Michele Bachman, who was condemned as an anti-vaccination conspiracy theorist after suggesting that Gardasil causes “mental retardation,” said Wednesday that she was in fact a big supporter of vaccines. Not only that, she thinks there are too many regulations on them.
Bachmann told a gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Washington that cures for polio and other diseases “literally changed the course of history and this was good.” Until the government got in the way, that is: “[T]he problem is that bureaucracy has risen up to such an extent that today because of the FDA and other measures we’re no longer seeing the miracle of cures that were coming forward,” she said.
Bachmann told the audience her original “retardation” comment was really aimed at Rick Perry’s “crony capitalism.” Perry took a lot of heat over that angle, it’s true: his former chief of staff Mike Toomey helped promote the new treatment on behalf of Merck, its manufacturer. But Bachmann’s claim that a supporter’s daughter was mentally damaged by the vaccine — a loaded charge that’s never been backed up either in that individual case or anywhere else — clearly was an attack on the vaccine itself. Either way, given that she thinks a drug that causes children to become mentally retarded made it to the market just fine, it’s a little odd that her chief issue with vaccines is that bureaucrats are imposing too many safety requirements on them.
