You ask why Perry mandated the Gardasil vaccine for voluntary behavior. The answer is that insurance companies wouldn’t pay for the $380 vaccine unless it was mandatory. The vaccine had been shown to be nearly 100% effective. To give access to the vaccine to those who couldn’t afford it for the price of a copay, he went with an Executive Order to make it mandatory. Ultimately, the voters, through their representatives, exercised their will by overturning the EO.
Vaccines for STDs are unnecessary, since STDs can be prevented through abstinence: which should be the policy prescription for conservatives.
This just shows Perry is and was a RINO.
Cheers!
Wow. I did not know that about the $380. That makes even more sense. THANK YOU for explaining that!
Right. So he sought a big government solution to a problem that rightly should have been left to the people. Why not just mandate that government (taxpayers) pick up the tab for whatever else people can't afford? Did it ever occur to "small government" Perry to let private charitable foundations handle the relatively small number of cases where folks truly couldn't afford the $380 vaccines?
That EO ramps up that particular negative just a little bit. That and TTC and Perry’s’ own Amnesty make it difficult for me to see why a conservative would support the man.
It's for the children! Politics and personal agendas had nothing to do with it.
I understand you REALLY LIKE Rick Perry. But don't misrepresent the facts.
from realclearpolitics.com/ Tom Bevan / June 4, 2011
"In January 2007, Gardasil was put on the "recommended" immunization schedule issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control. Merck immediately mounted a massive lobbying effort of state legislatures around the country to get Gardasil added to their respective lists of state-mandated vaccines...But in Texas, Gov. Perry chose to bypass the legislature and on Feb. 2, 2007, he issued an executive order making Texas the first state in the country requiring all sixth-grade girls to receive the three-shot vaccination series (which cost about $120 per shot)...
The controversy over Perry's decision deepened as it came to light that his former chief of staff was a lobbyist for Merck and that his chief of staff's mother-in-law, Rep. Dianne White Delisi, was the state director of an advocacy group bankrolled by Merck to push legislatures across the country to put forward bills mandating the Gardasil vaccine for preteen girls...
In response, the sponsor of HB 1098, Republican state Rep. Dennis Bonnen, blasted Perry for "using cancer victims as his backdrop for an issue that he has grossly misjudged..."
"Just because you don't want to offer up 165,000 11-year-old girls to be Merck's study group doesn't mean you don't care about women's health, doesn't mean you don't care about young girls," Bonnen added..."
And, in fact, two years later the National Vaccine Information Center issued a report raising serious questions over the harmful side effects of the drug. A few months after that, an editorial on Gardasil in the Journal of the American Medical Association declared that "serious questions regarding the overall effectiveness of the vaccine" needed to be answered and that more long-term studies were called for.
Yes I know that 120 x 3 = 380. But the rest of the post stands. Perry’s ties to Merck are highly suspect.
See for example The Wall Street Journal in 2008.
That was with 20 seconds of Googling.
The point is, government officials shouldn't make vaccines for non-communicable diseases mandatory: particularly when the illness in question is linked to promiscuity, they shouldn't order the vaccine for children. This is implicitly saying "the kids are gonna do it anyway" and it undermines morality and parental authority.
And as Michelle Malkin (known commie liberal, right?) pointed out today, Perry blustered that the legislature *couldn't* overturn an EO.
Typical swaggering jerk, Perry is. Normally you only find that kind of attitude in Massachusetts.
Cheers!