So the governor of Texas just signed an executive order mandating that all girls entering the sixth grade be vaccinated against HPV. My favorite observation thus far has been the horrified comment of someone on a conservative weblog: “Governor Perry has just declared that all Texan girls are sluts.”
As you can see, this action on the governor’s part has some folks in Texas all riled up. The fundamentalists are aghast that the government should condone immorality in such a fashion. The libertarians are affronted by another exercise in big government stepping into people’s private lives and making decisions for them. Folks who prefer more democratic government don’t like the fact that the governor enacted this policy through executive order and bypassed the legislature entirely, which smacks of tyranny. And “good government” sorts are suspicious of the all-out and well-funded lobbying efforts of the Merck corporation – the folks who make the vaccine – to make said vaccine mandatory in just this fashion and thus, obviously, to profit.
The first group I dismiss out of hand as being self-evidently evil. To adopt the position that disease and death ought to be the consequence for immorality – to state that women who have sex out of wedlock deserve to get cancer – is not only unchristian, it’s downright evil. To claim that one doesn’t actually want anyone to get cancer but that the threat of cancer should exist to deter immoral behavior is simple sophistry; obviously some people must get cancer for the threat to be valid. Thus, again the statement is, women who have sex out of wedlock ought to get cancer.
Not getting the vaccine because you’re not going to sin, that’s fine. Preventing others from getting it, because if they sin they should get cancer?
The other groups, though, have more-or-less valid points.
Being a liberal, I’m not generally against big government. There are good things that require government. Most vaccinations fall neatly into that category; not only is it good for the individual, but you can’t prevent the ongoing spread of a disease unless a sufficiently large percentage of the population is immunized. And I daresay most people – though not truly doctrinaire libertarians – would agree that stopping disease is worth the cost in personal liberty, i.e. mandatory vaccination.
But this particular disease isn’t air or water borne. You don’t get it by shaking hands. Thus the choice to not get vaccinated does not mean that you will automatically be infecting other people. If you don’t get your mumps vaccine, and you get mumps, you are spreading mumps to others, including those who have not had a chance to get vaccinated. That’s not necessarily true of HPV; at least in theory, anyone at risk of contracting the disease also has had the opportunity to get the vaccine.
Hm. Although I don’t know how true that is vis-à-vis older women; I’ve heard but cannot recall that the vaccine is really only useful if given before sexual maturity. If that’s the case, and thus a voluntarily unvaccinated woman could, through the usual irresponsible male, pass the disease to an unvoluntarily unvaccinated woman, that would change my moral equation. I’ll have to check on that.
In general, I do feel that we should err on the side of fewer government mandates, rather than more. If you don’t want your daughter vaccinated, and she gets cancer, that was your decision.
Then again, we don’t let parents abuse their children any more. Children have rights which supersede those of their parents to raise them as the parents see fit. Is the right to grow up and not fear HPV one of those?
I don’t know. Parents have rights, too. The scales there are too even for me to judge.
Now, if we want to wipe out HPV entirely, then vaccination does need to be mandatory. Enough fundamentalists’ daughters will skip out otherwise to keep the disease around. Is that a feasible goal? Is it the stated one? Unless it is, the eradication argument lacks force.
Back to the list of objections. Executive order. I’m not so sympathetic there. That’s the law. If you don’t want the governor issuing executive orders, get rid of the policy. Vote in a governor who will get rid of this order in particular or executive orders in general. But as the law stands, doing this was entirely within his authority.
The last point, namely that Merck is bankrolling this effort, is the weakest, perhaps, in proclaiming this a bad action – after all, so Merck is funding efforts to get laws passed, so what? It’s their right. Free speech and all that.
It is, however, the point that resonates the strongest with me. I’ve long and firmly held that corporations are not people, and that money is not speech. Getting a law passed for private profit is exactly the sort of thing that one can expect from corporations – in fact one should honestly expect nothing else – and exactly the sort of thing that is the worst sort of decision-making for society.
Governor Perry is pretty obviously in bed with Merck. The campaign contributions, the jobs for staffers, etc etc. Does that necessarily make this a bad policy? Of course not. It’s just another sign of the Achilles’ heel of our democracy.
So, in sum, is this a bad order?
I don’t know. Probably not. There is validity to the argument that this is an unnecessary infringement on parents’ rights to choose for their children, even given the fact that the order permits parents to sign a waiver and opt out. On the other hand, the vaccination itself is pretty obviously a good thing; cutting down on HPV will quite simply save lives. (Arguments about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine are about as valid as the arguments against fluoridating the drinking water, and only slightly more valid than the arguments that man is not causing global warming.) Were I a Texan, my reaction would be something along the lines of “Oh. Well, okay.”
Sorry to be wishy-washy about it. But at least it’s nice to see the Republicans splitting along the party’s natural fissures.
- Sun Ra