In the Sep­tem­ber 12 Tea Party Express/​CNN debate, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Michele Bach­mann took Gov­er­nor Rick Perry to task for sign­ing an exec­u­tive order requir­ing Gar­dasil vac­ci­na­tions before young women could attend pub­lic schools. Gar­dasil is a vac­ci­na­tion which pro­tects young women from the human papil­loma virus, known to increase a woman’s risk of cer­vi­cal can­cer. Gar­dasil is made by the drug giant Merck, and Perry’s ties to Merck are well-​​known and were the sub­ject of heated attacks at last week’s debate.

After the debate, on Greta van Susteren’s Fox News show, Bach­mann refused to walk back her com­ments:

There’s a woman who came up cry­ing to me tonight after the debate. She said her daugh­ter was given that vac­cine. She told me her daugh­ter suf­fered men­tal retar­da­tion as a result of that vaccine.

The next day, Fox’s Sean Han­nity (on his radio show) pressed her for more information:

Is that one of the side effects of this? ’Cause I’ve not heard that.

[Bach­mann repeats the anecdote.]

I am not a doc­tor, I’m not a sci­en­tist, I’m not a physi­cian. All I was doing is report­ing what this woman told me last night at the debate. As a mother — my hus­band and I have five bio­log­i­cal chil­dren, three daugh­ters, and we’ve raised 23 fos­ter chil­dren in the home. As a mother, I would not want the Fed­eral gov­ern­ment or a state gov­ern­ment to man­date that my child has to have an injec­tion just because the state says so.

Arthur Caplan

Bioethi­cist Arthur Caplan has offered $10,000 if Rep. Bach­mann can pro­duce this woman who she claims met her after the debate. He emailed and tweeted his chal­lenge:

If she can pro­duce a case in one week start­ing today ver­i­fied by three med­ical experts that she and i pick of a woman who became ‘retarded’ (her words) due to HPV vac­cine i will donate that to a char­ity of her choice. She must donate 10k to a char­ity I pick if she fails to do so.

As far as I’m aware, Caplan’s chal­lenge has been ignored by Bachmann.

The Enemy: Human Papil­loma Virus

What is this evil Gar­dasil, and why has it become the cen­ter of so much controversy?

There are a num­ber of viruses which have been defin­i­tively shown to cause can­cer in humans. Most are in the cat­e­gory of retro­viruses, viruses which use RNA as their genetic mate­r­ial. A small num­ber are DNA tumor viruses. Either kind of virus works by enslav­ing the body’s cells and turn­ing them into mol­e­c­u­lar copy machines churn­ing out copies of the virus. RNA viruses (retro­viruses) usu­ally cause the most dam­age to a cell’s DNA.

Human papil­loma virus (HPV) is a DNA tumor virus which has been shown to increase the risk of cer­vi­cal can­cer in sex­u­ally active women. Viral infec­tion is quite com­mon. More than 1⁄4 of women 14 to 59 test pos­i­tive for HPV infection.

The Wages of Sin

There are sev­eral strains of HPV, des­ig­nated with a num­ber. The HPV-​​16 and HPV-​​18 strains are esti­mated to cause 70% of all cer­vi­cal can­cers. HPV-​​6 and HPV-​​11 cause gen­i­tal warts but are not thought to increase can­cer risk. Gar­disil vac­ci­na­tion pro­tects against all four of these types (6, 11, 16 and 18).

Bachmann’s denial of the ben­e­fits of Gar­dasil vac­ci­na­tion, and her trum­pet­ing of exceed­ingly rare side effects, is part of a larger pat­tern of dan­ger­ous anti-​​vaccine pro­pa­ganda which was detailed in Seth Mnookin’s book The Panic Virus.

There have been 35 mil­lion doses of Gar­dasil admin­is­tered in the United States. Of those, 18,727 (0.05%) caused adverse effects reported to the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Control’s Vac­cine Adverse Event Report­ing Sys­tem (VAERS) as required by law. Of those 18,727 adverse events, 8% (0.004% of the total) were con­sid­ered seri­ous.  None of the seri­ous side effects (includ­ing Guillain-​​Barré Syn­drome, an autoim­mune paral­y­sis which some believe is trig­gered by vac­ci­na­tion) were found to be higher than what is nor­mally expected in the pop­u­la­tion. Over 4,000 women die of cer­vi­cal can­cer each year, and accord­ing to the National Can­cer Insti­tute, each year 2,800 of these deaths could have been pre­vented with an effec­tive vac­ci­na­tion program.

Not only is the anti-​​vaccine posi­tion an extreme one amongst the sci­en­tif­i­cally lit­er­ate, but it’s part of a larger trend seen in the Tea Party pop­u­la­tion which was strongly rep­re­sented at the debate last week (after all, it was spon­sored by one of the larger Tea Party organizations).

Tea Party sup­port­ers tend to be strongly anti-​​science, in con­trast with the remain­der of Amer­i­cans who actu­ally believe the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion, National Can­cer Insti­tute, Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency, and the over­whelm­ing major­ity of main­stream scientists.

For exam­ple, ear­lier this month, a CNN/​ORC poll asked if the the­ory of evo­lu­tion is def­i­nitely true, prob­a­bly true, prob­a­bly false, or def­i­nitely false. Of those polled, 25% of Tea Party oppo­nents believe it’s prob­a­bly or def­i­nitely false; 39% of those who are neu­tral with regard to the Tea Party believe it’s false; while a major­ity (58%) of Tea Party sup­port­ers think the the­ory of evo­lu­tion is prob­a­bly or def­i­nitely false.

Sup­port­ers of the Tea Party are sim­i­larly at odds with sci­en­tific con­sen­sus on anthro­pogenic global warm­ing (AGW). A large major­ity (77%) of Tea Party oppo­nents feel that AGW is a real phe­nom­e­non. About half (48%) of those who are neu­tral on the Tea Party hold this view. But amongst Tea Party sup­port­ers, only 18% feel AGW is a real phe­nom­e­non while 31% believe there is global warm­ing as a result of nat­ural processes and a major­ity (51%) think that there is no global warm­ing at all.

This view is also held by Gov­er­nor Perry, who accused sci­en­tists of fraud:

A sub­stan­tial num­ber of sci­en­tists … have manip­u­lated data so that they will have dol­lars rolling in to their projects.

The only prob­lem with this view is that sci­en­tists are not, in gen­eral, wealthy peo­ple. Name one sci­en­tist on the Forbes list of the world’s rich­est men. If they’ve used fab­ri­cated data to enrich them­selves, they’re clearly not doing it right.

I expect bet­ter from Pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates. Is it too much to ask that a per­son who wants to become leader of the free world actu­ally believe in sci­ence and technology?

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