Aaron Blake: “Many things have conspired to bring us to this moment in American politics, in which more than 600,000 deaths are apparently insufficient in the minds of some for such a step. But perhaps the turning point came in Texas in 2007.”
“Out of the blue, a conservative Republican governor named Rick Perry signed an executive order. The order made his state the first in the country to mandate a vaccine for a sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer, the human papillomavirus (or HPV), for girls entering the sixth grade.”
“The response was swift, and the GOP-controlled state legislature soon overrode him. But the conservative concerns often pertained less to the safety of the vaccine or the appropriateness of the such mandates — as they do today — and more to both the limited scale of the problem and to the idea that the vaccine would encourage promiscuity in young girls.”
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