Johnson County resident Melissa Campbell urged state senators Tuesday to remove the authority of state and local health authorities to order quarantines to prevent the spread of an infectious disease.
State law doesn’t provide details about what it means to quarantine, Campbell said, and she fears the worst. Senate Bill 489 would fix that by stripping the secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment and county-level health officers of their powers.
“I go back to old history, and I feel like if we were to not pass out 489, and we did not listen to the voices of the people, you know, we would be giving the state, the KDHE secretary specifically, the opportunity to put my family in what could appear to be like a concentration camp environment,” Campbell said.
Anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers have repeatedly made comparisons between their suffering and that of victims in the Holocaust, in which the Nazis imprisoned, tortured, experimented on, and murdered millions of Jewish people. Last year, in the leadup to a special session to respond to federal vaccine mandates, a family wore gold stars to a legislative hearing.
At Tuesday’s hearing in the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee, Sen. Pat Pettey, D-Kansas City, challenged Campbell to defend her comparison. Campbell scoffed in indignation.
“Have you ever been in a concentration camp?” Pettey said.
“Oh my God,” Campbell said. “Have you?”
“In your testimony, I’m sorry, you said that,” Pettey said.
“What I said is that I never want to be in a situation where one of your statutes would allow my family to be taken out of their home to a place of quarantine,” Campbell said. “And when there’s nothing that explains what that may be, and as badly as people have been treated who want freedom, it’s a concern that how bad could it be.”
“So since you don’t like that reference, it would be better not to use that in a public setting like this, because it’s very offensive,” Pettey said.
“I appreciate your opinion,” Campbell said.
The proposed legislation would rewrite state law to remove the state health secretary’s authority to prevent the introduction or spread of infectious or contagious disease. Local health officers would lose their power to restrict public gatherings when necessary to control infectious disease. Health officials could not investigate the spread of contagious disease. And local law enforcement officers would no longer be required to enforce health orders.
Campbell, who said the role of government “is to protect the people from too much government,” joined Greg Smith, a former state senator who now works for the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office, in speaking favorably of the bill.
Smith said law enforcement officers didn’t like being in the position of having to enforce the law when it meant carrying out things like the governor’s stay at home order in the early weeks of the pandemic in 2020. The proposed legislation doesn’t apply to the governor’s emergency orders.
“We had a very confused public when the stay in place order was issued,” Smith said. “We had people calling 911 to let us know that their neighbor got in their car and left the house. I mean, things got that crazy.”
He also expressed concern that officers would be forced to enter a dangerous situation without protective equipment for a contagious disease. And he objected to asking deputies to forcibly remove a child from a parent because of a health risk, something that never happened as a result of a health officer’s order.
The Senate panel also returned its attention to Senate Substitute for House Bill 2280, which would allow doctors to prescribe ivermectin or other drugs for off-label use in the treatment of COVID-19 without fear of being disciplined by health authorities. Sen. Mark Steffen, an anesthesiologist and Hutchinson Republican, introduced policies contained in the bill, and revealed he was under investigation by the Kansas Board of Healing Arts after prescribing ivermectin to patients.
The panel adopted two amendments introduced by Sen. Beverly Gossage, R-Eudora. One of the amendments removes a retroactive clause that would have cleared Steffen of any wrongdoing. The other allows pharmacists to reject a prescription if they believe there is a problem with the dosage or if it will conflict with another medication, but not on the basis of using the drug to treat COVID-19.
The hearing coincided with the Kansas Pharmacists Association holding an advocacy event in the Statehouse rotunda. Aaron Dunkel, executive director of the association, said the amendment makes the law better.
“It’s way better than taking away any protections that we can provide our patients, which is really what was happening with the original law,” Dunkel said.
A “huge component” of a pharmacist’s job, Dunkel said, involves “professional judgment and doing reviews and making sure that the patient’s health and safety is taken into consideration.”
Sen. Kristen O’Shea, R-Topeka, introduced an amendment that would remove a section of the bill that allows children to opt out of any kind of vaccine that is required for attendance at public schools or child care. Senators ran out of time before taking a vote on the amendment.
Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.
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