Republican legislators in Kansas have formed something they call a Special Joint Committee on Government Overreach and Impact of COVID-19 Mandates, ostensibly to examine orders requiring masks and vaccines.
The committee hasn’t scheduled a hearing yet. But let’s help the members out by providing some interesting statistics from the federal Department of Health and Human Services, released Tuesday.
Nearly 3 in 4 Kansans older than age 65 had been fully vaccinated by the end of May. That’s pretty good, although at the time it was a bit behind the national average.
Those shots saved lives, the HHS report says. The vaccines protected an estimated 4,300 Medicare-eligible patients in Kansas from catching the virus, and saved 700 lives among those age 65-plus.
Nationally, 39,000 people in the cohort escaped an unnecessary death because of vaccines, the study says. Those are grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends and neighbors. They’re alive because of COVID-19 inoculations.
You can’t read those numbers without realizing that the overall full vaccination rate in Kansas is still at a mediocre 51%. Younger Kansans simply aren’t getting shots: Just 40% of Kansans age 12-17 are fully vaccinated. Shots for residents age 18-64 are at 57%.
More Kansans will get sick and die from COVID-19 because of reluctance to take a shot that’s available, free, safe and effective. The COVID-19 death rate in Kansas still exceeds the rate in West Virginia, Kentucky, Colorado and Nebraska.
That’s the idea behind more aggressive vaccine mandates: to protect lives. To ease the burden on Kansas hospitals. To make public spaces more safe. To get rid of the virus.
Kansas Republicans appear interested in none of those goals. Instead, the new committee will ponder the constitutionality of vaccine mandates, because so-called “freedom” from basic public health measures is more important in some corners than trying to end a lethal pandemic.
“Kansans impacted by these mandates expect us to take real action in defense of their liberty and freedom, and this special joint committee is a necessary and critical step in that process,” said Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson.
So what if a few more old people die? Them’s the breaks.
It’s dangerous nonsense, of course. Public health mandates, including quarantines and vaccinations, are as old as the republic. And legislators should know this, since Kansas law requires schoolchildren (with religious and medical exceptions) to be vaccinated against polio, chicken pox, measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis and hepatitis.
The state also recommends HPV and flu vaccinations for children.
It isn’t clear why adults would recoil at the idea of a COVID-19 vaccine mandate while happily requiring preschool kids to take shot after shot. Maybe Republican legislators are afraid of an ouchie.
Or maybe — and this is more worrisome — Republicans in Topeka want to end all vaccine mandates, which has been whispered in some places and states. It’s hard to imagine a more dangerous decision. It would threaten young lives every day.
It doesn’t seem possible that the Legislature would even consider such a step. With science-denying goofball state Sen. Mike Thompson on the new committee, though, you never know.
Businesses are requiring workers to get COVID-19 shots. They know full vaccinations are the best way to protect everyone from a virus that has claimed 700,000 American lives, a ghastly number that will haunt the nation for decades.
We wish the new legislative committee would pause, even briefly, to remember those who have died from COVID-19. That doesn’t seem likely, because, you know, freedom.
