T-Party Fave, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, founder of the House T-party caucus, presents a clear and present danger to the nation – as she says foolish things and appears to mean that they should be taken seriously as public policy.
George Orwell wrote a marvelous comment in 1947, titled, “Politics and the English Language,” concerned with the fact that “the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
Orwell thought that, if we only thought clearly, we would take a significant step toward “political regeneration.”
Bachmann’s latest gaffe - hope you’ve been keeping count of her unclear thoughts - was that young girls in Texas and indeed across the nation should be protected from any mandatory vaccination of Gardasil that protects them against strains of a virus (HPV)(human papilloma virus) that causes cervical cancer; by the way, cervical cancer is the 2nd leading cancer killer of women with 10,000 women diagnosed each year; Gardasil can stop the resulting deaths and should be given to all girls, in order to be effective, before they become sexually active and can contract the virus.
On NBC’s Today Show last week, Ms. Bachmann nevertheless told Host Matt Lauer, “I had a mother last night come up to me here in Tampa, Florida after the [Republican primary presidential] debate” and “she told me that her little daughter took that vaccine [Gardasil], that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter. It can have very dangerous side effects … This is the very real concern, and people have to draw their own conclusions.”
Okay, so let’s look at what the Center for Disease Control reports.
They say that 35 million doses of Gardasil have been distributed as of June 22, 2011 and they have reported no vaccination resulting in “mental retardation.”
Two bioethics professors, Univ. of Minnesota Prof. Steven Miles and Univ. of Pennsylvania Center of Bioethics Prof. Art Caplan, immediately challenged Ms. Bachmann to produce any evidence that Gardasil produces mental retardation, and even offered her cash money if the mother could be identified and demonstrate the alleged link between Gardasil and “mental retardation.” Ms. Bachmann hasn’t taken up the offer.
Ed Rollins, who recently jumped the Bachmann bandwagon as her campaign manager, tried to tell MSNBC that Ms. Bachmann just made a “mistake.”
Ms. Bachman then told Sean Hannity that she was just “reporting what this woman told me…”
But what about the remark Ms. Bachmann made independently, that the vaccine “can have very dangerous side effects” and that “this is the very real concern.”
Perhaps Ms. Bachmann is reviving the arguments of the Anti-Vaccination Society of America, founded in 1879, that opposed vaccines because they caused “corruption of the blood.”
Ms. Bachmann has joined a long line of medical know-nothings who have opposed vaccination for small pox, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps, rubella, polio, you name it; the Pediatric Academic Society estimates that childhood vaccinations prevent about 10.5 million cases of infectious illness and 33,000 deaths every year.
Ms. Bachmann’s fear mongering demagoguery parallels those who thought autism was brought on by vaccinations but the British Doctor who said so was later charged with “an elaborate fraud.” Closer to home, in August 2010, the federal appeals court upheld a lower court finding that there was no link between vaccination and autism.
Does Ms. Bachmann object to the fact that every state requires vaccinations for children entering public schools? Perhaps!
Orwell cautioned that political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Let us pass over the Bachmann breeze and turn to a candidate and dialogue that will instead regenerate the nation.
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