Might as well get one of these, too:
Posted on 09/13/2011 8:09:37 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Earlier today, I noted that Michele Bachmann finally scored points on Rick Perry by hitting him on his ties to Merck and linking that to the Gardasil mandate Perry imposed through executive order in Texas. This is a fair point on Perry’s record, even given his apology for pursuing the mandate through EO instead of through the legislature, and it’s not surprising that Bachmann was the candidate to first take advantage of the opening. (Mitt Romney passed a mandate on health insurance for all citizens of Massachusetts, which pretty much puts this issue out of reach for him.) However, Bachmann took a winning argument about the method and the wisdom of mandating a vaccination for a limited-spread virus and turned it into an anti-vaccination argument, especially in this post-debate argument on Fox with Greta van Susteren.
>>>"There’s a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine. She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine."<<<
Huh? “Mental retardation” typically takes place in a pre- or neo-natal event. Autism becomes apparent in the first couple of years of life — and primarily affects boys. Gardasil vaccinations take place among girls between 9-12 years of age. Even assuming that this anecdote is arguably true, it wouldn’t be either “mental retardation” or autism, but brain damage.
The FDA has received no reports of brain damage as a result of HPV vaccines Gardasil and Cervarix. Among the reports that correlate seriously adverse reactions to either, the FDA lists blood clots, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and 68 deaths during the entire run of the drugs. The FDA found no causal connection to any of these serious adverse events and found plenty of contributing factors to all — and all of the events are exceedingly rare.
The “mental retardation” argument is a rehash of the thoroughly discredited notion that vaccines containing thimerasol caused a rapid increase in diagnosed autism cases. That started with a badly-botched report in Lancet that allowed one researcher to manipulate a ridiculously small sample of twelve cases in order to reach far-sweeping conclusions about thimerasol. That preservative hasn’t been included in vaccines for years, at least not in the US, and the rate of autism diagnoses remain unchanged.
The most charitable analysis that can be offered in this case for Bachmann is that she got duped into repeating a vaccine-scare urban legend on national television. It looks more like Bachmann sensed that she had won a point and wanted to go in for the kill, didn’t bother to check the facts, and didn’t care that she was stoking an anti-vaccination paranoid conspiracy theory, either. Neither shines a particularly favorable light on Bachmann.
Rick Santorum took the correct position on the Gardasil issue. We mandate certain vaccines in children because we mandate children be gathered for educational purposes for many years (in private or public schools), and certain diseases are easily communicable in those settings. By mandating vaccinations against whooping cough, measles, and mumps, we are protecting children who would otherwise get exposed without any action on their part except compliance with the law. That’s not true with HPV, and parents should decide for themselves whether to inoculate their sons and daughters with Gardasil or Cervarix. If Perry wanted to make those inoculations more accessible, he could have crafted an opt-in system rather than forcing parents to opt out.
My wife works with a specialist in communicable disease. He is known around the world for his work. He is a good, reasonable guy.
He told us that the vaccine was good and that we should get it. He said the claims that are coming up are extremely rare, and some seem to be without foundation.
Our kids are older now, and they are out of our home. I do not know if they are sexually active. I know when I was their age, I was. I am glad they got the vaccine.
I do not agree with Perry’s position it this. Michelle made some good points last night.
And now she goes back to sounding like an uniformed idiot. She took her message off the point: The issue was not the vaccine, it was the process of mandating it.
Whatever gains she made last night, get swiped away with a typical politician tactic of “I met somebody.....”
Herman Cain looks better every day.
“I believe that if you asked Perry what should be done now, as a matter of public health, he would say that he believes the vaccine should be mandatory for ALL children.”
no because even back then he had the opt out.
If you recall, in one of the great flu scares or recent years, it was exposed that high ranking WHO officials were in bed with drug makers.
Okay, see if you can follow this:
The government already mandates vaccines.
What was the big deal with mandating the hppv?
Oh I know, your little princess will be 21 and married before she’s thrashed by Antwon, not like the likely average age of 13.
Then cite some facts...not testimonials and hearsay, actual statistical facts.
That's what I find pathetic.
I don't think that was Michele Bachmann you're thinking of. That is Sarah Palin who has the close ties with Scientologiests.
Sarah, not Michele has close bonds with John Coale, Scientologist and husband of Scientologist Gretta Van Sustern. Coale worked with Sarah on her earlier and then more recent campaigns and also, oddly enough started and initially funded SarahPAC for Sarah Palin.
Here are some articles about her connection with him below. While a couple of these articles claim Sarah Palin was obligated then to provide special access and additional interviews to Gretta because of that connection and his funding of her SarahPAC, I personally think that special access was more because of Sarah Palin's $1 million dollar a year / 3 year contract with FOX News.
However, I do believe the total disregard of all vaccinations for public health purposes may be a Scientology platform and whether or not Michele Bachmann has any connection to Scientology, I don't know, but she does sound like she is at least endorsing that same concept now.
See: http://www.examiner.com/us-headlines-in-national/sarah-palin-too-close-to-scientology-lobby-to-oppose-it
See: http://www.politicususa.com/en/Sarah-Palin-Scientology
See: http://www.andrewhalcro.com/van_susteren_scientology_and_sarahpac
Might as well get one of these, too:
Google for lawsuits on everything from aspirin to zinc tablets and you'll find them galore. If you take any Rx medicine you'll doubtless find that being sued about too. Bottom feeders. I don't put a lot of stock in the theory that if lawsuits exist about X, X is a universally bad thing. Still, this vaccine had no business being on anybody's mandatory list. And bless Michelle Bachmann's heart, she's responding like a lot of mothers would. Having a mother as president would be... well, different. Golda Meir didn't do that lousy a job, and neither did Margaret Thatcher.
Please enlighten the forum with the evidence you are privy to.
Well, she just is. Go to any parents’ blog where this kind of thing is discussed. The mothers are typically concerned to a fault about their little darlings. That sure beats the alternative.
Then by all means, stay with your decision of letting the rest of us choose for you who shall govern.
As much as I deride such a view, I actually hope those that think that way follow through. It means my vote is stronger.
Reagan was OK, but again, "principled" conservatives gloss over the numerous errors he made.
As for the future, I am not optimistic.
“I can control my teenage daughter just fine, and she won’t be dating the sons of parents like those. “
What, you have her tied to a leash or something? Even the daughter of one of the most conservative politician in the country can’t be prevented from engaging in premarital sex. You try your best to bring them up right but in the end, it’s their choice.
As a parent who agreed to get both of my daughter vaccinated years ago, here are my reasons:
We did our research and spoke with some very good communicable disease doctors about it. (A benefit of having a wife that works at a big hospital and knows all of the department heads.)
We knew that this vaccine would help prevent a very preventable cancer.
While it is sexually transmitted, getting the vaccine was not a “license” to have sex. Any good parent can deal with that issue. Getting the vaccine early in life gives it the best chance to work properly.
If you discuss sexuality, and reinforce the many issues—both moral and “practical” with young teenagers you can help them make the right decisions over and over.
And finally, I realized that I had sex before I got married. I am a good person. I am a moral person. If I did it, I could guess there was a good probability they were going to have sex before marriage.
Based on that thought process, we decided to get our kids vaccinated.
That said, I would have been pissed if the government made that call for me.
The quid pro quo in cronyism is often tough to pin down, and may be something as simple as "favors for a (qualified) friend." Harriet Miers was a crony pick for SCOTUS, by GWB. What's in it for Bush? Not much, if anything. He just liked Miers, she'd been a trusted insider of his for many years, and he was giving her what he thought was a justified reward.
-- the charge that the main reason Perry did the mandate was to help Merck is extrememly weak --
I don't think that charge holds water, any more than "Perry did it for $6,000." But, failing either of those doesn't result in concluding that there was no cronyism (maybe by Perry's chief of staff, and Perry just went along).
-- If this is all they got regarding Perry and crony capitalism, then they might as well give up on that issue. --
I think the Gardasil issue resonates with many people as an insufficiently justified intrusion into parental prerogative. I haven't heard this aspect probed much, in that I believe Perry would LIKE to have Gardasil mandatory, just via legislation instead of EO.
As for the cronyism, if he didn't care (was indifferent) to his chief of staff pushing favors for business friends (assuming for the sake of discussion there is some "there" there), that could also be read (right or wrong) as indifference to cronyism.
I haven't gone looking for much, but Perry's "cronyism detractors" have more in the form of his successful real estate deals.
"VAN SUSTEREN: Well, there's a big difference, though, at least in my mind, whether you do it because you really believe it's the right and you're just flat out wrong or you shouldn't have done it or whatever, and the other difference is whether you did it because you wanted a campaign contribution. And I'm curious which you think was the one here with the governor.
BACHMANN: Well, of course, I don't know the thoughts and the intents of the governor's heart. I have no idea what they are, nor would I speculate." SOURCE
Maybe so but even Sarah Palin couldn’t prevent her daughter from having unprotected teen sex with a very questionable partner.
If true, I can only hope there are enough intelligent voters, whose votes she will lose, to offset the gains from moonbats.
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