The organization that injected the specter of retardation-via-vaccine is at it again, this time criticizing California's new law allowing 12-year-old girls to avoid cancer by getting HPV-prevention shots without their parents' consent.

Now, we're not sure if the National Vaccine Information Center is where Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachman got the idea that HPV vaccine could make girls “retarded,” but it sure seems like it's on the same page.

Now the org is saying that California's freedom-to-live law for girls clashes with federal statute. According to NVIC director of advocacy Dawn Richardson:

Under federal law, parents are supposed to get vaccine information before their children are vaccinated to help minimize risks and this new California law raises, rather than reduces, vaccine risks for children.

Hmm. Do we smell a lawsuit?

Bachmann, by the way, was criticizing Republican presidential competetor Rick Perry for signing a Texas law that requires girls to get the HPV vaccine when she made the “retarded” reference. We're confused: Aren't right wingers pro-life?

NVIC are the folks behind the very 1986 federal law, National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, that requires docs to inform parents of risks of vaccines given to their kids.

The group is widely derided as anti-vaccine around-the-clock, and it often coats its views in a bitter pill filled to the center with anti-big-pharma rhetoric. The org was founded by folks like Barbara Loe Fisher who claim their children were “brain injured” as a result of vaccines. (Is Jenny McCarthy a member of this group?).

NVIC's Fisher had this to say about California's law:

He has done what a lot of powerful people are doing today in America, which is making it easy for big corporations and trade organizations, including doctors and drug companies protected from vaccine injury lawsuits, to exploit ordinary people to increase influence and profits. This law will put the lives of minor children too young to make medical decisions at risk …

We share NVIC's mistrust of big corporations that want to shove things that come with lots of fine print down your throat (Occupy That) and, yeah, we prefer to get our drugs from characters in hoodies. But these are young girls we're talking about. And they're dealing not with the possibility of cancer, but the probability of cancer-like cells.

It'll be interesting to see if the feds really want to intervene with that.

[@dennisjromero/djromero@laweekly.com]

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