TOPEKA — Two Kansas Republican lawmakers joined a Democratic colleague Thursday to stress the safety and necessity of vaccines, in an attempt to stave off misinformation in the Statehouse.
Rep. Melissa Oropeza, D-Kansas City, Rep. John Eplee, R-Atchison, and Sen. Kristen O’Shea, R-Topeka, teamed up with the Immunize Kansas Coalition at a Statehouse rally, standing at a podium surrounded by signs on rubella, measles and and other vaccine-preventable diseases.
“Leave the status quo alone, it has worked well and it has served us well for 50 years,” Eplee, a physician, said. “We just need to send a message to all our colleagues both in the House and Senate to keep their mitts of the statutes, because they’re working.”
Kansas vaccine requirements are controlled at the state level. Despite false claims made by an anti-vaccination movement in recent years, COVID-19 vaccines and other vaccines have been repeatedly proven safe and effective. Vaccine requirements in Kansas for children attending school include shots for polio, hepatitis A and B, measles, mumps and rubella, among others.
“There are folks out there that have coalesced around anti-vax media and ideas and they think they know more than all these leaders here at this meeting and their narratives are going to hurt Kansans, they’re going to kill Kansans,” Eplee said. “We have to push back hard against that.”
On Wednesday, Sen. Mark Steffen, R-Hutchinson, introduced two anti-vaccine bills into the Senate Committee on Public Health and Welfare. Senate Bill 390 asserts employers, schools and other entities cannot discriminate or deny services based on a person’s conscience-based refusal of vaccines, among other provisions. Senate Bill 391 would limit local government authority to impose quarantines and enforce other preventive regulations meant to slow the spread of contagious diseases.
In the previous legislative session, Steffen introduced similar anti-vaccine legislation as well as advocated for the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for COVID-19 patients, treatments condemned as unsafe by the Food and Drug Administration.
O’Shea, who serves on the same committee as Steffen, urged vaccine advocates to speak up during hearings. She characterized the committee as one “where a lot of dangerous legislative bills have been introduced, and not only entertained but cheered for.”
“It’s been a little lonely in my committee,” O’Shea said. “We need your faces in the audience.”
As a currently pregnant mother of a 2-year-old, O’Shea said she wants to be a “good voice” for other mothers making health care decisions for their children. She characterized her pro-vaccine stance as a commonsense, non-partisan issue.
“To me, I don’t like it when it’s associated with the Republican party because I don’t know when anti-vax has been associated with the Republican party,” O’Shea said.
