Governor Perry, by executive order, required all girls to get vaccinated against HPV, or get . He got beat up for that in the debate a bit earlier. A lot of the discussion involved parental rights. I wanted to emphasize two points.
1) It looks like a dirty example of crony capitalism and the revolving door. Perry’s former chief of staff, Mike Toomey, was a lobbyist for Merck, the manufacturer of that vaccine. Merck pushed hard for the mandate and stood to profit from it.
2) Mandating an HPV vaccine is not like mandating a mumps vaccine. As Michelle Malkin pointed out, most vaccine mandates involve protecting other people’s kids from communicable diseases that can be spread in the classroom. HPV cannot be spread in any normal classroom spreading.
