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.
...
Just six weeks after Perry put pen to paper, the Texas House rebuked him on March 14, 2007, passing HB 1098, overturning his executive order by a vote of 119-21. The Senate followed suit the following month by a vote of 30-1.
...
On May 8, the day the law went into effect, Perry held a press conference surrounded by women touched by cervical cancer. He bemoaned the tenor of a debate that he asserted had been “hijacked by politics and posturing,” and blamed future cervical cancer deaths on those who opposed his mandate — many of whom were fellow Republicans.
...
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.... 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.
That’s an interesting post.
Are you sure you weren’t trying to ping someone else?
Perry’s story was it was because of his mother.