin crawl) royally blew it with her insane claims about girls facing mental retardation if they receive it. Also she played into the false stereotype of conservatives being anti-Science as well. As the author says ” [M]oral confusion and public health illiteracy” is not a great advertisement for ones candidacy.
by Michael Gerson
If Republican presidential candidates want to debate sexual health and hygiene, it would be nice if they displayed more collective knowledge and judgment than your average eighth-grade family-life class. During the Tampa debate, a viewer longed for a blunt, part-time football coach — or whomever they draft into teaching health classes nowadays — to mount the stage and present the facts of life.
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At least this approach would have added to the public stock of health information. Instead, Michele Bachmann talked of “innocent little 12-year-old girls” who were “forced to have a government injection” by Rick Perry’s 2007 mandate of HPV vaccinations in Texas. Bachmann later added, on the medical authority of a weeping mother’s anecdote, that the HPV vaccine, or maybe it was some other vaccine, might cause “mental retardation.” Bachmann herself seems prone to a serious condition: the compulsive desire to confirm every evangelical stereotype of censorious ignorance.
The objections to routine HPV vaccination cluster in a few areas. First, it is alleged that removing medical penalties for sexual contact — in this case, HPV and cervical cancer — will encourage sex. A protective shot given to a girl on the verge of sexual maturity, in this view, may be taken as permission for experimentation.
This type of argument is inherently difficult to prove or disprove. But it is unlikely that a 16-year-old making sexual choices is focused on her chances of getting a cancer that might develop 20 years in the future — a hypothetical event beyond the time horizon of the adolescent mind.
The more disturbing moral failure concerns any parent who would entertain this argument. Try to imagine a parent-daughter conversation about sexual restraint and maturity that includes the words: “Honey, I’m going to deny you a vaccine that prevents a horrible, bleeding cancer, just as a little reminder of the religious values I’ve been trying to teach you.” This would be morally monstrous. Such ethical electroshock therapy has nothing to do with cultivation of character in children. It certainly has nothing to do with Christianity, which teaches that moral rules are created for the benefit of the individual, not to punish them with preventable death.
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A second objection to routine HPV vaccination concerns parental rights. Bachmann confused this issue by introducing anti-vaccine paranoia — one of the most direct and practical ways that a public official can undermine the health of his or her fellow citizens. A more sophisticated version of this argument claims that a vaccine against measles or mumps is fundamentally different from a vaccine against a sexually transmitted disease such as HPV. Because of the ethical context, parents should have more of a say.
But the public health case for vaccination is similar for diseases spread by coughing and those spread by sexual contact. Vaccines decrease the incidence of a disease in a whole society, which has good health outcomes for everyone, not only the protected individual. Consider a woman who is resolutely abstinent until her marriage at 24. Her husband — who got HPV from a girlfriend who was not vaccinated — unknowingly gives it to his wife on their wedding night, increasing her risk for cervical cancer. She would suffer because others are not vaccinated. The decision to vaccinate — for HPV or any infectious disease — is not just a personal, family choice. It is also a matter of public health. And it is not unreasonable for public authorities to strongly encourage responsible parental choices.
It is possible that Rick Perry encouraged HPV vaccinations in the wrong way or for the wrong reasons. But it is Bachmann, not Perry, who would put girls and women at greater health risk based on moral confusion and public health illiteracy.
Read the rest – A dose of reality for the HPV debate
Bryan Preston of Pajamas Media has this to say regarding crony capitalism
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Which GOP candidate has had his state-run health care program linked with ObamaCare? Not Perry, since Texas doesn’t have anything like ObamaCare. No, that would be Mitt Romney. But Bachmann doesn’t use “RomneyCare.” Why? Has she allowed herself to become a stalking horse for Romney? If so, on what grounds?
And then there’s the crony capitalist problem. Bachmann has taken a lot of money from pharma companies. One company stands out.
Meanwhile, Bachman has taken somewhere north of $140,000 from pharmaceutical companies. Those donors include Abbott Labs, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Novartis, Eli Lilly and Bayer. Yet, not a dollar of all that pharma money, from such a wide range of the world’s largest drugmakers, came from Merck. Might Bachmann be going after Merck on behalf of that company’s competitors who also happen to be Bachmann donors?
Why bold GlaxoSmithKline? Because they make the only other viable HPV vaccine on the market, Cervarix.
If it’s fair to levy the “crony capitalism” charge at Perry, then it’s fair to levy the exact same charge at Bachmann, especially after her attacks on Perry.
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For the record, I know the “crony capitalism” charge doesn’t apply to Perry and I don’t believe it applies to Bachmann. The stalking horse possibility is definitely in play, though.
Read the rest – Does Michele Bachmannhave a crony problem too?
