Leading conservatives criticize presidential candidate Bachmann on medical science grounds

In 2007, Rick Perry—governor of Texas, and now a Republican presidential candidate—issued an executive order that sixth-grade girls be vaccinated against human papillomavirus, or HPV, the major cause of cervical cancer and also the most common sexually transmitted disease. His Republican presidential opponent Michele Bachmann has been criticizing that action. Some of her statements have drawn criticism on science-literacy grounds this week from conservatives, first in a Wall Street Journal editorial and then from Michael Gerson, the Washington Post columnist who served as a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

At some length, the WSJ editorial reports the medical facts and analyzes the political and cultural complexities of the Perry order. “The ethical and philosophical qualms ... are valid,” the editors write, “but he was erring on the side of public health against a terrible disease in a country where six million people contract HPV every year.” In the end, they charge Congresswoman Bachmann with “vaccine demagoguery” because, as they put it, she “has been making the talk show rounds implying that HPV vaccines cause ‘mental retardation’ on the basis of no evidence.” The editors call that “the kind of know-nothingism that undermines public support for vaccination altogether and leads to such public health milestones as California reporting in 2010 the highest number of whooping cough cases in 55 years.”

Gerson’s column follows a similar pattern. When he gets to Congresswoman Bachmann’s “mental retardation” allegation, he observes that “Bachmann herself seems prone to a serious condition: the compulsive desire to confirm every evangelical stereotype of censorious ignorance.” He charges that she has been “introducing anti-vaccine paranoia,” and calls that “one of the most direct and practical ways that a public official can undermine the health of his or her fellow citizens.” At the end, Gerson writes, “It is possible that Rick Perry encouraged HPV vaccinations in the wrong way or for the wrong reasons. But it is Bachmann, not Perry, who would put girls and women at greater health risk based on moral confusion and public health illiteracy.”

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are published in ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.