FT WORTH STAR TELEGRAM
A Texas Senate committee passed a bill Wednesday that public health advocates in the state have identified as one of the most worrisome anti-vaccine bills being considered during this legislative session.
The legislation, Senate Bill 1024, would significantly curb the ability of the state health department, school districts, cities and counties to require or promote vaccines of any kind. Although the bill specifically focuses on the COVID-19 vaccine, the bill also contains provisions that could affect future vaccines that don’t exist yet.
“This is a very, very bad bill,” said Dr. Jason Terk, a Keller pediatrician and chair of the Texas Public Health Coalition.
Rekha Lakshmanan, the director of policy at the Immunization Partnership, said: “It was a bad bill in its original form, and it continues to be a bad bill in its substitute form.”
The bill was written by Brenham Republican Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, who is chair of the Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee. The proposed legislation is considered an omnibus vaccine and public health bill, and codifies many of the executive orders Gov. Greg Abbott imposed during the pandemic, like prohibitions on cities or school districts establishing mask mandates. But it also gives legislators the power to decide whether to add or remove vaccines from the list of those required to attend school in Texas.
In a statement, Kolkhorst said she filed the bill “to continue the conversation in the aftermath of COVID-related vaccine policies that many Texans felt were onerous and overreaching.” She added that a colleague said the bill “threaded the needle” of finding a balance “between public health powers and our personal medical decisions.”
During testimony on this bill and other vaccine proposals considered by legislators, lawmakers either promoted misinformation themselves or invited witness who spread misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine, vaccine experts said.
The bill is part of a larger trend in states across the U.S., in which lawmakers are trying to restrict the authority of administrative agencies like state and local health departments, said Erica White, a research scholar at Arizona State University and a senior attorney at the Network for Public Health Law.
“States are trying to claw back the ability of agencies to be independent and to make their own policy decisions like they normally would,” White said.
WHAT SENATE BILL 1024 WOULD MEAN FOR VACCINE POLICY IN TEXAS
Perhaps the most notable change the bill would enact would be how vaccines are added or removed to the list of vaccinations required to attend school in Texas. That includes standard shots like the vaccines to protect against polio and measles, mumps and rubella.
During testimony, Kolkhorst noted that a recent addition to vaccine requirements was passed in 2009 by lawmakers who directed the Department of State Health Services to require meningitis vaccinations for students attending college in Texas and living on campus. The law was later updated to require meningitis vaccines for all college students, regardless of where they live.
“It was an action of the legislature so this is not unprecedented,” Kolkhorst said during the March 22 hearing on the bill.
But other changes to vaccine requirements have been instituted by the Department of State Health Services without a vote by lawmakers. The most recent change made to state requirements was an update to make the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine required for all grades from kindergarten through 12th grade in the 2016-2017 school year, according to a spokesman for the state health department. (Previously, those changes had been rolling out year by year.)
And vaccine advocates say completely giving that authority to lawmakers would leave public health decisions to legislators with no background in vaccines or preventive health care.
“You’re shifting the primary decision-making authority away from the health care professionals and the public health experts when it comes to setting future immunization requirements,” Lakshmanan, an advocate in Texas, said. “And you’re putting that in the hands of the legislature and policy makers, which is troubling and shortsighted.”
In Texas, children who attend school don’t have to get vaccinated if they have a medical or conscientious exemption to vaccines. The COVID-19 vaccine is not required to attend school in Texas. Kolkhorst’s bill explicitly prohibits the COVID vaccine from being added to school vaccine requirements.
TESTIMONY IN THE STATE CAPITOL
Vaccine experts also said the testimony in support of the bill was alarming because of the medical misinformation that was repeated in support of it.
During testimony on March 22, Dr. Robert Malone, a medical doctor licensed to practice in Maryland, was featured as an invited witness, and lawmakers deferred to him an expert on COVID vaccines and other immunization policies.
Malone says he invented mRNA vaccines in his work decades ago. (A co-author of one of Malone’s papers on RNA told the New York Times that was a “totally false claim.”) He became prominent during the pandemic, and has appeared on radio and televisions shows, at rallies, and in statehouses campaigning against COVID-19 vaccines.
In a statement, Kolkhorst said Malone “was given priority as a witness due to his national prominence and travel schedule, which is commonly given to similarly credentialed witnesses.”
In 2021, Malone appeared on an episode of the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast during which he said people in the U.S. are trapped in “mass formation psychosis,” in which anyone who questions the narrative on COVID-19 is attacked. During the episode, he said the situation in the United States was comparable to that of Nazi Germany in the 1920s. More than 200 health workers signed an open letter criticizing Malone’s statements as promoting “false and societally harmful assertions.”
On his website, Malone prominently features the endorsement of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has been spreading incorrect information about vaccines since 2005. Kennedy, the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, first began promoting the widely-discredited idea that childhood vaccines can cause autism, a notion that has been repeatedly proven false. Kennedy was identified as one of the “Disinformation Dozen” by a research group identifying the top 12 purveyors of false information about COVID-19 vaccines online.
Kennedy praised Malone as “the most important prophet for medical freedom, public health, and civil rights,” according to Malone’s website.
Malone did not respond to emails requesting comment. A Star-Telegram reporter called a phone number listed on his website, but did not receive a return call. On his blog, Malone wrote that he was asked to testify by Rebecca Hardy, the policy director of the Keller group Texans for Vaccine Choice, which frequently testifies in Austin.
One active Texas physician testified in support of the bill, and a second physician registered in support as well, according to the minutes from the March 22 hearing. (Malone is licensed to practice in Maryland.) Other people who testified in support include Dr. Richard Fleming, a cardiologist whose Texas medical license expired in 2005, according to the Texas Medical Board. (In 2009, Fleming pleaded guilty to felony charges of health care and mail fraud in Nebraska. Fleming later told the Food and Drug Administration that he was innocent.) One man — Bryan Ardis — identified himself as a doctor who works in Plano, although the Texas Medical Board shows that no one with that name is a licensed doctor in Texas.
Anti-vaccine legislators and their supporters alike testified that the COVID-19 vaccine was poorly researched and that it caused injury and even deaths to people who received the shot or shots. But researchers who study COVID-19 vaccines say the opposite is true: Because so many people around the world have been vaccinated against COVID-19, it’s actually one of the most researched vaccines in use today.
“I don’t think any vaccine in the world has been scrutinized as carefully for safety as the COVID vaccines,” said Dr. Kawsar Talaat, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Talaat is also the co-director of clinical research at the school’s Institute for Vaccine Safety. Dr. William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, said “there is no doubt that COVID vaccine is now one of the best studied vaccines we use globally around the world.”
As with all vaccines, drugs, and medical treatments, nothing is completely free of risk, Schaffner noted. Even drugs as common as ibuprofen can cause injury to certain people. But in general, the risk from COVID-19 vaccines are “rare, adverse events,” he said.
Although the bill has passed out of committee, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will become law. Senate Bill 1024 will be would have to be approved by the entire Senate twice before it can be referred to the Texas House.