Hpv Internal Type

The HPV files: In emails, Perry mostly absent

My colleague Byron Tau and I filed a Public Information Act with the state of Texas last month for correspondence related to the decision to vaccinate girls in the state against HPV disease, and about 700 pages of correspondence e inner-mail arrived pretty quickly yesterday.

The debate against HPV is one of the most interesting tenure Perry, and it was covered in depth in the press in Texas. The most immediate controversy comes from some social conservatives who believe vaccinating against a sexually-transmitted disease would encourage sex; but that argument is a bit of a distraction from other criticism Perry took. Texas was the first state in the nation to mandate vaccinations with the drug, and USA Today, for instance, editorialized against it, praising the drug but warning that the "rush to make it mandatory, less than eight months after FDA approval, could have detrimental consequences."

And the more interesting political and substantive debate may concern how Perry made his decision. He never strayed from the simple case that he was fighting cancer, but critics wondered whether Merck's political contributions and hiring of a lobbyist close to him had helped.

The Statesman, in 2007, wrote up the same email pile we were given, and noted that the process seemed rushed and that there was a bit of communication with Merck, but nothing really striking.

The emails are now available publicly for the first time here .

And the email cache offers outsiders a bit of insight into how Perry's operation works, and to one particularly striking fact: Perry himself was almost entirely absent from the implementation of this key decision. His own emails appear in only one thread in the entire 700 page cache: On February 6, 2007, as the initiative was rolling out, he received a supportive email from a friend, which he forwarded to his wife, Anita, under the heading, "fyi.

Perry says the HPV vaccine he mandated would have been optional ...

Critics said the vaccine, Merck & Co.’s Gardasil, was too new to declare safe. Some said too that Perry’s order would infringe on parental rights or give girls a false sense of security, leading them to be sexually active too young.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, one of Perry’s opponents in the GOP gubernatorial primary, frequently slams Perry’s stilled order.

Perry has stood by his action, most recently casting it as having created an optional vaccination requirement.

“That piece of legislation was not mandatory, in the sense of when you can say no, something’s not mandatory,” he said during the second Republican gubernatorial debate Jan. 29.

A just-say-no gubernatorial order? We decided to check.

What we found: On Feb.2, 2007, Perry issued an executive order - not a law, as he said - by requiring the Texas Health and Human Services Commission to adopt rules requiring all girls entering sixth grade to receive a vaccine against HPV, a sexually transmitted virus that causes most cases of cervical cancer and genital warts.

The order included an opt-out "to protect the right of parents to the final authority on health care for their children.” Perry ordered the Department of State Health Services to allow parents dissenting for philosophical or religious reasons to request a conscientious objection affidavit form. That form, which has been available since 2003, enables parents to enroll their children in public school even if they lack state-required immunizations. It’s automatically granted as long as parents provide all required information.

According to the Department of State Health Service’s 2008-09 immunization report, which uses data from kindergarten and seventh-grade students at 1,300 independent school districts and 800 private schools, 0.28 percent of the students filed conscientious objection forms.

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