“I’m offended for all the little girls and parents that didn’t have a choice,” she said. (Actually, any parent can opt out on a child’s behalf.) She said that girls who were harmed by the vaccine don’t get “a mulligan.” Later, the offended Bachmann ventured deeper into scientific illiteracy, telling Fox News that a woman had approached her after the debate and told her that she had a daughter who had “suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine.”
I wrote about the HPV vaccine and the Bush Administration’s opposition to science for this magazine in 2006. What was true then is true now: the vaccine has never been shown to interfere with the mental development of children. There is
no evidence—not a study, no data, nothing—to suggest this cancer vaccine causes anything of the sort.
