Posted on 08/26/2011 10:46:47 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
GOP presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry is taking a lot of heat from some conservatives for issuing an executive order in 2007 that required middle-school-age girls to be vaccinated for HPV -- a sexually transmitted disease that is a main cause for cervical cancer.
Dr. David Stevens, CEO of the Christian Medical Association (CMA), says his group sent a letter to Governor Perry at the time. While remaining neutral, the CMA told him they were not opposed to his mandate, as long it included an easy opt-out for parents -- which it did.
"In most states, and Texas is an example, it has to be a mandated vaccine before Medicaid and other children's programs will cover the cost of the vaccine," Dr. Stevens explains about his group's stance. "Of course, the most at-risk populations for getting cervical cancer and sexually-transmitted diseases are those who are impoverished, and therefore, sometimes difficult decisions have to be made to assure that they're going to get provision for them, while at the same time letting parents who don't want their kids to participate ... opt out."
Stevens says Gardasil is an "excellent" vaccination, and he assures that getting it does not mean parents are encouraging their children to be sexually promiscuous.
"Your children may live a moral life and have someone come into their marriage that has HPV; your daughter may be raped by someone who has HPV," he poses. "And so through no fault of their own, [they may] get exposed to this virus, which can cause serious illness, including cancer."
Perry has since stated that issuing the order was a mistake -- and when the Texas legislature eventually overturned it, he gave his signature of approval.
(Excerpt) Read more at onenewsnow.com ...
Glad to meet you!
There’s a new study out on the vaccines and Gardasil was found to be very safe, with the only associated risk of anaphylaxis, which is an immune reaction that can happen with any substance that is inhaled, eaten, applied topically, or injected. http://wingright.org/2011/08/26/that-institute-of-medicine-report-is-out/
(Bikkuri, you can opt out of the vaccines made from human fetal cultures like the Measles vaccine and still receive others without endangering your opt out status.)
I was in Austin quite a few days during all this, working on several pro-life bills, including the tweaks we were attempting to make on the Texas Advance Directive Act. I blogged at http://lifeethics.org in February, 2007, if you want to read real-time reports.
Perry did not go outside the legislative process. The legislature delegated the mandating of vaccines to the Executive Branch long before this. Besides a few statutorily required vaccines (including tetanus, diptheria, pertussis, MMR and polio), future mandated vaccines were to be named by the regulatory process at the Department of State Health Services.
“Mandate” has a fairly narrow definition. However, “opt out” can mean lots of things.
Every year, the Texas Medical Association has pressured the Legislature to tighten the mandates, in ‘07 there was a push to force the “opt out” time to each year.
In 2003, they made the mandated vaccines “opt out,” with exceptions for medical or religious reasons. In 2005, they expanded the qualifications to “conscience.”
Unfortunately include in the 2005 law was instruction to the DSHS to produce a form with a security seal so that it could not be reproduced. Regulatory hassles increased. Although, in practice, it was possible to send a letter to the DSHS requesting the paperwork, some in the Lege insisted that their intention was to make it so that the only way to get the form was to actually go to Austin and request a form to request the form it in writing!
(There were two Bills introduced in the Lege to make the vaccine mandatory,SB 110 by Senator Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, and HB 215 by Representative Farrar, D-Houston. Neither had the clarification on the opt-out. http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlodocs/80R/billtext/pdf/HB00215I.pdf#navpanes=0 )
The Governor did not by-pass the legislature at all. it did, however clarify an easier path to opt out, by ordering that the request be made available on line.
Thank you for the information and the link :)
I am pretty sure I have no libertarian friends, since I often post this line.
True Libertarianism always leads to Perversion.
Did you think twice before getting you annual flu shot last year, did the unthinkable enter your mind that the government might just begin to thin the useless eaters from society to make it more productive?
Not tin foil fodder anymore but real possibilities. They sooner or later will have to clean up the mess their utopian ideas have created, and you as an individual will always just be a liability.
We have turned our elected class into Royalty with little fanfare or public outrage, hard to imagine recovering from this mind set, but one man was called out to save us from ourselves before, could happen again.
My faith demands that I believe that, you can take it or leave it.
I’ve never had a flu shot.
Conspiracy theories about the flu shot are the equivalent of Jeremiah Wright’s claims that the government put AIDS in the black community.
I have no problem with people getting a flu shot.
It just is something I never felt I needed to get.
Yep, I would have agreed with you up until recently. But we have always thought, that could never happen here.
Of course we probably always thought we could never elect an outright Marxist to the Office of President either.
The old Commie trick used to be three steps forward and one step back.
Now we came no pretense of going back, it is just two steps forward, then hold until people go back to sleep and restart the process.
We eventually will have a Progressive that will attempt to solve what they perceive as a threat to their world, 8 billion people (not a part of their world by the way) is that threat. You guess how they might address that threat. In the past nature gave a hand, or wars but those are not all that dependable, so ultimately they will decide. Old people are the most expensive to maintain, so they would be an obvious first target.
A flu vaccine could be made that would likely be more fatal to the old and infirm, and could even get a few unhealthy young people, not unlike a natural infection.
If you think this is impossible then you haven’t evolved your thought process to include the unthinkable, because I am very sure many in the current government have.
Who in the opposition party would you bet your life, on them telling you the truth?
Tin foil, it is not just for the kooks any more.
Much more likely is a move to ration care after a given age or an arbitrary quality of life scale.
Most likely, though is a drift in public opinion http://lifeethics.wordpress.com/2007/01/24/uk-survey-doctors-should-probably-kill-patients-2/ and http://wingright.org/2011/08/24/murder-and-medical-ethics-viewpoint/
This would follow a move toward the public health policy of the Netherlands, where one in 10 die due to intentional - not always voluntary - euthanasia.
About 1/3 to 1/2 of doctors and the general public support killing by physicians - so called “physician assisted suicide.”
If I were to look for conspirators, I’d start with all the people with degrees in Public Health and the extreme objectivism of Randian utilitarians.
I grew up in the pre-pill era. Pregnancy was a serious deterrent. I doubt anyone under 50 today can even imagine what it was like thru the 60s for a single woman to become pregnant. Then, somehow, it became “fashionable” to have children born out of wedlock. The 80’s brought us AIDS, which I believed acts to some degree as a deterrent, at least to promiscuous sex among otherwise intelligent people.
One problem is the “intelligent” qualifier. What these people seem incapable of understanding is that in having sex, they are essentially sleeping with every other person that partner has ever had sex with, and every other person that those other people have had sex with, ad infinitum. The potential exposure to disease is phenomenal.
The CMA, recognizes that there is a segment of our population, usually but certainly not always, poor, uneducated, young, and very sexually active. Their exposure to deadly diseases if off the charts. While you or I would have thought of ‘consequences,’ these people just don’t. The real question is how to change behaviors that are so well embedded in those subcultures.
Which part of “rapidly spreading” and “bacterial” did you not understand. That is NOT the same thing as an STD vaccine.
Was it an “ask your local government bureaucrat” for permission to opt out?
It didn’t become fashionable, it became profitable.
I remember a congressman saying on the floor of the house once, he]] they are retired at 18, who can beat a deal like that. He was describing the benefit package for an unwed mother.
My initial reference was to the “Murphy Brown” tpe situations, liberate, career women who wanted a baby but not the ‘nuisance’ of the husband.,
But the more dangerous is the ‘unintended consequences’ of the “Great Society.” That was a major turning point in the downslide of the USA, amidst all the tumoil of the 60s. Now you have third/fourth generation who’ve figured out that scam.
A woman I once worked with always railed about her granddaughter’s mother: younger than 30, had something like 7 kids with God knows how many fathers. This woman was never quite sure the girl was her granddaughter, but paternity was acknowledged. That young woman spends the day watching soap operas with her mother whose path she had followed. When the aforementioned granddaughter @ age 9 mentioned that mom should stop having all those babies, the mother threatened the child with abandonment (shipping off to the other grandmother who had become fully disabled and was unable to help raise her granddaughter).
The system that rewards that lifestyle has to end.
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