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A bill to ban mandatory vaccines is under consideration at the state House.

We'll hear from its sponsor and from an opponent whose questioning brought a harsh national spotlight to it all this weekend in the state of Ohio.

Welcome to The State of Ohio, I'm Karen Kasler less than half of Ohio's total population is fully vaccinated against covid, but the American Academy of Pediatrics says over 80 percent of Ohio kids have received childhood vaccines such as measles, mumps, rubella or MMR, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis or LDAP and those against hepatitis B and polio.

The World Health Organization estimates the vaccines prevent up to five million deaths each year around the world.

And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found vaccines prevented the deaths of seven hundred and thirty two thousand American kids over a 20 year period.

Vaccines are also very safe, and according to the show, so few deaths can plausibly be attributed to vaccines that it is hard to assess the risk.

Statistically, Ohio law requires kids to be vaccinated before kindergarten, but offers medical and religious exemptions as well as for reasons of conscience.

But House bill to forty eight would change that.

An analysis by the Legislative Service Commission, which does research for state lawmakers, says the bill from Republican Representative Jennifer Gross, quote, prohibits mandatory vaccination and, quote, vaccination status disclosures.

And it prohibits a person, business or agency from, quote, denying service or access to segregating, requiring a vaccine status label for requiring disease or immunity, testing of penalizing as a result of or otherwise discriminating against the individual grows.

As a Republican of Westchester in southwest Ohio, who's a first term representative and has been a family nurse practitioner and former pharmaceutical rep or house biography, also notes she was a sub investigator for Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's effort to develop vaccines and treatments for covid-19.

And as a health coach, Groce says she supports childhood vaccines, but her bill came from personal experience.

A lot of times legislation is created and becomes a thing because something happens to someone and it actually happened to me.

So that's not the law.

The law says that we are afforded three exemptions.

However, the school in my case was requiring said that my son would not be permitted to attend school if he did not get the meningitis vaccine.

And so that is what caused a part of this bill that says you must tell parents that they have one of three exemptions in the same size font.

It specifically says in the bill initially the bill.

Am I talking too much?

No, go right ahead.

Initially, the bill in its first form said that we would take those exemptions and give them to all adults.

So it was a very simple bill, same law that we've had for children since the nineteen seventies.

We gave those exemptions to adults so that because we were worried right.

About a passport, we were worried about government passports and requirements.

So in it it said if you walked into a grocery store you could and they asked you for ID, you could say I'm exempt.

There was outcry saying we don't have to say that.

Now, why would we have to give an exemption or even say we're exempt?

That is an invasion of privacy.

At that point.

Another group that's opposed to vaccinations came and wanted to change the bill itself.

So that caused some some changing of the words where you can even ask and those kinds of things.

Does the bill ban vaccine pass?

Certainly does.

Why, though, banned vaccine passports for private businesses, shouldn't they be able to set their rules?

Don't Republicans want private businesses to set their own rules for themselves?

You know, that is it's a really good point because we are an at will state, but we also are anti-discrimination.

And so who then the challenge is who then gets to decide whether a vaccine is safe, whether someone should get it or shouldn't get it, whether their religious beliefs are being violated, whether they are medically capable of having it.

And then are we discriminating against someone to say, well, you didn't get the vaccine, so we're not going to provide service to you?

Now, when we talk about vaccines, we're not just talking about the vaccines.

We're talking about all vaccines here, going back to the childhood vaccines that most people do get.

But vaccines are safe for the overwhelming percentage of the population and they protect medically vulnerable people and kids, elderly people.

So it is offering freedom and the choice to not get a vaccine really harming someone else's freedom.

I would say if you go back and look in Ohio since the 1970s, since we've had these exemptions available, we have not had massive outbreak of disease.

So most parents will choose vaccinations and those who have not chosen have not inherently made our population in Ohio unsafe.

We had an outbreak in twenty fourteen with the Amish community of about three hundred and eighty some odd cases.

But public health did what public health is.

Has to do isolated, prevented, spread.

You will notice that even measles and that was a measles outbreak, measles then since then in twenty fifteen, there was like one case, 20, 16, zero cases.

Don't quote me, but there have been five cases of measles in Ohio since twenty fifteen now.

With those who have chosen not to vaccinate five cases and most of those came in from another country were exposed somewhere, and I do believe that even one or two of those cases, those people's people, had the vaccine.

So vaccines are not 100 percent either.

That's another thing.

Again, I'm not anti vaccination, but nothing's 100 percent.

So if you believe a vaccine works for you, get the vaccine.

But that's your freedom to choose.

I think there's something as a health care provider, as a veteran who's fought for freedom as well, although I was a health care provider, I wasn't a combatant.

There's something inherently objectionable about having to roll up your sleeve to get something into your body that cannot be removed even to protect someone else.

Well, we never it was never it has never been the case in the United States that I needed to get a shot to protect you.

It was I get a shot to protect my own medical choice.

That was never it's been twisted now in this current climate to say it's my responsibility to keep you safe.

That is not we believe in the United States, according to the Constitution, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

If you believe a vaccine is 90 percent or ninety five percent effective, why does it matter if I don't get it?

I want to ask you about the people who might take the choice to not get the vaccine if this bill passes, you're a family nurse practitioner.

You've talked about your medical background.

You worked for the pharmaceutical industry.

With that in mind, you have to know that there's a lot of research that people are getting online.

That is just not true all the way from vaccines cause autism, which is a long debunked claim to the current claims about the covid vaccine that it affects and that affects fertility.

It allows Bill Gates to put a chip in you that interfaces with 5G towers of magnetizing magnetize people.

All that's untrue.

You have to know that people are seeing that and using that information to make a choice.

You know, what I would say, again, is I still believe, regardless of what you believe, that you should be free to discuss with your provider what that best medical choice is for you.

When you have a good relationship with your medical provider, it's inherent on me, your provider, to explain to you why this is a good choice for you if you then take that information.

And that's a great point, because any of those claims that they think they should go to the medical provider and they should say, what do you think about this?

How do you feel about this?

If then the provider is unable to educate them and say, hey, this is what I think is best for you, or maybe they have a medical exemption, maybe it's not best for them or they have a religious exemption and they just don't agree.

I think that they need to be solid in their process of deciding.

But there there there is an inherent belief that some information is being withheld from them.

And so I think that when that happens and you don't come out with actual science and truth, that people start grabbing on to things that might be sensational again, even if it is sensational.

And someone comes to me and they say, I believe that if I take this vaccine, I'm Superman or whatever, that they get to make that decision because it's their body, one body, one vaccine, one body, one decision, one person or a parents decision for a child.

On that sensational note, some testimony before the House Health Committee on the vaccine went national.

I just referenced it with Dr. Sherry Tenpenny, a doctor from northeast Ohio, who had said that the vaccine magnetize is people interfaces with five towers.

A lot of people looked at that and said that is just completely false.

Why was that allowed in House health committee?

Why was that testimony allowed?

Well, actually, she didn't say that.

If you go back and you watch it, you will see that she was asked by one of the health members, the health committee members.

Do you believe I was watching one of your podcasts, what's going on?

And she said, we are investigating.

We are looking into it.

She never said she agreed that it was what she believed that it was.

So it was media grabbing hold and making it into this big thing that it really wasn't.

Dr. Tenpenny was an emergency room board certified emergency room physician.

I don't know if she still is.

And she was a health director for tens of thousands of employees.

So I like doctors.

And for me as a medical doctor, you know, at any time, the chairman could have stopped the questioning and stopped the sensationalism, but he chose not to.

And indeed, there's reporting for the Ohio Capitol Journal that it was you who brought her to the committee and that he felt you were vehemently supportive of her testimony.

No, that was not true.

Now, Dr. Chen, Dr. Tenpenny has indeed been the platform from Twitter after these comments.

Oh, wow.

I didn't know that.

So, yeah, that there there was a violation of the covid misinformation, because this suggestion that the the the vaccine magnetize is people and interfaces with five cell towers.

There is absolutely no evidence of this.

This is completely it's and I and I don't purport to say that I agree with that either.

The point of the bill is not it's not even a medical.

It has nothing to do with Dr. Tenpenny, who is a good person as a person.

The bill has to do with do you have the right to choose what goes in your body or not?

It's always people always want to turn it around to the science of vaccines.

I was part of the research related to some of the covid vaccines.

I am pro science and I am pro research.

The fact of the bill is always and has been do you have the right to choose what goes in your body?

It has nothing to do with whether you think you glow or whatever it is that you think you believe, not you.

But whatever the people I you know, I don't I don't agree with everything everybody says to me.

But I listen and I make my own decision, my own autonomous.

Independent decision, and I think that if it sounds too good to be true, that it probably is the covid vaccines have been proven to be safe for the overwhelming number of population.

That's I mean, there have been some breakthrough infections and there have been some problems, but overwhelmingly they've been proven to be safe.

Do you ever worry that this bill and the whole discussion around it is contributing to vaccine hesitancy and vaccine reluctance in Ohio, which potentially could cost people's lives, it could endanger Ohio's come back from the pandemic?

No, I really don't, because I believe Ohioans are very well-educated and they're very smart.

I think that what is contributing to the hesitancy is kind of like Shakespeare's discussion, we think, is thou protest too much.

If you come to me and say, I've decided you need to have this.

Don't you want this?

Don't you want to have this?

I think you need to have this.

If you everybody's everybody has this, you know, like, why are you pushing me so hard to get if you really?

Because it works.

People got in line for the smallpox vaccine because they knew people were dying.

They got in line.

They fought to have that vaccine because they knew and they saw a ton of people that were dying.

Three hundred and thirty three out of every one thousand covid is deadly to one out of a thousand.

Who gets the disease.

It's different.

So this bill, do I feel that it contributes to vaccine hesitancy?

No.

Growth is mostly correct about measles.

There have been three cases in Ohio since the outbreak of three hundred and eighty two in twenty fourteen.

And Sherry Tenpenny is still listed as having an active license as an osteopath.

But the Ohio State Medical Board.

But it must again be said that the CDC, the HMO and medical researchers, groups and professionals say vaccines are safe and effective from childhood vaccines to the covid-19 vaccines, which do not have full approval from the Food and Drug Administration but are being used under emergency authorization.

A state law taking effect in October does not allow for mandates for vaccines that do not have full FDA approval.

Three hundred and forty three million covid vaccine doses have been given in the US so far, with one hundred and sixty three million Americans fully vaccinated.

While many people report injection site pain, fever, fatigue, chills and other symptoms, most go away within a few days.

The show and the CDC say serious adverse events after covid-19 vaccination are rare but may occur.

Vaccine opponents will point to the vaccine adverse event reporting system, or Veirs.

The CDC notes that this database accepts reports of any adverse event following any vaccination.

More than six thousand deaths have been reported to Veirs, which is point zero one nine percent of the vaccinated population.

But those reports can come from any source, and those deaths have not been confirmed to have been caused by vaccines or by another issue.

I also talked about this bill with Democratic Representative Beth Liston of Dublin.

She's also a medical doctor and a professor of internal medicine and pediatrics in the division of hospital medicine at Ohio State University.

So I do think most parents will choose to vaccinate, but this bill makes it so that it is so easy.

To choose the non vaccinated choice, it it actually makes it so people are getting so much information that they don't have to get vaccinated, that everyone is going to pause and say, well, maybe I'll just say I'm not going to get my kid vaccinated without necessarily going through that process of discussing it with the doctor and really thinking about the health benefits of the vaccine for their child.

There's no informed consent that in this process, it just makes it easy to say, I don't want to deal with that right now.

So I think people will still choose to get vaccinated.

But as we gradually decrease the vaccination rates in the population, which this bill will do, we have outbreaks.

We've seen that across the country with measles.

And I think with this bill, we'll see it even more and with more deadly diseases.

It was, Bill, the inact Vaccine Choice and Anti Anti-Discrimination Act prevents discrimination against people who have not been vaccinated.

That means no vaccine passports, no testing requirements for people who haven't been vaccinated, no segregation of vaccinated people versus unvaccinated people.

What does that potentially what are the impacts of that potentially?

And I really I really don't like the words that are used and people are discriminated against for not being vaccinated.

People are treated differently because there are safety requirements, that there are things that we need to do.

If you have a group of people that haven't received the vaccine, but they're at risk, you need to make sure that they're not that they have those six feet of social distance or that people that are taking care of them wear masks.

So this bill makes it so people cannot respond appropriately in a public health way to protect the vulnerable.

And I think that's a real problem.

It also prevents businesses, private businesses, from saying that they want to require people to prove their vaccination status if they come in, if they work there.

That prevents all of that, right?

Yeah, it keeps businesses from saying, you know what, we know that our employees are at risk and we want to make sure that they're protected and it prevents businesses from enacting those commonsense measures within the workplace for both the employees and maybe anyone who interacts with the business that impacts hospitals and impacts health care facilities, that really, I think, constrains anyone from having a smart and evidence based response to public health emergencies.

That representative versus people and parents should be able to make the decision because it's their body and one vaccine, one body, one decision, one choice, and then the vaccines work.

It shouldn't matter to you whether I'm vaccinated or not.

Can people still be trusted to do vaccines?

And why not do this if vaccines really are effective?

So vaccines are very effective and they saved countless lives, but the decision to get vaccinated impact more than just you.

It impact your neighbors, your family, your community.

And while I do think most people should and will choose to get vaccinated, those that don't allow the the virus, the pandemic to continue, every time we get spread, we have the risk of variants developing.

We're already seeing that with the Delta variant where the unvaccinated infection rate is skyrocketing or hospitalizations are increasing, and that puts them at risk.

But it also puts the rest of us at risk and additional variants develop.

So, I mean, this is about more than an individual.

And let's be clear, no one, again, is saying every individual must be vaccinated.

But if you choose not to be vaccinated, which I believe is the wrong choice, but if you do choose that, then you can't put others at risk if you have to have other safety measures in place so that you're not spreading the back, the virus throughout the community and throughout businesses or throughout schools.

Now, a lot of this conversation about this bill has centered on the polio vaccine, but this would prevent mandatory requirements for all vaccines going back to childhood vaccines like the measles and mumps and that whole battery of vaccines that little kids get.

But back to the vaccine passports issue.

Isn't it a violation of personal privacy to ask people to show their vaccination status or demonstrate whether they've been vaccinated or not?

I think we need to really think about what this the impact is on public health.

Again, you have the right to choose not to take the vaccine, but if that's the case, then you can't put others lives at risk.

You can't be in areas where there are individuals that are immunosuppressed or taking care of individuals that are at risk without a mask or are young children that don't have the ability to be protected.

Yet they still are vulnerable.

So I think there's a balance if you choose not to get vaccinated, obviously, you're making that risky decision for yourself and your family.

But we need to make sure that the public is otherwise protected by different measures so that you're not risking lives and causing increased.

Was your questioning that led to the testimony from Sherry Tenpenny about the covid vaccine, magnetizing people and interfacing with five cell towers, all of that's false, which Representative Gross said Tenpenny didn't say.

She says Tenpenny only said that's being investigated, which to my knowledge, is not the case, at least in terms of mainstream medical research.

It also got Ohio a lot of unpleasant national attention, which even represented Gross has upset her.

You said you'd heard that in 10 Penneys podcast.

That wasn't in her testimony.

Why did you ask her about that?

So I thought it was really important that people understood where the hesitancy or where the anti vaccine views were coming from and the reasoning that went into them, and if they saw that the reasoning wasn't scientifically based, that it really did include so much from conspiracy theory, I guess, nonsense that they would understand that this wasn't a view to really take seriously and really consider.

You can't weigh the entire body of scientific knowledge and data and the huge preponderance of people that support vaccines against people that are, you know, clutching on to conspiracy theories that have no evidence and say that they're equal or that they're both should be considered.

So I wanted to make sure that that was understood within the community, that people really saw that this is, you know, fringe groups with really bizarre beliefs that shouldn't be weighed equally.

And in fact, Tenpenny has been platform from Twitter, she's been named as one of the disinformation dozen by the White House and other groups because this group is responsible for about sixty five percent of all the false information that's circulating out there about the cold vaccine.

But I want to ask you about that.

Again, this bill is not just about covid vaccines, but also about all of these vaccines.

Do you worry that this bill is contributing to vaccine hesitancy and refusal that we're seeing in Ohio, which not only potentially endangers people's lives, but also endangers Ohio's comeback from the pandemic economically?

Yeah, absolutely.

You can't you can't separate it, right?

When people are sick and in the hospital, obviously their financial impact to that as well.

If it's not safe to go to work or to go into a restaurant that has economic implications.

And we felt that throughout the state and throughout the country.

So, yeah, they are tied to the public health recovery and the economic recovery are tied together.

And this bill goes well beyond simply saying, you know, the government can't hold you down and force you to get a vaccine, which I think all of us would agree with.

But it says that no one can respond appropriately in it.

And it really does address all of the vaccines and say, you know what, we really should be providing more ways for people not to get them.

And it really it impacts our young people in colleges right now, meningitis and hepatitis vaccines are things that need to be documented by colleges.

And this law says, you know what, we don't want to know about meningitis status in our our young people who are in dorms.

And I think that should scare all parents that have kids that are going to school and in our state because you don't know meningitis is deadly and you don't want your child to get infected because people are not taking precautions seriously, not getting vaccines or the very least you don't know it.

You don't know who is vaccinated and who isn't.

House Bill two forty eight has had five hearings with hundreds of supporters and opponents often spoken and written testimony.

It was set to come up for a vote in June in committee, but that was scrapped after the Ohio Chamber of Commerce and the Ohio Manufacturers Association testified against it.

By the way, August is National Immunization Awareness Month, and that's it for this week for my colleagues at the Statehouse News Bureau of Ohio Public Radio and Television.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our website at statenews.org and you can follow us and the show on Facebook and Twitter.

And please join us again next time for the state of Ohio.

Support for the statewide broadcast of the state of Ohio comes from medical mutual, providing more than one point four million Ohioans peace of mind with a selection of health insurance plans online at Medda Mutual dotcom slash Ohio by the law offices of PorterWright Morris and Arthur LLP.

Now with eight locations across the country, PorterWright is a legal partner with a new perspective to the business community, Morad PorterWright Dotcom and from the Ohio Education Association, representing 100 24000 members who work to inspire their students to think creatively and experience the joy of learning online at O H E A dot org.