Sen. Mark Steffen, a legislator in Kansas recognized for his endorsement of disproven Covid-19 treatments, initiated a startling proposition on Thursday. The new bill, if passed, will eliminate the statutory abilities of health officials in the state to confront infectious diseases, raising substantial health concerns. Steffen, a Republican from Hutchinson and practicing anesthesiologist, had previously come under investigation for prescribing a livestock de-wormer, a treatment discredited in the medical community, to Covid-19 sufferers. Throughout the pandemic, he has been a vocal critic of safety precautions proposed by the governor and state health department.
His recent proposal, Senate Bill 391, seeks to dispossess both state and local government bodies of their ability to enforce quarantines and similar actions designed to control the spread of contagious diseases. Similar legislative attempts have not garnered significant support in the past. The bill entails a profound shift in responsibilities for managing infectious diseases. If passed, healthcare providers, hospitals, and testing labs will no longer have to report cases of infectious diseases to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.
The state Secretary of Health and Environment will be barred from designating the presence of infectious diseases within the state, significantly diminishing state surveillance capabilities. Instead, the secretary will only submit reports on disease presence to the legislature and recommend preventative measures. The bill also aims to discard existing mandates that require educators and social workers to report infection cases to Public Health Departments, thereby further reducing monitoring capabilities. Ashley Goss, the deputy secretary of KDHE, warned of the potential calamitous fallout in a recent hearing about the bill. Goss highlighted that the bill could lead to a reversal of centuries of public health progress, which has been instrumental towards controlling the spread of infectious and contagious diseases. KDHE has also communicated that monitoring outbreaks, like measles, will be notably difficult if the law were to pass.
An outlined example was given of the measles outbreak in 2018 when 22 cases were reported. In the absence of isolation and quarantine measures, it’s estimated that nearly 400 cases would have arisen, magnifying the costs of response measures from around $400,000 to above $7 million. Instances of measles in the U.S., which were largely eradicated by 2000, have recently seen an uptick due to the pervasive trend of vaccine scepticism. Sen. Steffen dismissed concerns over measles outbreaks, attributing them to individual decisions against vaccination and imperfect vaccines.
Moreover, he claimed the current immigration situation is contributing to an influx of unvaccinated individuals, though his claims are not founded on factual evidence. Outbreaks of measles in the U.S. are typically associated with international travel to areas with prevalent measles cases, not illegal immigration. This bill emerges alongside Senate Bill 390, also proposed by Steffen, which posits that services or rights cannot be refused based on an individual’s refusal to vaccinate for reasons of personal conscience.