Camille Giglio
Sacramento: On Monday, August 15, 2011 the Senate Appropriations Committee moved AB 499, Minors, Medical Care, Consent over to the Suspense File. The official reason was that it was financially too costly for the state to administer.
Bills in the Suspense file will be heard on August 25th, again, in the Senate Appropriations committee. Bills then passing out of that committee will go to the floor of the Senate. It is believed that this will happen rather quickly.
This meeting of the Senate Appropriations Committee will not take witnesses or testimony.
We ask that you call the local district office of your state Senator and register your opposition to passage of this bill when it comes to the floor of the Senate. Since this may happen quickly we ask that you please start your calling now.
The meeting of the Senate Appropriations Committee was heavily attended due to the large number of bills to be heard on that Monday. CRLC had prepared 20 packets of information on Gardasil and its negative effects to be distributed to the committee members (9), and to other Democrats and Republicans. That folder contained a prepared statement by an 18 year old young woman who also accompanied us to Sacramento. At age 15 she and her mother went to Kaiser for check-ups. The girl’s doctor asked to speak to the daughter alone which the mother allowed.
The doctor then tried to talk the girl into accepting the Gardasil injections. She asked the girl if she was just saying no, she didn’t want the shots because her mother didn’t want her to have them? The girl said “no.” then the doctor told her that she, the doctor, wouldn’t tell the mother if the girl did decide to have the shot.
When the doctor returned the girl to her mother, the doctor told them that if the girl didn’t have the shot and she was raped, she could get cancer and die.
This is a very good example of what will happen to all minor children if this bill should pass. The medical profession will become salesmen for the drug industry or whatever fad medicine is currently popular.
Along with the health dangers to young girls from this vaccine is the danger to parental authority and supremacy in rearing and making decisions for one’s own children.
The bill, though very brief and with all the appearances of being very simply written places the state in the position of authority over the health care of children. Some spokespersons for the pharmaceutical and medical industries suggests that this shot should be given to 9 year olds.
The author of the bill, Toni Atkins of San Diego, frames this drug as a preventive medicine procedure, protecting girls from the future (and unknown) possibility of contracting genital warts and ultimately cervical cancer. This action places this vaccine into a category of children’s protected rights. The parents are removed from any position of authority. The understanding is that whatever the FDA says is necessary and a certain group of medical representatives, such as the ACIP - Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices - says is necessary.
Guess where the money comes from to pay for all of this? Of course, the Omnibus Budget Reconcilliation Act of 1993.
The funding for AB 499, if I understand the report correctly, states that the funding would come from a state tax source called the Minor Consent Program which comes under the Medi-Cal program. This is the program that already pays for the abortions and part of the contraceptives given out to children in California. The state pays the total cost of an abortion for a minor and it receives a 90% reimbursement from the feds for contraceptive and STD services.
The official Senate Appropriations analysis also contains this information: ‘Based on Medi-Cal counts as of January 2010, it is assumed there are over 466,000 females and 457,000 males aged 12 through 17 who are Medi-Cal beneficiaries. A five to ten percent immunization rate for HPV [Gardasil] which is a three-dose series, would result in administrative costs ranging from $1.2 million to $2.5 million in total funds."
Nationwide it is estimated that the costs of Gardasil and all the other charges for services, etc, have a low of $350.00 to $500.00 for the series of 3 shots. That’s not to mention the planned for booster shots needed a couple of years down the road.
The Senate Committee analysis of the bill states that:
“Time-critical preventive services [this is the same basic strategy for getting girls lined up for abortions] for sexually transmitted diseases include the hepatitis B vaccine, post-exposure HIV medications and the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine which, if given prior to exposure, can significantly reduce the risk of certain cancers. The cost of administration of these vaccines comes out of other Med-Cal program which pays a $9.00 administrative fee to physicians who administer the vaccines to Medi-Ca; beneficiaries. Other costs related to vaccines for Medi-Cal beneficiaries comes from the federally funded Vaccines for Children Program. This is, apparently, administered by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - www.cdc.gov/vaccines/programs/vfc/default/htm.
Gardasil or the right of the government to mandate vaccinations for every child, may well become a part of the latest political debates. Presidential Candidate, Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, did, a couple of years ago, write an Executive Order mandating that all school-aged children be required to have the gardasil shot. This was not the legislature, the peoples’ voice, this was the executive branch of state government. When parents found out about this such a loud protest occurred that the Texas state legislature then stepped in to override Perry.
During the recent Republican candidate debate Candidate Mitt Romney was asked about his position on federal officials mandating that states comply with certain things, in contradiction to the Constitutional division between federal and state rights. He declared that the federal government did not have the right to mandate that states do certain things, but he felt that the state had the right to mandate that its citizens complied with certain mandates. Gardasil is apparently one of them, if, one accepts the idea that the state has the right to direct the health care of everyones children in that state.
This isn’t just a simple little debate about vaccinations. It is a big debate about parental rights and whether the government can invade that heretofore private sanctuary.
Please continue to be interested in this debate and be prepared to contact your legislator.
