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 ...
It’s still a bad idea and based on an evil notion.
Thanks for posting this. I didn’t realize there was an easy opt out provision. That eliminates one of the concerns I had about Perry.
This at least puts some context into Perry's decision, though it certainly does not justiify it.
The “Perry forced Gardisil” bots don’t like to mention the opt out.
This piece is inaccurate. Perry never “gave his signature of approval” when his mandate was overturned by the legislature.
Generally speaking, there usually is more to the story.
Naturally, we all like to think our daughters/nieces, and all young women would remain totally chaste up to their wedding day. However, in this day and age, I would not bet the farm on the percentage of those remaining so even approaches double digits.
Even the best parents’ kids can fall victim to hormones. Most emerge unscathed from a health perspective. But the reality is that some become pregnant; others develop disease. From what I’ve heard from my hospice nurse friend, it is a horrible, horrible disease, and we’re talking about its affecting very young people.
If a vaccine is available against that disease, why would people object to its being made available, with the opt-out proviso? I don’t believe it encourages pre-marital sex. That doesn’t seem to require much encouragement. Kids are inundated day in and day out from birth with sexual messages. How credible is it that a teen is going to say, whoopee, I’ve had my gardasil immunization, I can go out and have sex now?
Quite true. In fact, he was quite bitter.
"I want to thank those legislators who voted against this bill. They will never have to think twice about whether they did the right thing. No lost lives will occupy the confines of their conscience, sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. I have wrestled for a few days with whether to veto this bill, or let it become law without my signature. But the fact of the matter is, it will become law no matter what because the voice of the Legislature is clear. And rather than allowing this issue to be held captive one more day by legislative politics, and the inevitable posturing that will ensue during a veto override debate, I have decided to let it become law without my signature. It is time to extract this issue from the political arena to the court of public opinion where real lives are at stake, and it is time to do so without delay"
Keep on spinnin’
The idea of oral sex not being sex (I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewisnsky) has led to an alarming increase in oral cancer (HPV).
Thanks Bill.
You also probably didn't realize that this easy out option, is anything but easy.
Ever wonder why there are easy Opt out options instead of even easier opt in options?
Thing is... if they opt out.. they not only opt out of “Gardisil”, they also opt out of ALL booster shots.. There IS no opt out of ONLY “Gardisil”.
An equal question is, did YOU give your signal of approval?
Most likely you never heard of Gardisil or Perry outside of FR and still don’t know much about either.
The Gardisil “mandate” was not to force girls with parents that cared what they were doing or would take the time to Opt Out, it was to offer some protection to the poor girls that more or less raised themselves and whose “parents” never did give a damn what they were doing if not outright encourganing them to be sexually active and possible suffer from HPV!!!
Get a clue!
Do you realize how progressive your rant sounds?
Very strange considering your tag line.
Thank you for that, it is absolutely true. A friend of mine tried to mentor a high risk girl from a large welfare family. It didn’t work, the girl was pregnant by 15 and dropped out of school. If she didn’t have an STD then she soon would have one. Her welfare mother expected the girl to get pregnant because it meant another check from the government.
This is from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:
“Two HPV vaccines are licensed in the United States: a bivalent vaccine (Cervarix) containing HPV types 16 and 18 and a quadrivalent vaccine (Gardasil) vaccine containing HPV types 6, 11, 16, and 18. Both vaccines offer protection against the HPV types that cause 70% of cervical cancers (i.e., types 16 and 18), and the quadrivalent HPV vaccine also protects against the types that cause 90% of genital warts (i.e., types 6 and 11). Either vaccine can be administered to girls aged 11–12 years and can be administered to those as young as 9 years of age (15,16); girls and women ages 13–26 years who have not started or completed the vaccine series also should receive the vaccine. HPV vaccine is indicated for girls in this the onset of sexual activity. The quadrivalent (Gardasil) HPV vaccine can also be used in males aged 9–26 years to prevent genital warts (17). Administering the vaccine to boys before the onset of sexual activity is optimal. Both HPV vaccines are administered as a 3-dose series of IM injections over a 6-month period, with the second and third doses given 1–2 and then 6 months after the first dose. Ideally, the same vaccine product should be used for the entire 3-dose series. HPV vaccine is available for eligible children and adolescents aged <19 years through the Vaccines for Children (VFC) program (available by calling CDC INFO [800-232-4636]).”
http://www.cdc.gov/std/treatment/2010/hpv.htm
ping
Perry was amazingly stupid when he did this executive order. There is no excuse for such a thing. Spin it all you like there is nothing conservative about going outside the legislative process to mandate this kind of thing. And then to hang the bill of millions and millions of dollars around the Texas taxpayers necks. Bills to be paid forever, year after year. For an unproven drug pushed by people that were or had been close to Perry who made money off the deal.
It was equally stupid to not make the program opt-in.
FYI, I know several young women who have been shot up with that crap. Each of them have had side effects. One has had what are akin to very bad migraines. Before Gardasil she never had a headache in her life.
I have a suggestion. To put this topic to bed how about if Rick Perry, in public and verified by a doctor gets vaccinated with Gardasil? If the drug is OK and he defends it let him take the stuff!!!!!
No amount of posts by you will unrung this bell. Rick Perry made a stupid and politically nutty decision to construct and sign an executive order that was certain to be kicked back at him and kicked back hard. That is exactly what Texans and the legislature did. They kicked Perry right in the cajones!
Even still, with all that said compared to Obama Rick Perry poops jobs, diamonds and bricks of gold. Go Perry!
One more thing to mention to the thread.
Boys contact HPV too.
So where does that leave virgin brides if their husbands aren’t?
The idea of something like Gardidsil is plain old good common sense to reduce the incidence of diseases that could be much more than just irritating. Its the same exact issue with the school-age vaccinations. Requiring some relatively innocuous preventatives to keep from epidemics is a rightful function of government for the common good. No different than the purposes of the military.
The Opt Out clause gave parents, who were confident their 12 y.o was not sexually active, a reasonable excuse from the vaccination, because Gradisil was not needed in their case.
If you or your libertarian friends fail to grasp the concept, then you are simply being political.
Nice ASSumptions, all wrong. I followed the Gardasil issue all the way through.
The state does NOT have the authority to make such a vaccination mandatory for school. Children won’t get it sitting next to someone in school.
YOU get a clue.
Are you for real? Obviously you have a very difficult reading comprehension issue. Then again your Gardisil balone is not about reality and is solely about some demented libertarian blue-sky dream world politics.
Don’t states require pre-marital blood testing any more? Wouldn’t that show a problem? Or was that just related to the Rh factor questions?
Back in 1970 they were testing.
Not now, that I am aware of.
Thank you for bringing this up. There are two sides to the STD transmission issue, and, strangely enough, only the female side (contraction or transmission) seems to be up for discussion.
Why is that?
Anytime ANYONE wants to inject something into you and your kids... QUESTION IT! Seems pretty simply to me. Parents ARE the FINAL AUTHORITY regarding their children... what about that do people not understand. If you have a problem with a parent abusing said authority... make your case.. you SOB’s.
So.. government now needs to protect the ignorant from their personal decisions regarding sex? This type of gov’t control is quite new to me.
The very fact that government has involved itself with this issue is the problem... this is a personal, family issue..not a government issue.
Geez... how did anyone survive the “SIXTIES SEXUAL REVOLUTION” without government intervention? It comes right down to PERSONAL responsibility! A CONSERVATIVE concept, that is not entrenched in mandatory programs for vaccines. Leave it to the PERSON to decide to take the RISK! What the heck..??? Do you love your liberty and freedom or not????
The kali PDS coyote clique must be hanging out at the Med MaryJuana shops way too often.
LOL.
Say that fast ten times.
It comes right down to PERSONAL responsibility!
Ok and 100% agree with that, but what about the apparently growing mass of those that never think beyond “how fast can I get my pants off” and carry their little hitchiker along to the other unsuspecting like mindeds AND eventually to either the population or to the “personally responsible” ones pocketbook?
Anyone who, for whatever reason, that doesn’t understand the addage “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, is either a none thinker or is more interested in scoring some petty narrowminded libertarian political point. Which is it???
Perry Ping.......
Did you just arrive on this planet, coming from Mars with ronpaul or are a new previously undocumented case of Rip Van Winkel?
No, they aren't going to say it like that. But those things can make a difference at the margin. I remember myself deciding not to go forward with sex at the last moment due to the possible consequences. If the consequences are removed one by one... you have lost all obstacles to promiscuous behavior.
That is all by design from the dimocrap playbook that LBJ put in play big time.
Thanks for posting. I’m the author of “A Dose of Reason,” and chair of the Family Medicine Section of the CMDA.
I thoroughly investigated the CMA position at the time. Dr. Gene Rudd, an OB/Gyn, was our VP at the time. He and Dr. Stevens, an FP, both made public statements to the press about the ethics statements of the CMDA and the legitimacy of the vaccine.
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.
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