The recent debate between Republican presidential candidates produced a number of contentious moments, but none more so than Rep. Michelle Bachman’s rebuke of Texas governor Rick Perry’s 2007 Executive Order RP 65  (later rescinded by RP 74 )  requiring pre-teen girls to be vaccinated for the Human Papillomavirus (HPV).  Issues of public health and parents’ rights, morality and constitutionality, ethics and politics have all collided over this vaccine, and the debate will likely only intensify.

 With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to see how many times this vaccine has been referenced in recent state executive orders, statutes, regulations and pending legislation.  On WestlawNext, I started with the following search in Netscan Executive Orders:

      h.p.v. human-papilloma! & vaccin!

It produced only one result, an executive order from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal directing the creation of abstinence and HPV vaccine awareness programs. Coverage for Netscan Executive Orders dates back to 2008, so Perry’s 2007 EO does not appear.  But, the same query in Texas’ Historical Session Laws did provide a link to Gov. Perry’s response to the Texas legislature’s rebuke of his Executive Order.  See, TX Gov. Mess., 5/8/2007 at TX LEGIS 43 (2007)).

Next, I selected All State materials, and ran the same query.  At the time of this writing, the search produced 51 statutes, 27 regulations, 270 bills and session laws and 155 proposed and recently adopted regulations. Only 4 cases were retrieved with the search.

For some of the most robust results, I selected Secondary Sources for a list of 379 articles, including “Assessing Mandatory HPV Vaccination: Who Should Call the Shots?” from the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics.

For some of the most robust results, I selected Secondary Sources for a list of 379 articles, including “Assessing Mandatory HPV Vaccination: Who Should Call the Shots?” from the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics.

Over 2,285 results were produced in News sources on WestlawNext, over half of them published in the last 90 days.