Vaccine-Nation

I have granddaughters. The eldest is nine.

If she lived in Texas today (and other states are poised to follow suit), she and her sisters and female cousins would be required -- prior to entering the sixth grade -- to get a vaccination against a sexually transmitted disease that may (or may not) prevent her from getting cervical cancer.

There's no way to get human papilloma virus, or HPV, from other than sexual contact. It's not an airborne virus; no one is going to expose her to it by coughing nearby. She can't get it by drinking out of someone else's cup. It doesn't spread like wildfire through a crowded sixth-grade schoolroom like the flu -- or at least like the flu did before we had shots for that, too.

Even so, the Texas governor apparently feels this is such a huge public health issue that he's mandating vaccination (with Gardesil, manufactured and heavily marketed by Merck, to which the governor reportedly has some fairly close ties) for all of the little girls in his state.

Just the girls. Because, you see, they're the ones who can potentially get cervical cancer from contracting HPV. (They can also get other forms of it that have nothing to do with either HPV or having a series of Gardesil vaccinations, but the impression one gets from the Merck ads is that vaccination = safe from cervical cancer, period.)

I guess the little boys are off the hook in more ways than one. Not only does this order not affect them, but they also get to enter adolescence knowing that just about all of their female peers (those whose parents haven't opted out "for reasons of conscience") presumably won't get HPV even if the fellas end up being promiscuous little carriers.

As far as I can tell, there's been no word from Gov. Perry as to his level of concern for males who contract this virus. Perhaps I should be relieved that there's been no proposal -- yet -- to hand sixth-grade boys packages of prophylactics so they don't feel left out.

There's nothing wrong with developing vaccines and cures for STDs, as far as that goes. But there is plenty wrong with mandating vaccination of children against something they aren't going to get unless they have premarital sex; it presupposes that they will, and even obliquely condones it.

"Safe sex" in the popular context never was, and never will be. We would do our children far greater good by teaching them the context in which sex IS safe; between a husband and wife, exclusively, with abstinence by both before marriage. It's 100% guaranteed "safe" from all of the things for which we've scrambled to develop pills and shots.

But there's no profit for Big Pharm in that, and darned few political donations made on that basis.

Did anybody really think this was NOT about money?

American Papist has a good roundup of full coverage on this.