Calling the (Unconstitutional) Shots in California
Listen up parents: On Sunday California's Governor violated your Fourteenth Amendment right to parent your minor. Under a new law signed by Jerry Brown, children as young as twelve can receive serious medical treatment without parental consent and without parental access to the medical records.
Whether your child is at a routine doctor appointment, visiting the school nurse, or at Planned Parenthood, she or he may receive vaccinations for sexually transmitted diseases without your knowledge.
Brown thinks that a sixth grader can understand the risks and benefits of receiving vaccines such as Gardasil, Cervarix, and Hepatitis B. In grave irony, Sunday he also signed into law a ban on teens using tanning booths. Apparently Brown thinks a child can decipher the medical jargon in a twenty-seven page product insert, including statistical details from placebo controlled trials, but doesn't think teens can make decisions about whether or not they will get a sunburn in a tanning bed.
Constitutional violations aside, since its introduction in 2006 the Gardasil vaccine has been under scrutiny due to exceptionally numerous reports of severe reactions. A well-regarded vaccine safety group, the NVIC, tallied the adverse reactions in the government's own Vaccine Adverse Events Reports (VAERS) database and found that "by the summer of 2009, [Gardasil had] already caused more than 15,000 thousand reports of vaccine reactions, including more than 3,000 injuries and 48 deaths." Serious injuries include fainting, seizures, and temporary or permanent paralysis. The use of this vaccine has increased in the two years since this report, and as of today, my VAERS search did indeed yield more than 22,000 adverse event reports for Gardasil. Be aware that VAERS is a passive, voluntary reporting system and as such it is widely believed that adverse vaccine reactions are under-reported by at least a factor of ten.
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