Bioethicist Art Caplan is challenging Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann with a $10,000 bet to prove a claim that a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer caused mental retardation.
Bachmann chastised Texas Governor Rick Perry at a Sept. 12 Republican debate for requiring girls in his state to get Merck & Co.'s Gardasil in 2007 to ward off a sexually transmitted virus that causes cancer. The next day in television interviews, Bachmann said a woman told her the shot, usually given at age 12, triggered mental retardation in the woman's daughter.
Caplan, director of the center for bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said the statements by Bachmann, a U.S. representative from Minnesota, may cost lives by frightening parents from vaccinating their daughters. He said he'll pay $10,000 to Bachmann's charity of choice if she can find such a patient.
"It's ethically obscene," Caplan said today in an interview. "The stakes are too high to try to get political advantage by putting young women's lives at risk."
If Bachmann takes the challenge and is unable to find three reputable doctors who agree a girl was made mentally retarded by Gardasil, she will have to pay $10,000 to Caplan's charity of choice, he said.
