Texas now requiring meningitis vaccination for all college students

Monday, February 13, 2012 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
Tags: meningitis vaccines, Texas, college students

(NaturalNews) Former presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry has signed into law new legislation that requires all college students, including those living off campus, to get injected with a meningitis vaccine. The new guidelines, which reportedly received bipartisan support, require that all students under the age of 30 show either proof of vaccination or a signed affidavit of exemption before being allowed to come to class.

Effective beginning spring semester 2012 for all students enrolled at both public and private colleges and universities across Texas, the mandate expands a previous one enacted in 2009 that requires only students living on campus to get the shot. And even though all students still have the freedom to decline the vaccination as a matter of conscience or for religious reasons, many of them are not being told this by their schools, and are just going along with it.

Though the entire state of Texas had only 34 reported cases of meningitis among young people between the ages of 15 and 29 in 2009, Gov. Perry, the Texas Medical Association (TMA), and several state senators expressed vehement support for the new bill, S.B. 1107, which further expands the government's reach into the personal health choices of Texans.

Authored by Texas State Senator Wendy Davis (D-Fort Worth), S.B. 1107 is the companion bill to the earlier Jamie Schanbaum Act of 2009, which was enacted beginning January 1, 2010, in honor of Jamie Schanbaum, a University of Texas student who developed Meningococcal Septicemia that ended up causing her to lose both her legs and all ten of her fingers, according to reports.

But rather than continue to give students the option to evaluate the facts and decide for themselves whether or not to get the vaccine, both the Texas state government and the TMA have decided to force it on everyone, despite the fact that the condition is extremely rare. The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) also lists some very serious reported adverse events associated with the meningitis vaccine that include nerve damage, double vision, the deadly skin disease Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, and even death (http://www.medalerts.org).

The whole charade hearkens back to Gov. Perry's 2007 executive order that mandated Gardasil vaccines for all Texas schoolgirls. This mandate was later repealed, but it appears as though Perry and the other vaccine-pushers in Texas are up to their dirty work once again trying to force chemical injections on the young people of Texas.

You can see who voted for and against S.B. 1107 by visiting:
http://www.capitol.state.tx.us

Sources for this article include:

http://www.dcccd.edu

http://www.reporternews.com

http://www.nytimes.com

http://www.star-telegram.com