Keil Hileman survived a slow-growing brain tumor that ate his pituitary gland and left the Kansas middle school teacher immunocompromised. A bout with COVID-19 would likely incapacitate or kill him, he says, or even worse in his mind, burden his family with his care. So of course, as soon as he could, he got the vaccine and a booster shot. He wears a mask every day at work, and so do his 160 students.
“I will do whatever it takes to be here, to do my job,” said the 52-year-old Hileman, who teaches social studies at Monticello Trails in the De Soto district. He loves teaching, so of course he would. When he was at his sickest from the tumor, “my students, being in school with them, they saved my life.”
He should also be getting support right now from state and federal lawmakers. They should want what Hileman wants, which is to keep him and others like him safe. Instead, through their anti-mask, anti-vax words and actions, even some GOP lawmakers who are doctors are putting his life and many others at risk.
Though most modern medical schools do not require students to swear to any version of the Hippocratic Oath, this is still in clear violation of common sense, and an offense against the common good.
“It’s frustrating,” Hileman said, that some lawmakers who should know better continue to spread misinformation that’s putting folks like him at particular risk.
COVID-19 has already killed nearly 900,000 people in the U.S. That’s more people than the number of US citizens living in the state of South Dakota, and more than the common estimate of military casualties in the American Civil War. Once more we stand in a house divided, and again over an issue in which both the stakes and the moral issue are clear.
All the same, Republican U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall, a Garden City, Kansas physician, is leading the charge to block vaccine mandates in schools and other workplaces. Kansas state Sen. Mark Steffen, also a physician, pushed state lawmakers to support legislation that would force pharmacists to fill COVID-19 prescriptions for drugs that do nothing to fight the virus. Yes, even when it goes against their better judgment — and even when they know it could be harmful.
That legislation would prohibit the Kansas Board of Healing Arts from punishing physicians who prescribe ivermectin, a drug commonly used as a livestock dewormer, or hydroxychloroquine, usually prescribed for autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. That’s clearly a measure that would protect only the doctors, not the health of the general public.
Steffen is already under investigation by the state licensing board for prescribing ivermectin for COVID-19. He called the investigation “overreach,” and said it’s “an attempt to silence,” him. Yes, it is. Not politically, but medically, to prevent him from prescribing treatments that are known not to work.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has warned against ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as COVID-19 therapy because neither has been proven to work against the disease.
As for Hileman, like millions in this country with compromised immune systems, including cancer survivors and transplant patients, he’s doing the best he can to ignore the political noise and to follow the science. “I wash my hands, I wear my mask. I can’t control the rest of the world. If I get it it could kill me, yes. But dying then would be easy for me, because I’m gone. It’s my family that’s left to suffer.”
Every time a politician undercuts the proven efficacy and importance of vaccines, he or she is putting his personal ambition ahead of care for all such families. When that politician is a doctor, it’s not just cruel but unforgivable.
