Iowa Republicans’ bill to criminalize vaccine providers advances amid funnel week chaos

MRNA vaccines were key to fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Iowa Senate Republicans cooked up a bill to criminalize the providers of numerous widely-used immunizations. But at the last minute, the bill’s sponsor said the language may be scrapped for something new entirely. 

Iowa Republicans are barreling through funnel week. If a bill hasn’t passed committee by Friday, it’s dead.* And a bill that criminalizes some health care providers for doing their job is moving towards passage.

Iowa Senate Republicans advanced a bill that would make it a crime for a health care provider to administer a COVID-19 vaccine. Sponsored by state Sen. Doug Campbell of Mason City, the bill specifically goes after mRNA vaccines, a technology that was crucial in developing safe vaccines in response to the COVID-19 pandemic—the same technology that has become the focus of baseless conspiracies about their safety. MRNA vaccines are safe, particularly when compared with the deadly viruses they build immunity for.

Campbell disagrees. And further, he claimed—counter to the text of the bill he introduced—that it didn’t ban these vaccines. Which is technically true: it only criminalized the health care workers that administer them. 

Senate File 360 goes after health care providers, making administering a mRNA vaccine a simple misdemeanor charge, including language for a $500 fine per incident. It would also go after the provider’s license with the Department of Inspections, Appeals, and Licensing. 

He was joined in support by Sen. Dennis Guth of Klemme who said he’d sign onto the bill. Like Campbell, Guth is outspoken about his distrust of vaccines. But when asked if criminalization was the right solution, he said, “Probably that’s going too far.”

“But that’s part of this whole process of getting this input,” Guth told Iowa Starting Line. “This might be a little extreme, it might come back and forth someplace in the middle here yet.”

Such a sweeping ban would impact several FDA-approved vaccines currently in use. Under the bill, the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines would all be illegal to administer to patients within the state of Iowa. 

While the bill has appeared in states like Idaho and Montanna, if it passes, Iowa would be the first state to criminalize health care providers for administering common vaccines. Patients would need to travel outside the state to receive this health care (a growing trend in Iowa health care). 

The bill specifically goes after providers at a time when Iowa already struggles to recruit physicians. A fact that was not lost on Dr. Patrick Keating, a psychiatrist at UnityPoint Health. 

“In Iowa, it’s very well established that there’s a physician shortfall. I certainly think this is not an attractive position for physicians to remain in the state practicing with the potential of being fined and having criminal penalties for providing evidence-based medicine,” Keating said.

jk lol: Funnel Week uncertainty

Subcommittee meetings are the only point in the legislative process where the public can weigh in on a piece of legislation. And unsurprisingly, this extreme bill filled a room in the Iowa Capitol Monday for public comment. 

But after hearing extensive testimony on the bill, the sponsor put a stick in his own spokes.

“Oh that bill is gone,” Campbell told reporters shortly after exiting the hearing. 

“…The title you got to keep. Subject and title,” he said, referring to the administrative rules for legislation. “That’s all you have to keep. And then everything else is going to get replaced.”

Whatever bill emerges before the end of the week, Campbell said he wants it to remove indemnity for the manufacturers of vaccines. It could come to more closely resemble House File 712, a bill requiring any vaccine administered in the state to waive “any immunity from suit for an injury arising from a design defect of the vaccine.”

In order to become law, it must pass out of committee, be approved by both the Iowa House of Representatives and Senate, and then receive a signature from the governor. While it is unlikely to clear those hurdles this session, it’s the first time such a bill was granted a subcommittee by Senate leadership. 

*Until the session ends, no bill is truly dead. It can always pass through the budget appropriations process.