Rick Perry Mandates Vaccines

Texas Governor Rick Perry his displayed his contempt for his constituency, open discourse, and personal rights...once again. In a disgusting display of arrogance on February 2nd, King Perry mandated (dictated) Executive Order RP65 in which Texas has become the 1st state (hopefully the last) to require all 11- and 12-year-old girls entering the sixth grade to be vaccinated for 4 of 20 types of HPV.

The Dallas Morning News reports,

"Merck had provided a relatively small amount of money to Mr. Perry's campaign fund – $5,000 in 2006 – and has paid three lobbyists up to $250,000 this year. One of the lobbyists, Mike Toomey, was formerly Mr. Perry's chief of staff.

Beyond many of my typical reservations regarding vaccinations, I have several concerns regarding King Perry's Mandate:

Mandating a vaccine is bad, mandating one that we do not know long-term the efficacy, risks, or side effects of is careless and dangerous. This is especially true when the only people providing research results that validate it's safety and effectiveness are the people who will profit most from it being on the market. That's right. Merck did all of it's own testing on Gardasil. Merck is the same company that brought you Vioxx with falsified testing that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans.

A little reminder from the Washington Post in '05:

The possible FDA fallout from the (Vioxx) trial was quickly evident in a statement from Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who held a hearing on the drug safety issue last fall.

"The Food and Drug Administration was also negligent in the Vioxx case," said Grassley, who has proposed making the drug safety office more independent. "Those running the nation's public safety agency repeatedly dismissed the concerns of their own scientists and seemed to do everything possible to keep the public in the dark about emerging problems with Vioxx."

Remember, Vioxx was approved by the FDA and Merck had provided the research to get it approved. NPR's Research on whether Merck tried to censor Vioxx critics included this:

FDA whistleblower Doctor David Graham estimates that at least 38,000 people died from taking Vioxx. Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, notes that "each one of those is somebody, is a real person, with a real family, real people who grieve for them."

You can read the FDA label info for Gardasil here and the product approval info here.

I ask our legislators to to stand up for Texas, stand up for personal rights, stand up for the future health of our nation and the world. Stop this mandated state-wide experiment on our 11 yr. old and up girls.