It was a pretty telling revelation that Gov. Sarah Palin was also approached by Merck about gardasil and she said hell no.
I don't know what makes you think that? While she was Governor, Gardisil was added to Alaska's immunization program, and they even accepted federal dollars to help pay for Gardisil vaccines for children.
What she apparently DIDN'T do was make it a mandatory vaccine for school attendance. I agree with that. But Merck stopped asking states to do Gardisil stuff in like February of 2007. So she didn't have to fight them off very long. Merck Ending Lobbying for mandatory Gardasil Vaccine -- February 27, 2007.
Palin took office in December of 2006, so they only had about two months to ask her to put it on the list. I think Palin said she had some e-mails about it, maybe someone could dig them up and post them, that would be enlightening.
But like I said, it is clear Palin wasn't opposed to Gardasil, or even to taxpayer funding for Gardasil (which also enriched Merck). We know that because we have seen links to the actual Alaska Government web pages that tout the programs, from late 2008 early 2009, while Sarah Palin was still governor.
Anyway, government decides all sorts of things it thinks is best for your child, and yes, they all infringe on your rights. You have to use a child safety seat in your car. You can't opt out of that one either. You will get a ticket, and CPS might come after you. Sarah Palin never spoke out against that mandate, nor has ANY conservative I've ever seen speak out against that.
So don't pretend conservatives are universally against any government law that mandates ANY action by parents. We are more or less opposed in general to these things, but we accept a lot of them without question or complaint.
At least with school vaccine requirements, some states have opt-out procedures, and Texas was one of those so PARENTS HAD THAT FINAL SAY in whether their kids got vaccinated or not. That is explicitly stated in Perry's EO.
Unless Michelle Bachman is on record for ending school-required vaccination programs, and lifting the car seat requirements, and the mandatory testing hospitals have to perform on newborns, she has no leg to stand on complaining about Perry adding ONE vaccine to the list on those grounds.
Her problem is the nature of the Gardasil vaccine, not some grand principle that government should never tell us anything about how to raise our children.
Maybe she will post links to the e-mails she was talking about.
OK, I dug through the e-mails and found NOTHING about Gardasil, or Merck.
But eventually, I found an article that actually referenced the e-mail Palin was talking about.
That e-mail had NOTHING TO DO WITH MERCK. And in fact, Palin's remarks NEVER said she was approached by Merck. So Palin didn't lie, it's just some people misrepresented what she said.
The e-mail was from 2008, and was a response to the Board of Education in Alaska adding Chicken Pox vaccine to the mandatory list. Palin's e-mail says that she can't do anything about it, but that her staff should tell supporters that she opposed mandating shots for our kids.
Nothing at all about "standing up to Merck". Just a comment that she can't stop mandatory vaccines, but she didn't support it, in the context of Chicken Pox.
I don't think she meant she opposed all mandatory vaccines, because she was governor for 2.5+ years, and never did anything to stop the Alaska mandatory vaccine program. If she really opposed it, she would have done something or at least tried to do something.
So in my opinion, she was just saying that she was predisposed to not mandate new vaccines. That is a great position, one I agree with, especially for Gardasil in 2007.
But it is a misrepresentation of what she said to claim she was "approached by Merck" and said "hell no". She didn't say that, her e-mail has nothing to do with that, and it turns out Merck stopped approaching states to mandate Gardasil in February of 2007, right after she became Governor.
Merck switched to a public education campaign, to put Gardasil on vaccine lists so insurance companies would cover it, and a push for federal and state programs to use tax dollars to pay for poor people. That campaign worked well enough that Alaska, under Sarah Palin, advertised Gardasil shots for their innocent children paid for by taxpayer dollars.
Not a mandate. But what Merck was pushing after they stopped pushing the mandate program.
Here were her words on the subject:
Speaking about her reaction at the time, Palin indicated she had been startled by Perry’s decision to push for the vaccine mandate.Note that this both implies she thought he was unduly influenced, AND that she was it as out of the norm for him. Obviously, she did NOT think the Garasil incident was serious enough to make a point out of publicly at any time before now, nor did it bother her enough to change her opinion of Perry as a "true conservative".Sarah Palin: “And there had to have been something to that whole issue because it just didn’t sound like Governor Perry,” she recalled. “Governor Perry was, you know, the proverbial anti-government type of maverick there in Texas, and yet on this issue, he decided that he was going to know better than a parent was going to know in terms of what the health care or health benefit would be for their teenage daughters. So I knew there was something to it.”
This should put to rest the argument by a few people (don't know if you were one or not) that she didn't really know about Perry's Gardasil record when she endorsed him for Governor.