Rick Perry further backed away from his 2007 decision to require schoolgirls to be vaccinated against HPV, saying he should have made the treatment available only when parents requested it.
“We should have had an opt-in instead of an opt-out,” he said at a fundraiser in Virginia, according to Politico.
Perry is under heavy fire from rivals Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum over the HPV move, but he defended the opt-out provision as a key feature of the vaccination program in Tuesday’s debate.
“It had an opt- out,” Perry said. “And at the end of the day, this was about trying to stop a cancer and giving the parental option to opt out of that. And at the end of the day, you may criticize me about the way that I went about it, but at the end of the day, I am always going to err on the side of life.”
Perry defiantly stood up for his HPV decision for years despite widespread opposition in Texas, where the legislature overturned the decision with veto-proof majorities, at one point challenging politicians to personally explain their vote to dying cancer patients. But it’s been clear from the start that he doesn’t want to fight a presidential race over it — right after launching his campaign he said he made a mistake by using an executive order to require the HPV vaccinations instead of working with state lawmakers.
