According to a report in yesterday’s AJC, a Senate bill is currently working its way through committee that will mandate the HPV or cervical cancer vaccine for all pre-teen girls in Georgia. The proposed legislation will require the vaccine for all girls, unless the parents object on religious grounds or can’t afford the vaccine.
Over the past few weeks, it was revealed that the vaccine’s manufacturer, Merck, has been lobbying state lawmakers to make the vaccine mandatory. After a lot of backlash, the company has now promised to stop lobbying. It was also discovered that Merck made large campaign contributions to the Texas governor who then signed an executive order making the vaccine mandatory for Texas girls, sparking more controversy.
Typically, such decisions are left between children, their parents, and their doctors, which is as it should be, or are made by public health officials. For serious, contagious diseases that spread easily from child to child, such as measles or polio, one can make the case for universal immunization. However, it is much harder to make such a case for a sexually transmitted disease, and even then the decision ought to be up to public health officials, or better yet parents, rather than state legislators.