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UPDATE: 4/5/2024 - SB 390 died, it failed to be reported in the Senate Committee on Public Health and Welfare before the deadline of first adjournment on 4/5/2024.
UPDATE: 2/28/2024 - SB 390 is withdrawn from the Senate Committee on Ways and Means and rereferred to the Senate Committee on Public Health and Welfare on 2/28/2024.
UPDATE: 2/23/2024 - SB 390 is withdrawn from the Senate Committee on Public Health and Welfare and referred to the Senate Committee on Ways and Means on 2/23/2024.
UPDATE: 2/14/2024 - SB 390 is scheduled for a hearing in the Senate Committee on Public Health and Welfare on Wednesday, February 14, 2024, at 8:30 AM in Senate Room 548-S.
SB 390 was referred to the Senate Committee on Public Health and Welfare on 1/25/2024. This bill is sponsored by Senator Mark Steffen.
SB 390 prohibits an employer, healthcare entity, school, or person from discriminating against or taking an adverse action based on an individual's decision to refuse a certain vaccine or medical treatment.
SB 390 amends Kansas Statutes Annotated (K.S.A.) Chapter 65, related to public health, and adds the following summarized as follows:
SECTION 1.
Subsection (a) establishes the future title of this act to be known as the "conscientious right to refuse act."
Subsection (b) prohibits an employer, healthcare entity, school, or person from committing the following based on an individual's "refusal of any vaccination, biologic, pharmaceutical, drug, gene editing technology, DNA- or RNA-based product" if the individual's refusal is for a conscience reason summarized as follows:
(1) Adverse employment action, including but not limited to refusal to hire; dismissal; demotion; transfer; reassignment; suspension; reprimand; monetary penalty; or any unreasonable change in terms, conditions, or privileges of employment;
(2) Denial of goods or services;
(3) Denial of entry to a place accessible to the general public;
(4) Segregation or separation from others without a valid business necessity;
(5) Denial of housing;
(6) Financial penalty; or
(7) Treatment of an individual that is different than treatment of any other individual who accepted medical intervention.
Subsection (c) addresses legal action that can be taken if this section is violated:
(1) "An individual who suffers direct or indirect injury from a violation of this section shall have a private cause of action for appropriate relief. Any action commenced under this section shall be filed within two years from the date of injury or after the act giving rise to the cause of action."
(2) "A prevailing plaintiff in an action brought for violation of this section shall recover three times the amount of actual damages sustained or $10,000, whichever is greater, as well as the cost of the lawsuit."
Subsection (d) defines multiple words used throughout this section, including term (3) "governmental entity" to mean any state or municipality as defined in K.S.A. 75-6102 and (8) "school" to mean a public school or accredited nonpublic school or postsecondary educational institution as defined in K.S.A. 74-3201b and amendments thereto.
SECTION 2. Repeals the following laws summarized as follows:
K.S.A. 65-126: Permits the secretary of health and environment to quarantine any area that a disease "may show a tendency to become an epidemic" if the county, joint board of health, or local health officer neglects to properly isolate or quarantine contagious diseases or persons infected with said diseases.
K.S.A. 65-127: Fines any person found guilty of violating 65-118, 65-119, 65-122, 65-123, and 65-126 no less than twenty-five dollars and no more than on hundred dollars for each offense.
K.S.A. 65-129: Provides a criminal penalty for anyone who violates, refuses, or neglects to obey the rules and regulation for the prevention, suppression, and control of infectious or contagious diseases, of a class C misdemeanor. This includes anyone who leaves an isolation area without consent of a local health officer, evades or breaks quarantine, or knowingly conceals a case of infectious disease.
K.S.A. 65-129c: Outlines an in-depth process for orders of isolation, forms, notices, hearing in the district court, application and effect, procedure, orders of relief, and emergency rules of procedure for issuing an order to an individual or group of individuals related to quarantine under 65-129b.
SB 390 shall take effect from and after publication in the statute book. Kansas does not assign a code reference to bills creating new sections of code until the bill is passed and signed into law.
NVIC SUPPORTS SB 390 because it allows individuals the freedom to choose whether or not they will take any vaccine and blocks any entity from treating someone differently based on their vaccination status. NVIC supports an individual's right to make their own fully informed decisions based on vaccination. An improvement to this bill would be to repeal other dangerous laws currently in effect, such as 65-129b which allows local health officers to isolate anyone who refuses vaccination, medical examination, treatment, or testing. Since there are other similarly alarming statutes in place, it would best if SB 390 also had a prevailing clause that would guarantee the new law passed through this bill would supersede any conflicts with previously passed laws.
http://www.kslegislature.org/li/b2023_24/measures/sb390/ - text, status, and history of SB 390
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