Kansas Senate approves string of bills targeting vaccine requirements, public health measures

The Kansas Senate narrowly approved three bills Wednesday targeting vaccine requirements and the power of local and state health officials despite low chances the policies could become law.

The upper chamber voted 24 to 16 to prohibit the Kansas Department of Health and Environment from requiring COVID-19 vaccines in schools or child care centers – something KDHE Secretary Janet Stanek has said she does not plan to do.

The Senate also approved bills removing the state-level meningitis vaccine requirement in Kansas colleges and blocking any schools or employers from questioning the validity of a religious exemption request for vaccine requirements, and stripping state and local health officials of their power to adopt rules and regulations preventing the spread of infectious diseases.

Under the anti-vaccine bill colleges would still be permitted to maintain a meningitis vaccine requirement but would not be mandated to do so.

Support for all three bills fell well below the 27 votes needed to override a veto from Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly. House leaders have also indicated they are unlikely to pursue most of the policies.

Rep. Brenda Landwehr, a Wichita Republican who chairs the House Health and Human Services, said she would only be interested in limits on COVID-19 vaccine requirements. She said she lacked sufficient information on the proposed limits to public health officials.

The bills represent a continuation of a string of bills targeting the authority of public health officials in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conservative Republicans in Kansas have insisted that public health officials at the state and local level overstepped their authority. Decisions on vaccines, they say, should be left to individual Kansans rather than institutions.

In 2021, Republicans successfully passed a bill blocking employers from questioning religious exemptions to COVID-19 vaccine requirements by employers. Efforts to go further have been largely unsuccessful.

“No one has the right to question or challenge my individual beliefs,” Sen. Renee Erickson, a Wichita Republican, said while advocating for broad vaccine exemptions on the Senate floor.

Speaking on the House floor Tuesday, Sen. Pat Pettey, a Kansas City Democrat, said expanded vaccine exemptions would be dangerous to Kansas youth and adults.

“They’re going to jeopardize the health of our children and the ability of our parents to go to work,” she said.

Andy Marso, a University of Kansas graduate who contracted meningitis before the university required a vaccine, said in a text message that he was disappointed but not surprised to see the Senate approve the bill.

“It will be an ongoing tragedy if deadly diseases like meningitis come roaring back because of internet-driven misinformation,” said Marso, who worked as a reporter for The Star from 2017 to 2019. Marso’s 2013 memoir “Worth the Pain” recounts his recovery from meningitis.

The language the Senate passed regarding public health officials was already approved by the chamber in a separate bill last month.

After the House did not act on the bill, the Senate Health and Human Services Committee voted to add the bill’s language to a separate bill that aimed at creating a board to review drug overdose deaths in the state.

The committee also removed language legalizing fentanyl test strips, a tool which advocates say will help prevent overdose deaths, from the bill.

The strips are currently illegal in Kansas as drug paraphernalia.

The Kansas House has passed three bills this year with language to legalize the test strips but the Senate has not voted on the language.

Rep. Stephen Owens, a Hesston Republican, said the third bill represented the House’s last effort to legalize the test strips this year. The bill, which the House approved Wednesday, included test strips alongside several other changes to criminal code and prosecutorial power.

“I’m optimistic that when they see everything that we’ve put together that maybe there will be enough good in there for them to overlook some things that maybe they don’t agree with or, at a minimum, allow it to go to a vote in the Senate,” Owens said.