Posted on 06/04/2023 12:41:06 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Around the country, vaccine policy is on hold while lawmakers recover from a pandemic-policy hangover.
The HPV vaccine has been around for almost two decades and could spare thousands of people from developing cervical and oral cancer — so mandating it for schoolchildren once seemed an easy call for Democrats in deep-blue California.
But a bill to do just that has been watered down beyond recognition in one of the most liberal states in the U.S., a victim of a homegrown anti-vaccine movement that has become more organized and more successful since the pandemic.
Anti-vaccine activists didn’t do it on their own. The “most powerful thing to get the author to withdraw the mandate was school districts opposing the bill,” said Joshua Coleman, who founded the group V for Vaccine to fight such requirements.
While only a handful of mostly small, rural districts formally opposed the bill, statewide education groups also started to privately pressure the lawmaker to drop or soften her proposal.
Toxic, pandemic-era battles over immunizations and school closures have made vaccine politics radioactive, even on diseases wholly unrelated to Covid-19. In California, where lawmakers pushed through some of the nation’s strictest mandates through 2019, schools are wary of wading back into the fight.
Across the country, blue-state policymakers have nearly given up trying to create new vaccine policy and are now simply trying to hold the line on a decade’s worth of public health gains. Attempts to add required vaccines for school kids this year sputtered in Wisconsin, California and Massachusetts, a stunning reversal after a successful push to tighten exemptions for mandated childhood vaccines.
California Assemblywoman Cecilia Aguiar-Curry “People are so wary of science and data now,” said the HPV bill’s author, Democratic Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry. "I have to have a brass backbone on this," she added. | Rich Pedroncelli/AP Photo
“It’s fair to say we’re experiencing a new paradigm in the vaccine debates,” said Troy Flint, a spokesperson for the California School Boards Association, which has not taken an official position on the bill. “I think there is weariness about addressing the issue because of the impact that the closure of in-person instruction had on students, as well as just the vitriol that surrounds the issue and has the potential to distract.”
Anti-vaccine activists, who argue immunizations are a personal choice and should not be compelled by the state, have seized on that reluctance — and lately, they’ve been on a winning streak. In just over a year, proposals in Sacramento to let younger teens get the shot without parental consent, require the Covid-19 vaccine for schools and some employers, and tighten up vaccine reporting requirements lost steam, weighed down by pandemic fatigue and growing public resentment toward public health mandates.
“People are so wary of science and data now,” said the HPV bill’s author, Democratic Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry. “I have to have a brass backbone on this,” she added.
It’s an ominous sign for the ability of states to enact new vaccine laws.
“There’s been an avalanche, a flood, of bills introduced on vaccine policy, but they’re mostly negative,” said Brent Ewig, the chief policy and government relations officer of the Association of Immunization Managers, which has been going state to state to counter the small but loud “medical freedom groups.”
“Right now the politics of vaccines are such that we’re in a holding pattern.”
The anti-vaccine side is not waiting it out.
Even before Aguiar-Curry’s HPV bill had been formally introduced, groups advocating for “parental choice” and “medical freedom” were roaming the halls of the state Capitol, meeting with elected officials in case anyone in Sacramento was thinking of trying to mandate the Covid-19 vaccine again.
By the time the Democrat finally proposed an HPV mandate, one that she had been urged to shelve years earlier during earlier vaccine wars, the politics had hardened. Almost immediately, her bill — which would have required students to receive the HPV vaccine by eighth grade to attend school — became a problem.
HPV is a virus that is often, but not always, sexually transmitted, and certain strains of it can lead to cervical, oral and other cancers. It’s the cause of around 3 percent of all cancers in women and 2 percent in men, around 36,000 new cases each year. A vaccine for the few cancer-causing strains has been available since 2006; it prevents around 90 percent of HPV-related cancers.
In 2007, Texas became the first state to mandate HPV vaccines for 11- and 12-year-old girls when then-Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, signed an executive order. His action was quickly overturned by the state legislature after public outcry over the vaccine manufacturer Merck’s lobbying and campaign contributions to the governor. It cast an early shadow of controversy over the vaccine, one that skeptics have latched onto since.
“There’s a real reluctance to introduce any proactive policy to improve vaccines because once it gets discussed in the public sphere there’s a real danger that we will lose ground.”
Ryan Westergaard, chief medical officer, Wisconsin Department of Health Services
In California this year, vaccine mandate opponents began calling the offices of nearly every member of the Assembly’s health committee to complain about the bill. They put out calls on Twitter and Facebook, urging like-minded people to show up to hearings.
But anti-vaccine groups — which are generally viewed as pariahs in the state Capitol — also leaned on the influence of the pandemic-battered education world, which weathered years of exhausting debates over distance learning, masking and vaccine mandates. They called up schools and churches — two places that sat in the crosshairs of Covid public health fights — and mobilized from there.
Struggling to generate enthusiasm among her colleagues for the bill, Aguiar-Curry continued amending it — first, by removing the mandate for middle schoolers and kicking it up to college students and, later, replacing the mandate with a recommendation.
“I thought I did them a big favor,” Aguiar-Curry said. “I got the schools off the bill because they were upset about it.”
The post-pandemic vaccine backlash has led to a sense among pro-vaccine advocates across the country that the best they can do is protect existing rules.
Republican lawmakers in Wyoming and West Virginia spent the past year trying unsuccessfully to remove all school vaccine requirements and making it easier for children to opt out of vaccines, said Becky Christensen, the state campaigns director for the Safe Communities Coalition, which advocates for pro-vaccine policies state-by-state.
“We’re just trying to hang onto the provisions we do have in place,” Christensen said, noting that “the situation and the climate is so volatile.”
Wisconsin is one of the only other states that tried any kind of vaccine mandate this year, through its health department. What should have been a simple update — to put the state in line with federal recommendations requiring that seventh-graders be vaccinated against meningitis and 12th-graders be boosted for it — became a supercharged political issue as Republican lawmakers blocked it, said Ryan Westergaard, chief medical officer for Wisconsin Department of Health Services.
“The pushback was unexpected, and the tenor was much more intense and personal than we anticipated,” Westergaard said in an interview, noting that Wisconsin’s school vaccine requirements hadn’t been updated in a decade. “There’s a real reluctance to introduce any proactive policy to improve vaccines because once it gets discussed in the public sphere there’s a real danger that we will lose ground.”
Ha ha ha.
A lot of words. I’ll summarize.
“We don’t need no vaccination
We don’t need no thought control.”
“The HPV vaccine has been around for almost two decades and could spare thousands of people from developing cervical and oral cancer — so mandating it for schoolchildren once seemed an easy call for Democrats in deep-blue California.”
Except for it is not the benign miracle touted by its maker and others. Not to mention there is no valid public health reason to mandate the vaccine for school children (or anyone else). The only reason is to encourage minors to engage in sexual activity at a younger age based on it now being so much safer.
Obviously, you are informed that the HPV vax is not as good as it’s made out to be - quite the contrary, it is very dangerous.
From link:
Before experimental COVID-19 shots started taking serious vaccine injuries to new and shocking heights, Merck’s aggressively marketed human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine — the quadrivalent Gardasil jab fast-tracked in 2006 for girls and later also for boys — earned a reputation for being one of the most dangerous vaccines ever approved.
Safety signals were already evident during Gardasil’s clinical trials, and by 2013, researchers were noting the “unusually high frequency of adverse reactions related to HPV vaccines reported worldwide.”
That year, Gardasil’s disproportionately harmful impact — even when compared to other shots that are far from benign — was responsible in the U.S. for three-fifths of all serious vaccine reactions reported in young women under age 30, including 64% of deaths and 81% of cases of permanent disability.
Gardasil’s Long Shadow of Autoimmunity Confirmed — Again — by New Study
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/merck-gardasil-hpv-vaccine-autoimmunity/
I am glad you brought that up. Thanks. I just did not have the energy to go digging.
It’s the cause of around 3 percent of all cancers in women and 2 percent in men.
What ever happen to inform consent before any medical treatment?
So this is the latest tactic by the evil b@stards to foist the HPV shots on kids - parents BEWARE:*
FROM LINK:
The HHS grant builds on Brewer’s previous industry and HHS-funded research investigating different “research-tested interventions” intended to reshape the behavior of physicians and patients by “improving” the ways providers “announce” the vaccine to potential recipients, in order to get more teens to take the HPV vaccine.
The grant is focused on further developing “Announcement Approach Training,” which involves having providers skip the step of discussing with families in “open-ended conversation” whether or not they want their child vaccinated for HPV and instead “presume” the family wants the vaccine and announce the child will receive it as if it were a routine part of the office visit.
Brewer’s team found clinics that used the presumptive or announcement approach had a 5.4% increase in uptake and physicians had to spend 40% less time discussing the vaccine with families.
The grant documents provide an example of the announcement approach:
“Announcements should indicate that HPV vaccination is part of routine care …
“We recommend that announcements 1) note the child’s age to establish what follows as part of routine care; 2) say the child is due for several vaccinations (noting the diseases prevented, not the vaccine names); and 3) say that the child will receive vaccines today.
“An example of a presumptive announcement is, ‘Now that Sophia is 12, she is due for 3 vaccines. Today, she’ll get vaccines to prevent meningitis, HPV cancers, and whooping cough.’”
For “hesitant parents” who don’t submit to the HPV vaccination with the initial approach, the provider should “connect and counsel.”
To do this the provider:
“1) connects with the parent by showing empathy and confirming the parent’s main question without reinforcing misinformation; and
“2) counsels the parent using a research-tested message and encourages them to vaccinate today.”
According to the grant proposal, “Messages in the counsel step increase parents’ intentions to vaccinate in our prior randomized experiments (e.g, ‘This vaccine is one of the most studied medications on the market. The HPV vaccine is safe, just like the other vaccines given at this age.’)”
If parents decline same-day vaccination, the team member makes a note in the patient’s chart and addresses HPV vaccination at the next visit.
In an observational study, the “announcement” or presumptive method was associated with an increase in parental vaccine acceptance but also with reduced satisfaction in the clinical experience.
The participatory or conversational format — where providers offer the full range of options to patients and dialogue with them about it —showed the opposite pattern.
HPV vaccine generates profits for Merck and HHS, which funds the grant
Brewer receives research funding from both Merck and HHS/NCI, both of which stand to gain financially from increased HPV vaccine uptake.
*********
Exclusive: Federal Government Funds $4.7 Million Grant — Led by Merck Consultant — to Increase HPV Vaccine Uptake by Improving How Providers ‘Announce’ the Vaccine
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/federal-funding-merck-hpv-vaccine-behavior/
I happen to think HPV vaccine is a good idea, especially in the current highly pornogrified world young people are living in now.
The side benefit of vaxxing my kids was it also got rid of the common warts to which they were prone.
I wanna be sick.
Ther are ads on TV pushing the HPV vax. .
…
…..
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How Covid Made It Nearly Impossible to Pass New Vaccine Rules.
Rules? You mean MANDATE.
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