KS lawmakers redouble efforts to limit reach of public health officials in next crisis

Kansas legislators are pursuing a series of changes to limit the authority of state and local health officials during infectious disease outbreaks, measures that critics say will effectively rewrite a century of public health law and hinder response to the next crisis.

The proposals are a continuation of the backlash against lockdowns, business closures, mask directives and vaccine mandates imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic. They build on limits lawmakers placed on Gov. Laura Kelly and local health authorities last year and come alongside renewed efforts to relax vaccine requirements for children.

GOP lawmakers contend that the new legislation is necessary to protect individual liberty.

“Typically, before COVID, we didn’t have a fear of the Kansas Health Department secretary,” said Sen. Richard Hilderbrand, a Baxter Springs Republican, who chairs the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee. “And after (COVID), we are really fearful.”

The Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee held a hearing Tuesday on a bill that would strip the state health secretary of authority to issue and enforce quarantine orders.

On Monday, the Senate Judiciary Committee discussed a bill to prohibit schools from requiring COVID-19 vaccines and to make all mask mandates, social gathering limitations, business restrictions and religious gathering rules subject to renewal every 30 days during a disease outbreak. The committee is scheduled to vote on the bill Wednesday.

“We saw in the last year or two a lot of government overreach and we want to make sure that that doesn’t happen again, that we have the proper guardrails and procedures in place to protect your liberties and your freedoms,” said Sen. Kellie Warren, a Leawood Republican and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. She is also a candidate for state Attorney General.

Local health officials worry these stringent measures will overwhelmingly disadvantage Kansas in the event of another COVID wave or a new pandemic. They say measures expanding exemptions to childhood vaccines could increase the likelihood of a measles or mumps outbreak.

“To save lives and prevent disease, public health emergencies require swift responses and nimble adjustments,” said Sedgwick County Health Director Adrienne Byrne. “So moving power to the state legislature would result in the inability to locally tailor orders and could lead to slow and poorly informed responses.”

Outcome unclear

Under the bill in the Public Health and Welfare Committee the state health secretary would be required to submit recommendations to the state legislature on how to address outbreaks and how to conduct contact tracing. All authority of the state health secretary to investigate sources of outbreaks would be delegated to county commissions and boards.

“It has a lot of potential impact to just cut public health off at the knees,” Byrne said.

It’s unclear how successful these efforts will be. House Speaker Ron Ryckman said he would consider the legislation if it reached his chamber. But Public Health and Welfare Committee Chair Brenda Landwehr and Judiciary Committee Chair Fred Patton each said the bills being heard by their Senate counterparts weren’t immediate priorities.

“My review of the bill and gut concern is, early on when we were dealing with these things; they were directly related to the COVID emergency,” Patton said of the limits on local health officers. “Now there’s so much in there, to me, it seems like it should be broken up into several different bills studied by health committee, commerce committee, corrections.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling people for a couple years is that when we get through with needing to deal with COVID then let’s take our time and look at these things independently.”

It is not the legislature’s first attempt at taking power away from health officials. In 2020, lawmakers made participating in contact tracing voluntary. Last year, they passed a bill removing their authority to issue unilateral orders on masking, capacity limits and business closures. The same bill created a process by which “aggrieved” members of the public could challenge any health order in court. The Kansas Supreme Court upheld the bill after a Johnson County judge had ruled it unconstitutional.

Before the restrictions on contact tracing went into effect, about 85% of infected people reached by Sedgwick County health officials participated in contact tracing, Byrne said. After it passed, health officials, who were required to stop any form of contact tracing if a patient declined to cooperate, only heard from 35% of the infected.

Simmering anger

At the start of the pandemic, county officials relied on coordination across the state to share information as the situation unfolded, said Jay Hall, deputy director of the Kansas Association of Counties. Denying the state health secretary’s power to investigate infectious diseases and perform duties to prevent the spread would curtail county collaboration, he said, especially for Kansas’ rural counties.

“COVID-19 is not going to be the next problem we have,” Hall said. “Removing the tools from the toolbox now could present us with problems we can’t contemplate right now and, frankly, we can’t contemplate them because we don’t know what those problems will be.”

But anger over COVID restrictions continues to simmer, with proponents of these bills comparing quarantine and isolation rules to concentration camps and state-wide mask requirements and business closures to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Parents were especially concerned for their children, many of whom were required to wear masks and social distance in classrooms.

“COVID has been a scary and deadly disease for some, however our children never should have been the ones to carry the weight of potential spread in our community,” said Angela Gansor, a Shawnee resident, during testimony in the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday. “COVID was never their burden to bear.”

Many supporters told lawmakers they would welcome guidance from the state health secretary or other local health officers, but ultimately wanted to exercise their own discretion in wearing a mask or staying away from large groups of people.

But the mandates to mitigate the spread of COVID were necessary to save lives, Adrianne Casalotti, chief of public and government affairs for the National Association of County and City Health Officials, said.

“The next public health crisis is not an issue of if it’s when,” Casalotti said. “So by pushing through bills like this now, we’re actually tying our own hands for the future in a way that could be really devastating for the health of individuals, but also the health of our economies and communities.”