Bachmann: I Just Passed On Stranger's Vaccine Fear

Michele Bachmann is again backing off her vaccine scare story, admitting she really didn't know what she was talking about when she linked the HPV vaccine to a risk of retardation. She was simply passing on the concerns of a stranger who approached her. "All I was doing is relaying what a woman had said," Bachmann told the AP yesterday. "I relayed what she said. I wasn't attesting to her accuracy. I wasn't attesting to anything."

Bachmann attacked Texas Gov. Rick Perry in last week's Republican debate for requiring all schoolgirls in his state to be vaccinated against the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, which can cause cervical cancer. "It can have very dangerous side effects," Bachmann said about the vaccine on the Today Show the day after the debate. "This is the very real concern, and people have to draw their own conclusions." (More GOP stories.)