There are probably two main things at work here:
- The Texas Legislature is Retarded. Don't believe me? Well, until about 2000 or so it was legal to hand out the death penalty to the mentally-challenged in Texas, and not to mention they're like, one of the states with the highest use of capital punishment.
- Cancer is the archenemy of all modern doctors. Detecting it can be tricky in some cases, it's most certainly fatal to miss a diagnosis, and lastly the treatment for it is often worse than the disease until it reaches a certain point.
This comes together to form a unique situation, wherein doctors press upon stupid politicians to attempt to kill off one of their most-hated enemies. Anyway, that aside, I think it's a perfectly fine practice and, in fact, after let's say 20 years I'd recommend it as a standard practice everywhere. Why? Sex happens, that's why (and cancer does too, and it sucks). Maybe the situation is unideal, the kid gets molested by someone carrying the virus; maybe she's just horny, who knows. The point is, sex is a part of being human and certainly as much as we'd like to blind ourselves to it, kids do have sex. This is just an added protection, something to keep this eventuality safer--I mean, would you, as President Bush did, have the CDC cut all funding to sex-ed. programs that advocate the use of condoms over abstinence because the implication is that, if you teach them how to use condoms they'll use them (have sex) whereas, if you teach them not to have sex, they won't (which, in fact, as many studies have shown, is not just false, but inversely true--it
causes people to have sex)?
Moreover, being an STD, and a common one, this becomes a matter of public safety, so it only makes perfect sense that it would be a required school vaccination--because one is safeguarding the public's health by doing so, just as one is required to get their child vaccinated for Meningitis, get their child test for TB, etc. See, HPV is somewhat unique in that, many STDs cannot be inoculated against and this one can.
Finally, in terms of drug-safety...well, they're Texans, we can afford to lose a few to save the many. Did I say that aloud; did they hear me? In all seriousness, these things do get tested on humans and there are some long-term tests, but to be entirely honest, the FDA is not what you would call trustworthy. Furthermore, whether they acknowledge it or not, scientists and doctors can make all the noise they want about ethical standards, policies, and treatment, but most of the time, the most valuable data is that which is actually collected unscrupulously or extracted from catastrophe. With Cancer, there are Clinical Trials which essentially is human experimentation on a person whom you know to be dying at a reliable-enough rate. But with that out of the way, because of the mechanism behind inoculation, vaccines tend to be, for the most part, safe. It's not a drug that is altering the long- or even short-term chemical state of the body, it's some part of a virus that identifies itself to the immune system, enabling it to efficiently handle infection.
