Republican Candidates Take Strong Stand Against Inoculating Girls Against Cancer-Causing Virus

No. You're not seeing things. You don't need glasses.

You read that topic title correctly.

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My jaw dropped when Paul used the words “forcibly” and “sexually transmitted disease” and “12 year old girls” in the same sentence when describing something as basic to public health as inoculation against a virus that currently a full 50% of all sexually active men and women will get. If you did not know what the word inoculate meant, you would have thought from the context of those words strung together that the government was not actually enforcing public health in a non-invasive way as it is its full prerogative to do, but rather encouraging the raping and infection of pre-adolescent children.

This appeal to the almighty wisdom of parents (and in this case religious parents who apparently are less afraid of their children getting cancer than getting condoms) is not a rational commitment to liberty, it is not a rational fear of statism, it is not what should be called “libertarianism”, it is anarchism. It is the view not that the state needs to be kept within the limits of its abilities to successfully do good but the view that the state is inherently evil, that even its actions which are ostensibly only aimed at advancing public health are authoritarian impositions on people’s rights to die of preventable illnesses. And, in this particular case, it is anarchism on behalf of private religious power. Rather than being interested in the liberties of all people, this sort of insistence on “freedom” aims at increasing the abilities of religions to control people’s lives even to the point where those religions want to oppose medical treatments that their moralistic myopia, medical ignorance, and/or indifference to the suffering of others makes them think are evil or unnecessary.

There is no “right to cancer”. Not everything the government does is against the interests of the citizenry and not every law is an usurpation of the rights of individuals. This is absolutist nonsense, not a proper love of freedom.

And the other candidates, were as bad as Paul on this issue:

And Rick Santorum, in response to the question, “What about Perry’s reversal on the wisdom of mandatory HPV vaccinations for young girls in Texas? Is it enough for him to say, ‘oops, I made a mistake’?:

And Michelle Bachmann:

Your Thoughts?
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My thoughts?

At this point, I'll vote for a fucking chimpanzee before I vote for a Conservative.

No.

Fuck that.

I'll vote for single-celled organism before I vote for a Conservative.

I'm still finding humor that Captain Anti-Science/Anti-Gov't Mandate (Perry) is the one that mandated this vaccination after consideration of science.

Perry cared fuck-all for the science, think "campaign contribution from the manufacturer."

Credit where credit is due: Perry is on the right side of this issue. While I strongly doubt I'd support him in the general election, and am not voting in a Republican primary, he nevertheless deserves props for this stand however he actually arrived at it.

That being said, I'm not surprised by Ron Paul went after Perry on this issue. While I hardly think of Paul as an orthodox libertarian, both he and libertarians have a hard time dealing with collective actions problems, or those problems where everyone would benefit, but the costs are so prohibitively high that no one actor is likely to, or can, solve the problem on his own. Public health is a classic example: no one actor in society can, for instance, contain a smallpox outbreak, and in fact an individual acting perfectly rationally by fleeing the afflicted zone can (and often does) make the collective situation worse by simply carrying the disease to a new town while the disease is in its dormant phase. The only solution is to empower the state to take measures to contain the disease: quarantine zones enforced up to and including shooting people in the old days, and in modern times mandating vaccinations.

While admittedly far less virulent than smallpox, this is just another example: the only way to contain the spread of HPV given its current prevalence among the general population is to mandate vaccinations. But if you admit the logic of the collective action problem, you also have to admit that the state has the power to act for the common weal when no other actor can or is likely to do so, and libertarians and Ron Paul are both loathe to do so.

Last I checked, as much as 80% of women catch HPV at some point in their lives, and recent studies from Brazil found that as many as 50+% of men have some strain of it at any given time. And some strains of it can cause cancer. Vaccinations for everyone seems reasonable, I think. We have a chance to stop this trend. Giving your kids a vaccine for this isn't encouraging them to have sex (as if they'd need it by the time they're teenagers anyway). Not giving it to them is fucking wacko cruelty.

As semiretiredpunk noted, most women do get HPV. And it is prettymuch the sole reason for cervical cancer. So I am all for an intense campaign to educate parents and get girls vaccinated (boys, too, once it's approved...maybe it has been already, too lazy to check). We can fold it into some better safer-sex education for kids, as well while we're at it

But requiring a person to get a vaccination like this is bullshit. It's a medical procedure, and I see little difference between this and forcing a woman to have an ultrasound before she can get an abortion. The government shouldn't be allowed to force you into a medical decision that's yours alone.

That being said, we require vaccinations (HepB, MMR, etc) for things like attending schools. The difference is that you can get and spread, say, measles passively, simply by virtue of being in the same room at school. You can not get HPV this way; HPV requires a conscious choice to engage in sexual activity with another person. Simply being in the same algebra class in no way endangers you or anyone else.

And for the record, Rick Perry isn't on the right side of this for philosophical reasons. He old business buddies own the damn company that was gonna be giving the inoculations. It was a cronyism ploy to make them some monies. So let's not give that cocksucker any credit for anything please.

Far be it for me to point out, but you've already defeated your own point.

Let's actually work through the rights claim: that by mandating the vaccine, the state is unfairly abridging some right retained by the people. But that of course invites the question: what right, exactly, is abridged by bundling this vaccine in with any other vaccination you have to take if you want to get a public education? The right to contract a virus responsible for the vast majority of cancers and transmit it to other partners? That's not a right. So maybe it's more general: the right to bodily integrity. Okay, I'll grant you that you have that right. But as you've already admitted, the state already has the power to abridge that right when sufficiently justified in the name of public health, which is why they have the unquestionable authority to mandate vaccines for things like polio and rubella.

So the question seems to boil down to whether or not the state has sufficient justification to mandate this vaccine. And that question turns on whether this is a procedure more like vaccinating for polio, or mandating an ultrasound prior to an abortion. That question, of course, answers itself: it's a rare abortion indeed that causes someone else to contract cancer. It's not rare at all to be the carrier for the HPV strain that ultimately causes some other woman's cervix to kill her.

And far be it for me to point out, but strictly speaking, you do have a choice in whether you contract many of the diseases that the state already mandates vaccinations for if you want into public schools. If you never brush against a rusty nail and break the skin, for instance, you never contract tetanus. And if that strikes you as a faulty means of using the word "choice", I would point out that you've already made "choice" your watchword for contracting a disease that 50% of men carry at any one time, almost all of whom are completely asymptomatic. I fail to see the distinction between: "You chose to live in a house that used nails rather than spot-welding the entire structure or living in a grass hut, and therefore you chose to contract tetanus when your bare feet brushed against a nail that was slightly protruding from the floorboards", and "You chose not to remain celibate until you married a virgin who had never even so much as touched another woman, and therefore chose to expose yourself to HPV."

Agreed, Towelly. Moreover, the underlying idea that sex and sexuality is a choice and because it is a choice you must accept all these terrible consequences (including in this case death) is symptomatic of the bullshit puritanical undercurrent that informs and enables assholes to argue against abortion, contraception, AIDS research and the like. Sexuality is not a choice like deciding whether to go to the movies is a choice. Choosing to have sex is closer to choosing whether or not to eat. It's a choice that is deeply influenced by our innate instincts. I

That's not at all the question. Your opinion as to the invasiveness of the procedure is irrelevant. The question is whether the consequences of an individual not getting the procedure is more like polio or an ultrasound. A woman getting an ultrasound doesn't affect anyone (Though I think this is a line of argument that pro-lifers might try if they haven't...) But if you don't get vaccinated for polio, that endangers others without their permission.

I think you need to brush up on disease communicability. If someone sitting next to you in grade school has measles and coughs, you can contract it, simply by being in the room.. Other examples of this are quarantining people with highly resistant TB. Or the classic example, locking up Typhoid Mary, who was passing typhus around to people left and right even though they didn't know they were putting themselves at risk (she did, however) by employing her. Like measles, these are cases in which you endanger others by having the disease, even when they aren't allowed a conscious choice to expose themselves to you.

As stated ad nauseum, getting tetnus doesn't endanger OTHERS. Getting HPV doesn't endanger the other kids in your class simply because they're in your class. (Relatedly, I'm not sure tetanus is required in general, but I could be mistaken. It's usually rolled into DPT, because the other two in that vaccine ARE of the choice-thieving variety. But you can them separately, as well.)

These are not in any way the same thing. Sexuality is not a choice, I agree. Sex IS. Unless you are raped, you choose to take part in every sexual encounter you have. Confusing those two is problematic.

And in any case, we're not talking about puritanically punishing anybody. ALL PEOPLE SHOULD GET THIS VACCINE. The question is whether the State has the authority to mandate medical procedures.

Or having safe sex. Which, I also think we need to teach people better But just because two choices seem to suck doesn't mean you don't have that choice.

I think this is a really good point. And I'm sure some people do homeschooling (private school almost always require the same vaccines) in lieu of vaccination for god only knows why. I would still argue that the HPV doesn't actually endanger the kids in class in the first place. But if schools do start to require it, then, yeah, I think this is a great argument.

I cop to just stirring the pot, a bit here, but, does Texas require that their school children have intercourse with one another in the same way that they require they meet in enclosed spaces? Because I think it really boils down to the nuts and bolts of dunx's argument.

I don't think we're-- by and large-- okay with vaccinations being mandatory for school children because we think vaccinations should be mandatory for all citizens and getting them while they're school children is simply easier (their legs being shorter and all).

I think we're okay with mandatory vaccinations because we want kids to be able to participate in education and disrupting the herd immunity of a student body opens any member of that body up to dangerous health risks and the creation of a public health crisis simply because the easiest way to educate a large number of people is to put them in the same room together.

As ever, I'm quite open to being proven wrong.

That's why you're the writer, you elegant drink of water you.

thats an astute observation because some of the most serious problems we are likely to face as a country and part of the human race are collective action problems.

As a former gynecologist (him not me), I'm actually kinda startled to see Ron Paul oppose mandatory HPV vaccines for everybody, be it for his libertarian views or not.

SPOILERS! (Click to view)

Then again, the eventual reduced need for pap smears might put some of his colleagues out of work.

Hell, a whole bunch of the most serious problems we face are collective action problems. I've been reminding the cretins in members of the Libertarian group of this fact on a regular basis.

There are two problems with this: first, from a legal standpoint, and one is in fact invoking the law if one says "X violates my rights under the Constitution", invasiveness of the procedure is entirely relevant to the discussion about whether the law is justified in abridging rights. Secondly, even if you were correct that consequences rather than invasiveness were all that mattered, the simple fact is that the consequences are severe enough to warrant state intrusion. Let's deal with each point in turn.

First, the invasiveness of the procedure, as you call it, is entirely relevant to determining whether the government action is legitimate. Consider for example an entirely uncontroversial instance of the government's abridging the rights of its citizens: namely, the use of zoning ordinances to regulate land use. Zoning ordinances unquestionably restrict a landowner's ability to use his land in any way he sees fit. If I as a landowner want to build a sewage treatment plant on my land, regardless of what I want, I will not be able to do so if the land is zoned residential. But that abridgment is justified by the fact that the government has to protect everyone's property interests, and the other people who bought their land in a residentially-zoned neighborhood probably don't want to live near an industrial plant that treats sewage. So yes, the government has the power, under the police power of the state according to the controlling case on the subject, to use the power of law to restrict usage of property to certain zones.

But once you admit the general power of the government to stop people from putting sewage treatment plants in residential neighborhoods, you must also admit that there are a number of ways in which, and a number of reasons for which, the government could use that power wrongfully. For instance, a city, in lieu of passing a zoning scheme that prohibits it, could simply pass a law saying "Any person putting a sewage treatment plant in a residential neighborhood will be summarily executed by the police." This would, I'm sure we both agree, a bad way of implementing their plan to keep sewage treatment plants out of residential neighborhoods. Alternatively, a city or a group of individuals could get together and decide that they want to zone or create a restrictive convanant to stop black people from buying property in an area. That, I think we can both agree, is a bad rationale for zoning. But in either case, the reason why it's a bad use of law is not because the state lacks the general power to zone. It's because of it's invasiveness: the former is far more invasive than necessary to keep sewage treatment plants out of residential neighborhoods, and the latter is too invasive because the goal is illegitimate. What makes them illegitimate uses of government power is not whether the government can act in this matter, but how it acts.

Applying that general rule to this case, the Supreme Court has long determined that the states have the power to protect and defend the life, health and well-being of the public it serves. It is, in fact, the most pre-eminent power of any state do so. Communicable diseases are one such threat to the life, health and well-being of the public. Now there are many different ways of doing this: one could, I suppose, round every one with certain communicable diseases and summarily execute them. That would be a way of preventing epidemics. It just would be a way that was too invasive. Alternately, you could quarantine everyone with a certain disease. That's what we used to do with outbreaks of smallpox, and it is still what Cuba does with people infected with HIV. They have largely become relics of the past, however, because we have a less invasive and better way to do it now: mandatory vaccinations. Which is why the Supreme Court decided over a hundred years ago that the states could, with their police power, mandate vaccinations.

In short, yes Virginia, the state does have that power, and given that it's the least invasive way of solving epidemic health problems, it's a perfectly legitimate and reasonable thing for the law to do.

But before I finish, let's deal with the meat of your contention directly: that HPV differs from other diseases which we mandate vaccinations to such a degree that it effectively makes mandating this vaccination illegitimate. I for one call bullshit on this premise. According to the American Cancer Society in 2007 about 11,000 women in the United States were expected to contract cervical cancer, and about 3700 of them overall would die of it. Even for those who live, the cost is steep: the standard treatment for cervical cancer is complete removal of the uterus and cervix, rendering a woman sterile. HPV is a necessary prerequisite to contracting cervical cancer. Let me repeat that for you: if you do not contract HPV, you do not contract cervical cancer. Ever. HPV is carried by 80% of all sexually-active people, common enough to be referred to as the "common cold of sexually-transmitted diseases", andt condoms and other forms of prophylactics do not protect against all strains of HPV. Now given these facts, I'm hard pressed to see how one finds invoking the power of the state to protect people problematic. If the state can't act to stop over three thousand people a year, every year, from dying of a disease that could be stopped with one single injection, when the hell can the state act?

Given that I know about mandated DPT vaccinations, I'd say I know plenty enough about immunology and disease communicability. Put simply, the state is not simply mandating vaccines for those diseases that can be spread through the air. That's why they don't mandate a yearly cold/flu shot but do mandate bite-transmitted tetanus vaccinations.

Rather, they are trying to systematically eradicate certain strains of disease in the name of public health through the principle of herd immunity. Since you don't seem to know it, I'll break the concept down for you: by systematically making large portions of the population immune to a given disease, it effectively protects everyone, even unvaccinated members of society, because the disease becomes progressively harder to transmit to those parts of the population that are not immune to the disease. Really, it's a classic solution to the collective action problem that disease represents: no individual action, however rational, can solve an outbreak of a disease. And in fact perfectly rational individual actions can make the problem worse: if I'm not symptomatic and in, say, a smallpox quarantine zone, it would be entirely rational for me to try and escape the zone. But that only defeats the point of the quarantine in the first place. The only solution is collective action to stop the disease.

Leaving aside the fact that "immediate risk to others" is only one of several rationales for public health policy, along with such factors as "is it a disease with a 75% fatality rate left untreated" and "can it be easily eliminated through vaccinations", as well as the fact that tetanus vaccinations are mandated (or at least, they were for me when I went to elementary school, middle school, high school and college), the fact is that the state has plenary power in this area. The state has the power to decide that certain forms of disease constitute public health threats that will not be abided, and can mandate vaccination programs to eradicate them. And good thing too: because of that power, diseases like smallpox, polio and tetanus are things of the past.

HPV is a disease that kills entirely too many women in our society, it is entirely preventable, and the only thing it requires to do so is a quick series of injections to every woman at the age of 10-12. If every woman received such an injection, the number of cases of cervical cancer would drop by a minimum of 80%, perhaps more if you factor in the benefits of herd immunity. So to recap: the state has the complete power to act, about 2,800 more women died in the United States in just 2007 than had to because the state hasn't acted, and the action taken is a series of small injections that you allow for other diseases all the time. I'm not seeing this as a very strong argument for why the state should not be allowed to act in this case.

Ok, not only are you acting a pedantic dick, and not only are you in no way actually hearing my point (which ChrisSick put much more succinctly than me) but most importantly, you don't know what you're talking about. And I don't mean that in a knee-jerk "YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT" way, I mean that there are more factually incorrect statements in this rambling post than I could even begin to correct.
I am so fucking tired of people on porn sites that think that a fucking wikipedia link means they know shit that I'm ready to stab myself in the leg.

I agree with everything you said. Completely. I just think that it's our job to convince parents of that, so that they can choose what's right for their kid. But if you succeed and the state makes it mandatory anyway.... worst case, girls won't get HPV anymore, right?

I don't know about pedantic, but all right, I'll cop to being a dick in my previous post. For what it's worth, I realize that I'd be more persuasive if I was less pissy, and I'm sorry for that.

But that being said, there was nothing factually incorrect in my post at all. You said that the government shouldn't be allowed to force you to get vaccinated. The entirety of my rambling post was devoted to showing 1) that any decent kind of legal analysis would say that is incorrect, 2) the controlling Supreme Court case says you're incorrect, and 3) for a variety of policy reasons there are plenty of good reasons why you're incorrect. Moreover, in my search for data I didn't find anything that suggested I needed to rethink my analysis. If I relied on Wikipedia too heavily for you, I apologize, but I didn't want to spend four hours poring through source data to find better links.

If I'm wrong, please show me where my error is. If I'm wrong, I would like to know so that I can do better in the future. I can't improve my own skills, however, if you don't bring your A-game, which means showing me how my thinking errs and where my factual inaccuracies are.

You're giving parents, a very large and varied part of the population entirely too much credit.

I don't know if you have a kid or not, and i am not pulling the "i have a kid, i know better" bullshit, but sincerely, go to a PTA meeting sometime and start asking parents what vaccinations their kid had to get in order to go to school. I guarantee that half to three quarters of them have absolutely no idea what their child was vaccinated for, that they just took them to the doctor and got it done as to not have to worry about it anymore. We require 8 vaccinations in Ohio to attend school, i know them because you're a human being injecting something into my daughter and i want to know what it is. Other people just trust in what is going on and truthfully have no clue.

Don't get me wrong, there are some very educated parents out there, but there are many more than don't care to educate themselves that much, they just want to get the vaccinations and be done with it. They don't understand what or why they vaccinated their child.

Now you're talking an entirely different scenario when you're speaking of a STD to parents. There are parents out there that refuse to accept the reality that their child is going to have sex, especially when you start telling them that they're going to be sexually active and their child is only 12. There are going to be red flags bouncing up everywhere in their minds, one of them being "my kid won't be having sex at 12".

The HPV vaccine is already provided by planned parenthood for free. I found that out when going with an ex for birth control.

In my opinion, mandate it. The vaccine has been proven to work, while HPV isn't communicable like other diseases, it can definitely save money in the long run for the health care system and more importantly it's going to save lives.

I just don't think that the population is educated enough to make the decision on their own.

I don't have a kid, but I believe you, and partly because I see the other end of that (the healthcare end). And I wish more parents were like you. And...yeah, I totally agree, parents are often retarded, and every one of them should get this vaccine for their kid.

The problem with doing things for people because they're not educated enough (alluding to your last paragraph) to make the decision themselves is: What happens when it's not you and me deciding that?
Case in point: HPV-vaccinating-Rick Perry's biggest legislative jewel last spring was the abortion bill requiring Texan women to get ultrasounds and have the fetus described to them before abortions. And the people that pushed that through used the SAME LOGIC.

So, that kind of example is why I'd rather err on the much (MUCH) harder road of educating parents instead of forcing them. I freely admit I may be extra-sensitive to this issue... Either way, I totally hear you (and Thistle, who's spoken similarly) and respect where you're coming from. It's certainly not one-sided, and it's awful to see a kid punished for their parent's ignorance.

Why do the simplest things have to be so bloody difficult in the US? I just got the form home for my 8th-grade daughter to get the HPV vaccine. It's very simple - here's the info, here's how it can help, here are the possible side effects, this is what's in it (so check for allergies), check yes or no, send it back. And this from a bloody Catholic school.

I think the debate over whether it should be a government mandated vax is somewhat ridiculous anyway, since there is already a system in place for people who don't want their kids vaccinated. How would this one be any different? Parents all over the US already sign a couple of forms and send their kids to school without vaccinations. If the parents felt strongly about the HPV vaccination, they would just do the same (unfortunate for their daughters, but that's another thread).

I'd like to see girls and boys getting the vaccination (currently in Canada, only the girls get it), that would go a lot further towards decreasing the prevalence of the disease, since boys tend to be the "spreaders", so to speak. I guess I'll take what I can get in the short-term, though!

I work with a guy who has 7 kids. They don't get vaccinated. Yet they've all caught mumps, measles, whatever else they vaccinate for. Every year it's something new.

It just seems silly to me to not get your kid vaccinated.

Also, the posts in this thread have been outstanding. I learned more in here then I would researching it.