Michele Bachmann said this morning that the HPV vaccination Rick Perry had mandated in an executive order as governor of Texas could potentially cause mental retardation in children.
“I had a mother last night come up to me here in Tampa, Fla., after the debate,” Bachmann said on the Today show this morning. “She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter. It can have very dangerous side effects. The mother was crying when she came up to me last night. I didn’t know who she was before the debate. This is a very real concern and people have to draw their own conclusions.”
Bachmann repeated her “crony capitalism” charge, saying it was “very clear that crony capitalism could have likely been the cause because the governor’s former chief of staff was the chief lobbyist for this drug company.”
“Rather than putting it before hearings and before legislature the governor chose by himself unilaterally, to sign an executive order and put through the requirement that all innocent little 12-year-old girls or 11-year-old girls in the state of Texas would be forced by the government to take an injection of what could potentially be a very dangerous drug,” Bachmann said.
She added that “you can’t abuse executive authority with executive orders” because “there is no second chance for these little girls if there are any dangerous consequences to their bodies or for their parents.”
Video:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy