Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said Monday she was not arguing that a vaccine intended to prevent cervical cancer caused mental retardation when she repeated the scientifically unfounded claim last week.The Minnesota congresswoman said she was relaying what a distraught woman told her after a GOP presidential debate in Florida in which Bachmann criticized rival Rick Perry for ordering the vaccine in Texas.
"All I was doing is relaying what a woman had said," Bachmann told The Associated Press after touring a manufacturer in Waterloo. "I relayed what she said. I wasn't attesting to her accuracy. I wasn't attesting to anything."
Well, if she wasn't attesting to anything, then she wouldn't have said anything. And now that she's spoken, the only decent thing for her to do is to publicly acknowledge that the HPV vaccine is a good thing. There's a lot of misunderstanding out there about the importance and safety of the HPV vaccine, but the fact is that the HPV vaccine saves lives by preventing the main cause of cervical cancer.
If Michele Bachmann truly values life, she'll stop trying to cover her butt and she'll start telling people what they need to know: that the HPV vaccine is a simple, safe and effective way of saving women's lives. She can still slam Rick Perry all she wants for the way in which he went about mandating Gardasil in Texas, but spreading false medical information about the effects of the vaccine to score political points is the moral equivalent of murder.
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