Texas Gov. Perry is under attack for his decision to make Gardasil mandatory (note that parents can still opt out of this vaccine as they can others).

Several key Republicans urged Gov. Rick Perry on Monday to rescind his executive order making Texas the first state to require girls to be vaccinated against the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer.

Lawmakers should have been allowed to hear from doctors, scientists and patients before the state implemented such a sweeping mandate, said state Sen. Jane Nelson, chairwoman of the health and human services committee.

"This is not an emergency," said Nelson, adding that she plans to ask Attorney General Greg Abbott for an opinion on the legality of Perry's order. "It needs to be discussed and debated.

First, I'd like to tell state Sen. Jane Nelson, she is a fool. Preventing death and/or suffering should not be negotiable, as she apparently thinks it should be.

What I'm finding to be interesting, in a disbelievingly way, is two things, the first being that women afflicted with cervical cancer from these 4 viruses are being dismissed in the arguments against the vaccine and the second, is that no one is banding together to force Merck to lower it's price tag of the vaccine.

"I don't think the government should ever presume to know better than the parents what to do with children," Republican Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said.

Perhaps it is physicians that know better in this case, rather than parents, as they did with polio, measles and DPT vaccines?

Outbreaks of infectious disease among communities receiving religious exemption from immunization showcase the effectiveness of the vaccines and the consequences of refusal. In 1985, measles raged through a Christian Scientist school, with 125 cases and 3 deaths.[6] In 1991, there were at least 890 cases of rubella among the Amish in 5 states, and over a dozen babies with congenital rubella syndrome in Pennsylvania alone.[7] These cases would have been entirely preventable with immunization. In a measles outbreak among the US Amish in 1987, there were 130 cases. The attack rate was 1.7% among immunized individuals, and 73.8% among unimmunized individuals. Two Amish died of measles in the following year.[8] In 1979, a polio outbreak paralyzed 14 Amish people in the United States; the outbreak spread to unimmunized non-Amish neighbors.[9] In 1992, a Netherlands epidemic of polio began in a religious community affecting 68 people, paralyzing 59, and killing 2. None of the affected were immunized.[10]

For some reason, Italian diptheria-pertussis-tetanus (DPT) immunization rates have been low for decades, with only about 50% coverage. So it is no surprise that people bring the disease home to newborn babies who cannot yet be immunized and who are most vulnerable to severe disease. One out of every 14 babies under 1 year of age is admitted to hospital for pertussis; of these, 1 in 850 dies.[11]

Measles is the most contagious of diseases. Since about 10% of people who receive the measles immunization do not become immune, only a high level of immunization ensures neighborhood safety. In the United States, 130 people died in the 1989-1991 outbreak alone. Among the urban poor, the cause is lack of immunization due to social and economic problems. Elsewhere, the epidemics have begun among "exemptors" and spread to people who had not responded to the vaccine.[12]




Not convinced? Here's another link.

Recent studies have found exempted children are up to 35 times more likely to contract measles and six times more likely to contract whooping cough than vaccinated children. For example, a study of measles and whooping cough cases in Colorado between 1987 and 1998 found schools that had higher rates of exemptions were more likely to experience outbreaks and at least 11 percent of vaccinated children who became infected with measles contracted it from an exempted student.

"It's not just that parents only endangering their own kids," Dr. Anthony Robbins, professor of public health at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, told UPI. "Their decision results in reduced protection for every other kid in the community," said Robbins, who ran the National Vaccine Program during the Clinton administration.

I believe it is disingenuous to fall back on "parents know best," when a large portion of parents are not trained extensively in medical knowledge. How do their unimmunized child effect the rest of the population can't be exlained without medical knowledge or at the very least medical/scientific understanding.

The opposition to Gardasil also resembles US opposition to other vaccines, such as the one for tuberculosis. Note the differences shown in this analysis of introducing a vaccine in several countries.

Comparative historical analysis of national responses to the development of a new vaccine can serve to highlight influences or assumptions that might otherwise be invisible, because unarticulated. It can also help us understand better how scientific and epidemiological data are differently construed. Linda Bryder's analysis of responses to the development of BCG (Bacillus Calmette-Guérin) vaccine, in the early 1920s, is exemplary in this respect.9, Whilst Scandinavian countries rapidly introduced BCG vaccination in the attempt to combat tuberculosis, Britain introduced it only in 1950, whilst in the USA the vaccine was scarcely used. “All three countries claimed their policies were rooted in scientific research; if so, why did the interpretation of the same research, together with some locally conducted research, yield such different results?” asks Bryder.10 In Denmark, Norway and Sweden, local studies, as well as the convictions of influential physicians, led to growing use of BCG through the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Despite the fact that no randomized controlled trials were conducted in Scandinavia, the vaccine came to be accepted as a major protective weapon against tuberculosis. By contrast, British scientists remained sceptical. Evidence from Scandinavia was seen as non-conclusive, given that no randomized trials had been conducted. Scientific doubts and objections were accompanied by, and have to be seen in the context of, other convictions that played an important role. Most important, argues Bryder, was the conviction that Britain already had an effective system of tuberculosis control with which vaccination would only interfere. Specialized sanatoria were central to this system, as was an “ideology of self-responsibility and self-control”. The objective should not be to provide a false sense of security through vaccination, but to encourage healthy and responsible life-styles. It was only after the Second World War, with the coming of the National Health Service and its new commitment to greater equality in health care provisions, and an administrative (and manpower) crisis in the residential institutions, that BCG came to be widely accepted. In the USA too, the safety and efficacy of the vaccine were initially doubted, and there was a similar fear that mass vaccination would interfere with existing approaches to tuberculosis control. By the 1950s, despite (or because of) endorsement of BCG in Britain, debate in the USA had become all the fiercer. Central to professional opposition, argues Bryder, was the commitment of American specialists to existing, curative, approaches. Tuberculosis specialists were unwilling to be convinced by any evidence for the effectiveness of mass vaccination and were not, as in Britain, challenged either by institutional crisis or a major shift in public health ideology. Not so much the scientific evidence, always open to differing interpretations, as differences in social welfare traditions and systems seem to explain these major national differences.

Interesting, don't you think? Which leads me back to the Gardasil opponents and their arguments. Take a look at stickdog's arguments in comments here. In the first comment, he/she makes the assertion that cervical cancer is not deadly.

Cervical cancer is not a deadly nor prevalent cancer in the US or any other first world nation.

Psst, don't tell that to the families of the approximately 4,000 women that died from cervical cancer in 2002 (the last year the CDC provides stats). While the CDC states that the numbers of cervical cancer incidences and deaths from cervical cancer has indeed decreased dramatically, it has not been eradicated. And if we go back to stickdogs portion of the comment that cervical cancer is not a deadly cancer, we find that he/she does acknowledge that it can indeed be deadly -- if you are too stupid or too poor to get a yearly pap test, that is. (By the way, here is the link to the FDA's approval of Gardasil to understand the rest of the information provided by stickdog) This same commenter then continues on -- proposing "another side of the argument," that somehow women should get the vaccine if they are (intending to be) promiscuous.

All of this lengthy "discussion" directly relates to the historical analysis of introduced vaccines that I posted above. the opposition to Gardasil is not based in science, no matter how scientific opponents may sound, but in societal perceptions and economics.

And while I agree that Merck's price tag is oppressively high, Merck would do themselves a world of good by reducing the cost. Obviously, if they did, that would limit a major stumbling block that the opposition is using to convince you Gardasil as a vaccine is "bad." On the other hand, societal objections can be overcome, particularly as efficacy is proved when the vaccine is widely used, as they were during the introductions of polio, tuberculosis and measles vaccines.