One Last Round of Shots
April 10th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
Yesterday, I got a call from a concerned woman named Amy Sweet, who was getting calls from Texas legislators and the governor. Sweet, a practicing physicians assistant in gynecological oncology, testified back in February in favor of mandating the HPV vaccine for young girls. Perry and Rep. Jessica Farrar (D-Houston) who filed legislation similar to Perry’s mandate, wanted Sweet to testify again in front of the Senate today, since she was one of the most passionate and knowledgeable advocates of the vaccine.
Sweet was stressing out because she couldn’t possibly make it to the Capitol again to wait for testimony to begin — the last time she showed up, the House got into a budget tussle and the committee hearing on the vaccine started several hours late and ran until the wee hours of the morn’. Sweet’s leaving soon to go to Central America to conduct an HPV screening seminar for docs down there. She’s also been planning her wedding. All of which has made for a hectic couple of months. But what had her worried on the phone was that she was still carting around a stack of research she had collected showing HPV 16’s link to face and throat cancer. Oral and throat cancers account for 30,000 cases annually in the U.S., and about 7,000 deaths. HPV is linked to about 1/5 of cases.
This was all information that the House Committee on Public Health asked Sweet to gather for their consideration. The committee passed the bill to the House only days later without ever seeing Sweet’s data. She also said yesterday that she’s been searching in vain for research cited by an expert witness (brought in by Rep. Dennis Bonnen (R-Angleton) who led the charge to overturn Perry’s mandate) that cast doubt on the vaccine’s near-perfect efficacy rate and safety record.
“The vaccine is safe. It’s completely safe,” she said with exasperation.
I wish I’d told her not to sweat missing the testimony, since it has long been apparent that the Lege wanted nothing to do with requiring the vaccine. Sure enough, the Senate committee on Health and Human Services sent Bonnen’s bill to the full Senate. It’s becoming more evident that, despite all the statistics thrown around the debate, the move to kill Perry’s mandate had less to do with science and more to do with the right-wing ideology and the legislature’s anger at the governor’s heavy handedness. In the latest example, the Senate committee attached a provision that would require the Lege to revisit the vaccine mandate in 2011. Four more years of study on a vaccine that prevents a disease which can take decades to manifest is not going to yield some startling new information that suddenly makes the mandate decision crystal clear.
It’s a difficult issue, and in spite of all the evidence of the vaccine’s usefulness, it’s still understandable that parents would want a say in a decision that relates to their children and sexual behavior. But with Senate approval surely looming, the common-sense option of having the state pay for the vaccine, as Washington state is about to do and the Australian government already does, will go unproposed. Maybe we can at least hope one of the HPV education bills doesn’t get lost in the upcoming schedule crunch, especially given the woeful attitudes toward safe sex among college students in this article.
May 8th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
[…] by five women affected by or working closely with HPV and cervical cancer (a couple of whom testified during committee hearings). The whole time, HB 1098 and two fancy pens were sitting on a desk next […]