Michele Bachmann warned America on Monday that the HPV vaccine Rick Perry had mandated in Texas caused “mental retardation” in little girls, sending what had been a typical attack on Perry’s record deep into tinfoil hat territory.
“I will tell you that I had a mother last night come up to me here in Tampa, Florida, after the debate,” Bachmann said. “She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter.”
Bachmann’s line didn’t come out of nowhere. Conspiracy theorists have long pushed the notion — despite numerous studies debunking it — that vaccines cause mental disorders like autism. Bloggers Ed Morrissey points out that in the case of the HPV Vaccine Gardasil, the CDC has never recorded a single case of brain damage and recommends its use.
An advocate for autistic children slammed Bachmann’s scaremongering in an interview with Politico’s Ben Smith on Tuesday.
“Congresswoman Bachmann’s decision to spread fear of vaccines is dangerous and irresponsible,” Evan Siegfried, spokesman for the Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership, said. “There is zero credible scientific evidence that vaccines cause mental retardation or autism. She should cease trying to foment fear in order to advance her political agenda.”
Perry dismissed Bachmann’s claim as well on Tuesday. “You heard the same arguments about giving our children protections from some of the childhood diseases, and they were.. autism was part of that,” he told NBC News. “Now we’ve subsequently found out that was generated and not true.”
Aside from the “retardation” line, Bachmann mostly focused on an argument against Perry that Texas Democrats have employed as well, namely that the Texas governor had close ties with the drug company that manufactures Gardasil, which employed his former chief of staff as a lobbyist and donated $5,000 to his campaign.
Benjy Sarlin
Benjy Sarlin is a reporter for Talking Points Memo and co-writes the campaign blog, TPM2012. He previously reported for The Daily Beast/Newsweek as their Washington Correspondent and covered local politics for the New York Sun.
Facebook Conversations