The smell of horror hangs about the doctor's office.
That smell - an amalgamation of ammonia, bleach, latex and rubbing alcohol - hits flaring nostrils, provoking a primal response. Pores open and sweat seeps from foreheads into the cool air; pupils dilate despite harsh fluorescent lighting, hearts race, and breathing quickens. Ears strain to hear the physician's footsteps outside the examination room door. That smell tells the mind: You're fixing to get a shot.
It's worse when you're a child, aware of the pain that a needle causes but not of its benefits. However, with age comes acceptance, and one day you find yourself standing in line at the health clinic for an inoculation against influenza, meningitis or now the cancer-causing human papilloma virus. Taking yourself to receive an immunization, something unimaginable at the age of 5, now seems necessary, safe and practical. Just as a person's feelings about vaccinations evolve with time and use, so too has the collective attitude of Texas lawmakers - right up until Gov. Rick Perry opened his mouth earlier this month.
"I don't think it's right for them to force me to inject my children with the filth thrown off by animals - and that's what this vaccine is," said Sen. Floyd Bradshaw of Weatherford in 1959.
Bradshaw's comment in the Dallas Morning News dovetailed with his introduction of legislation that would have made it illegal for schools to require immunizations for enrollment. Bradshaw, the grandson of a faith healer, was keeping his 8- and 11-year-old children out of Austin schools in order to avoid the required smallpox vaccination.
In 1959, Texas had no statewide immunization requirements for schoolchildren. Instead, each individual school district called its own shots.
This began to change in 1970 (Bradshaw's bill never caught on), when Sen. Chet Brooks of Pasadena began considering legislation to set statewide immunization mandates for schoolchildren.
The impetus: a diphtheria epidemic raging in central Texas since 1967. Austin and San Antonio (whose schools did not require diphtheria vaccine) were hit particularly hard. The Austin American-Statesman said as many as 86 confirmed and 14 suspected diphtheria cases were reported in San Antonio alone during the first nine months of 1970.
In April 1971, Gov. Preston Smith signed Brooks's bill into law, requiring Texas schoolchildren to be immunized against diphtheria, smallpox, rubella, rubeola (measles), tetanus, poliomyelitis and whooping cough. Texas had the highest incidence rates in the nation in 1968 for measles, murine typhus and poliomyelitis.
Jump ahead to 1993, with Texas still ranking highest nationally in cases of vaccine-preventable disease. Answering a challenge from Gov. Ann Richards in her State of the State address, Sen. Judith Zaffirini of Laredo and Rep. Nancy McDonald of El Paso authored bills, calling for mandatory immunizations of all children in Texas, whether or not their parents could afford it, whether or not they were enrolled in school.
Signed in April 1993, the law, in essence, required a doctor to check a child's immunization records and shielded the doctor from liability in case of immunization without parental permission.
Having this mandatory, though mostly toothless, vaccination policy on the books paved the way for Texas to join the 1994 federal Vaccines for Children program, which provides free vaccinations to children who qualify.
On Feb. 2, 2007, Gov. Rick Perry made history by issuing an executive order adding the HPV vaccination to the Texas Vaccines for Children program and also mandating that the vaccination be administered to middle-school girls in Texas.
And thus ended the nearly unanimous support that had greeted vaccination proposals in Texas for the past four decades.
Democrats in the Legislature had already authored similar legislation this session, prompting little publicity, but Gov. Perry's bypassing of the Legislature has been challenged strongly by fellow Republicans. First among them is freshman Sen. Glenn Hegar of Katy, who points out that the HPV vaccine has a low rate of success (preventing 70 percent of cancer-causing HPV) when compared to existing mandatory vaccinations. Hegar also says that the HPV vaccine, federally approved in June 2006, has not yet been proven effective beyond five years, nor has it been proven safe for those who are pregnant.
Couple this seeming haste to action by the governor with the purported influence exercised on Perry by Merck (maker of the only HPV vaccine), and something sure smells funny. It may not be the doctor's office, but Gov. Perry's eagerness to circumvent legislative procedure on HPV has me nervous about this prescription.
Brendel is a journalism graduate student.
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