Gardisil and Bachmann: Tea Party Face Palm

Boy did Michelle Bachmann ever say something stupid: She claims that the Gardisil vaccination caused the daughter of a weepy constituent to catch “a case of the severe retards.”

She said:

There’s a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine. She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine.

As Ed Morrissey at HotAir says:

Huh? “Mental retardation” typically takes place in a pre- or neo-natal event. Autism becomes apparent in the first couple of years of life — and primarily affects boys. Gardasil vaccinations take place among girls between 9-12 years of age. Even assuming that this anecdote is arguably true, it wouldn’t be either “mental retardation” or autism, but brain damage.

The “mental retardation” argument is a rehash of the thoroughly discredited notion that vaccines containing thimerasol caused a rapid increase in diagnosed autism cases. That started with a badly-botched report in Lancet that allowed one researcher to manipulate a ridiculously small sample of twelve cases in order to reach far-sweeping conclusions about thimerasol. That preservative hasn’t been included in vaccines for years, at least not in the US, and the rate of autism diagnoses remain unchanged.

She should have just kept on criticizing Barack Obama and quit trying to snipe at Perry and others on the Republican ticket. Because of this statement, I have serious doubts about her ability to read and understand scientific information. And if she were to win the presidency and take a stand against the Global Warming scientific fraud, the left would just call her anti-science and refer to this incident as proof.