Under pressure from lunatics, Kansas Gov. Kelly’s administration pulls PSAs on vaccine

It is a sad day in Kansas when Gov. Laura Kelly’s administration doesn’t even dare to stand up for lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines.

And as we now know, that day came last month.

That’s when, under pressure from lunatics in the Legislature, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment stopped airing most of its public service announcements encouraging vaccination.

We only know this because during a Wednesday confirmation hearing for acting KDHE Secretary Janet Stanek, Republican state Sen. Mark Steffen asked Stanek how the department had responded to his concerns that the department was promoting messages that — oh no! — portrayed COVID vaccines as safe and effective.

“What have we done since we saw you last about correcting that lack of a balanced approach to true and informed consent?” he wanted to know.

Stanek answered, “One thing we’ve done is revisited the ads which were brought up by many of you and we have removed the TV ads.”

A spokesman later said that pressure from those who will vote on whether or not to confirm Stanek had nothing to do with this decision, but as one Democratic lawmaker put it: “Seriously, we’re caving to this? But I have wondered, how are we getting anyone through this committee otherwise?”

Turns out, even caving won’t necessarily get her confirmed.

And even if that weren’t the case, Kelly would still have been wrong to give in and give up. If even public service announcements are “tyranny” now, where does this end?

And how can Republicans continue to let the most extreme among them get their way again and again?

State Sen. Mike Thompson, who serves on the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee, suggested at the earlier hearing, in January, that any messages about vaccines should include a disclaimer, just as cigarette packs do, warning about all the deaths linked to vaccines. “What I’m getting at here is that the perception is the vaccines are safe and effective,” he said then. “Most people believe these things are safe and in fact we know people are getting COVID. We know people are actually dying from these shots.”

Only, they aren’t. The state was pitching COVID vaccines as safe and effective because they are safe and effective.

Of more than 553 million doses administered in the U.S., the CDC had as of Feb. 22 confirmed a causal link between nine deaths and any COVID vaccine. All of those were linked to the J&J vaccine, and all had resulted from severe blood clots known as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, or TTS. Nearly a million people in the U.S. — 953,000 — have died of COVID-19. And just under 2,000 people are still dying of it every day in our country — 1,933 on March 1, with a seven-day average of 1,915.

But there has been an enormous amount of misinformation and, unfortunately, flat-out disinformation about the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which compiles unconfirmed reports of any bad reaction following any vaccination. It does not distinguish between reactions that were and were not caused by the vaccination.

An example that VAERS itself gives is that if an elderly nursing home patient died from an unrelated illness months after receiving a COVID vaccine, that would still be reported as a death following vaccination.

The tally of deaths from COVID, on the other hand, only count those for whom COVID was the cause of death.

At Wednesday’s hearing, Stanek was asked what she thought about mandates, and the COVID-related closing of churches, and what she would have done had she been running the department earlier in the pandemic.

It’s not clear that a majority on the public health committee believe in public health measures, or even in the concept of public health.

On Thursday, Thompson argued that the committee should kill Stanek’s chances outright. “I just feel very uncomfortable and very unwilling to just accept someone who blindly accepts CDC guidelines,” he said. Thompson again repeated a bunch of misinformation, including that the vaccines were rushed and that people are dying from them.

He said he’d just gotten an email from someone whose 23-year-old son had died from the vaccine, and knew someone having a heart attack who had died waiting to be let inside a hospital because they had required him to first be tested for COVID. (Note: By all means, Senator, fill us in on the details, because we’d love to break some international news.)

Oh, and the former weatherman said that the person Kansas really needs to hire instead of Stanek is someone like Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who claims it’s a “lie” that masks have saved lives, and that any doctor who says otherwise is a “zombie.”

In the end, the committee decided to let the Senate as a whole vote on Stanek’s nomination, without making any recommendation one way or the other. It’s still not clear she’ll survive the up-or-down vote.

But it was always guaranteed that caving to lunatics would only lead to more lunacy.

If Kelly really wants to lead Kansas for the next four years, maybe she should start now.