The now-former Kansas health secretary Lee Norman is not Laura Kelly’s victim

So many public health leaders have been eaten alive by the job during the COVID-19 pandemic that you might assume that’s also what drove out now-former Kansas health secretary Lee Norman, whose last day at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment was Thursday.

Between the death threats, the long hours and the determination of some elected officials to sabotage public health efforts, this has been an inhumane 21 months for professionals to whom we owe a lot. Only, that’s not what happened to Norman.

For weeks at the beginning of the vaccine rollout, Kansas was 50th for vaccine administration. Norman kept saying those numbers just couldn’t be right, but they were. He and his people kept saying that doses of the vaccine had been distributed to all 105 counties in the state, too, but they had not.

In July of 2020, the day before Gov. Laura Kelly announced her mask order, he made remarks that seriously undercut that effort, and public health itself.

As The Star reported at the time, Norman “equivocated on whether the mask mandate will be effective in denting the surge of infections. ‘I think it will be successful to the degree that people adopt it.’ ’’ Not helpful.

Norman too often shared inaccurate information.

In May, he announced that Kansas was organizing a lottery to encourage Kansans to get vaccinated. “We are working with the lottery commission to put together a lottery that will be, I think, the right size for the state of Kansas and serve as a real stimulus.” Such a plan had at that point not even been discussed with the governor. She never approved it, and it never happened.

In June, he said that if the state’s emergency declaration were allowed to expire, Kansans would never even notice. The change would be “relatively unseen by the public,” he said.

In fact, the state stood to lose so much, including:

▪ The Kansas Division of Emergency Management’s ability to help vaccination efforts through mobile clinics.

▪ Funding for testing in nursing homes.

▪ The relaxation of rules that allowed retired and student medical professions to distribute vaccines.

▪ Federal Emergency Management Agency benefits.

▪ The governor’s ability to deploy the Kansas National Guard to support the vaccination efforts.

▪ Emergency food stamps for 63,000 Kansan households.

▪ And millions in other benefits.

To write all of that off as no big loss, you’d have to have your eyes closed.

In response, as first reported by the Kansas Reflector, Kelly’s chief of staff Will Lawrence emailed Norman that his remarks had given Republican leaders “every justification” to vote against extending the emergency declaration. “We absolutely need this extension,” Lawrence wrote. And yes, they did.

Republicans on the Legislative Coordinating Council had been expected to meet to consider an extension, but didn’t. For whatever reason, they let the declaration expire.

Another issue was Norman’s habit of posting late-night tweets trolling Republican lawmakers; Kelly saw these as unprofessional and counterproductive, and at one point her office barred him from his own Twitter account.

Even in the emails published by the Reflector, he comes across as focusing more on his TV appearances than in less glamorous aspects of his important job.

We can only hope that his successor flips those priorities, especially because this pandemic isn’t over.