Kansas lawmakers shouldn’t force businesses to hire unvaccinated workers

A bill in the Kansas Legislature would prevent businesses from taking someone’s vaccination status into account — for COVID-19 or anything else — in decisions on hiring, firing, compensation, benefits, promotions or leave.

Instead of protecting the public from contagion, it would make the potentially contagious a protected class.

So whose bad idea is this?

The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Mark Steffen, Republican of Hutchinson, is a doctor who has run a risk-benefit analysis on his own robust 58-year-old self and determined that he doesn’t need an “experimental” COVID-19 vaccine. He’s decided that no one else should be forced to protect public health, either.

But COVID-19 vaccines, while developed quickly, have been meticulously tested before a painfully slow rollout. It’s hardly experimental.

Steffen sees his bill as protecting businesses: “I don’t think employers really appreciate the amount of liability they’re incurring by pushing somebody into a vaccination.” Every one of the vaccines approved for use is so safe, and lifesaving, that’s there’s far more liability in failing to protect public health.

He also says mass vaccinations put society above individuals. Government officials, he says, “want people to take these vaccines because they are there to protect the society. I’m there to protect the individual.”

“Society” is just an amalgam of individuals, more than half a million of whom have died of COVID-19 in the last year in the U.S. alone. What individuals need is protection from the pandemic.

If this legislation passed, it would mean that restaurants, for example, could be forced by law to hire unvaccinated cooks and waiters.

Businesses violating the law by refusing to ignore a worker’s vaccination status would be subject to lawsuits and actual damages or penalties of no less than $1,000. For trying to protect their customers and staff.

The bill, SB 213, will hopefully die in the Senate Commerce Committee.

It’s being pushed by anti-vaccine, anti-mask advocates, according to Sen. Cindy Holscher, an Overland Park Democrat who is on the committee. “I’m not really sure the Republican leadership feels this bill is necessarily helpful to their agenda, so they may want to leave it alone. I don’t see that businesses want this.”

She’s certainly right about that last part.

“That’s just not good public policy,” Kansas Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Alan Cobb says of forcing unvaccinated workers on employers. Businesses don’t want to be prohibited from doing what they need to do to keep their workplace safe, he adds. Other states have looked at such legislation, Cobb says, but no state has passed it yet.

Accommodations already must be made by businesses for medical or sincerely held religious reasons.

If there are problems down the road — with failures to recognize medical and religious exemptions, or disparate hiring outcomes for minorities — that can be addressed.

For now this bill is, as Cobb says, trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

And creating many more problems in the process.