As coronavirus cases rise across Missouri and a new variant looms on the horizon, the state’s Republican legislators are busily preparing to respond — by making it more difficult to protect the public. A spate of new legislative proposals to prevent vaccine mandates and other crucial tools is once again illustrating how Missouri’s ruling Republicans have become a major threat to Missourians’ public health.
On Wednesday, opening day for the filing of new legislation in Jefferson City, Republicans proposed multiple bills to prohibit vaccine mandates or other attempts to confront the virus. As the Post-Dispatch’s Kurt Erickson reports, measures include one that would deem “natural immunity” to be the equivalent of vaccination, flying in the face of universal medical consensus that even those who have had the virus should get vaccinated.
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House Speaker Pro Tem John Wiemann, R-O’Fallon, has filed legislation he says would protect employers from legal liability if their workers are injured by required immunizations — thus promoting the dangerous myth that there is some significant risk of injury from the vaccines. (There isn’t.)
Rep. Nick Schroer, a radical right-winger from St. Charles County who can always be counted upon to twist the culture-war knife, twists it twice here with two bills. One would prohibit schools from mandating coronavirus vaccination — the same schools, mind you, that have for generations routinely required vaccination against other diseases, most less deadly than the coronavirus. The other would ban testing requirements for unvaccinated employees unless vaccinated employees are required to test as well. Take that, you vaccine believers!
And Rep. Adam Schnelting, R-St. Charles, has filed a bill to prohibit vaccination requirements for travel or entry to a business, even if that requirement is one the business itself wants to impose. “I’m against you being forced against your will to get a vaccine,” says Schnelting, employing a familiar and deeply deceptive trope from the right. Such mandates don’t force vaccination on anyone — they merely prohibit people who might be infected from entering settings where they could infect others. Apparently, forcing that risk on unsuspecting employees and customers is just fine with today’s Republican politicians.
Even as these lawmakers pretend for the sake of politics that science-based pandemic responses pose a threat to Missouri, the real threat is growing. St. Louis-area hospitals this week have warned of notable increases in coronavirus hospitalizations, up 63% in the past three weeks, primarily due to the delta variant. And doctors worldwide are still assessing whether the burgeoning omicron variant might prove even more transmissible and dangerous.
A Legislature that not only refuses to take action against a major public health threat, but deliberately stands in the way of such action, is the very definition of failed government. In hampering science to appease the anti-science fringe of their party, Missouri Republicans are literally endangering Missourians’ lives.