Topic: CNSNews.com
A July 16 CNSNews.com article by Terry Jeffrey begins this way:
There is a knock at the front door. Peeking through the window, a mother sees a man and a woman, both in uniform. They are agents of health-care reform.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” says the man. “Our records show that your eleven-year-old daughter has not been immunized for genital warts.”
“And your four-year-old still needs the chicken-pox vaccine,” says the woman.
“He will not be allowed to start kindergarten unless he gets that shot, you know,” says the man—smiling from ear to ear.
“So, can we please come in?” asks the woman. “We have the vaccines right here,” she says, lifting up a black medical bag. “We can give your kids the shots right now.”
“We are from the government,” says the man, “and we’re here to help.”
Is this a scene from the over-heated imagination of an addlepated conspiracy theorist?
Considering who wrote it, we'd have to say yes. It's a scare tactic by Jeffrey, who's purportedly reporting on a bill that would allow "interventions" to increase immunization.
Jeffrey undermines his own scare tactic, however, by stating later in the article, "Many vaccines routinely administered to children in the United States are utterly uncontroversial." That's not quite true; some right-wingers, like the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, oppose mandatory vaccination of children, and others have claimed that vaccine regimens cause autism (though that his been largely debunked).
Further, rather than noting that, Jeffrey focuses instead on claims that vaccines against chicken pox and HPV aren't sufficiently effective. As we've noted, conservatives have opposed the idea of making the HPV vaccine mandatory, in no small part because they think it will encourage girls to have sex.
