Bill battling vaccine mandates offered to Legislature again
Bill battling vaccine mandates offered to Legislature again
By Victoria Eavis
Casper Star-Tribune
Via Wyoming News Exchange
CASPER — A reworked version of a bill that aims to create protections for unvaccinated Wyoming residents is headed to next month’s legislative session.
House Bill 32 would require health care facilities, governmental entities and providers of “essential services” to offer accommodations to people who are unable or unwilling to provide proof of immunization. It would also outlaw COVID-19 vaccine requirements in Wyoming schools for the next five years and make requiring immunization as a condition of employment “a discriminatory or unfair employment practice.”
For starters, the bill requires health care facilities to provide a “reasonable accommodation” to “any person seeking to visit a patient or resident of the health care facility if the person is unable or unwilling to provide proof of immunization,” the bill reads. Reasonable accommodations are often associated with protections for people with disabilities. For example, an employer might have to provide a desk that a worker who uses a wheelchair could use to perform their job.
The bill defines a reasonable accommodation as “any change in policy, process, location or other appropriate measures that allows a person who is unable or unwilling to provide proof of immunization to visit a patient or resident of the health care facility or to access publicly funded services unless doing so would create an undue hardship or would pose a direct and unavoidable threat to the health or safety of the patient, resident or staff or other patients or residents of the health care facility.”
While this language may appear complicated, human resource teams at businesses have been dealing with “the concept of reasonable accommodation and hardship for 30 or 40 years at least,” said Rep. Sue Wilson, R-Cheyenne, who co-chairs the Joint Labor, Health and Social Services Committee, which is sponsoring the bill.
The measure is a less severe version of House Bill 1006, which failed in last year’s special session, which wad held to fight back against federal vaccine mandates.
A similar attempt was taken via Senate File 1003, a special session bill, that would have required places like nursing homes to allow unvaccinated visitors in the facilities. Nursing homes have been among the most impacted health care facilities of the pandemic, and that earlier bill prompted some concerns from senior advocates.
“Our concern with 1003 is as written, a nursing home couldn’t determine whether it is closed to visitors without a vaccine when it is deemed to be in the best interest of the residents by administration,” Tom Lacock, spokesman for the Wyoming AARP, previously told the Star-Tribune.
The new bill includes a list of business types — such as pharmacies, hospitals, grocery stores and banks — that must provide services to the unvaccinated or a reasonable accommodation.
The legislation carries a possibly misdemeanor charge punishable by imprisonment for not more than six months, a fine of no more than $750.00, or both, if someone is denied an “essential service” without a “reasonable accommodation” based on their vaccination status.
Children in Wyoming are not required to be vaccinated against COVID-19. The bill seeks to ensure that COVID vaccines could not be mandated in any Wyoming schools — public or private — during the next five years. This section does not apply to vaccinations that have been around for decades, only new ones that may crop up. Nor does it prevent parents from making their own vaccination choices.
“This doesn’t stop parents from immunizing their children,” Wilson pointed out.
Lastly, the bill would make it a “discriminatory or unemployment practice” for an employer to require as a condition of employment that any worker or prospective employee be immunized for any preventable disease unless the requirement is strictly based on federal law, or the employer can demonstrate that an unvaccinated employee would create an undue hardship or pose a direct threat to the health or safety of people in the workplace that cannot be eliminated or reduced by means of a reasonable accommodation.
The move is not new. During the special session, Sen. Drew Perkins, R-Casper, sought to make vaccination status a protected class, joining race, religion, color, sex and national origin. The attempt was not successful.
If this section of the bill makes it into law, state money would go towards supporting the Department of Workforce Services in fielding these discrimination claims. The state would get no federal dollars to handle these cases.
The Department of Workforce Services did not respond to request for comment Wednesday.
With all that said, the bill never uses the phrase “COVID-19.” That was on purpose, Wilson said.
“If you’re going to put laws in the green books, they should he generally applicable and not just to the disease of the year,” she said. “I don’t like to legislate just for this year.”
House leadership declined to introduce the previous version of this bill during the special session because “it wasn’t specific to COVID,” Wilson said.
Unlike many of the early phase bill drafts from the special session, House Bill 32 partly acknowledges the federal government’s role and its constitutional right to supersede state law.
“I not trying to put employers in a nutcracker between state law and federal law,” Wilson said.
Last fall, the Biden administration announced vaccine mandates for various groups — including workers at large private businesses. The U.S. Supreme Court last week ruled that workers at companies over 100 employees can’t be federally obligated to be vaccinated against COVID-19, while workers at health care facilities that accept Medicare and Medicaid can be federally mandated to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
All of the state’s 38 nursing homes and 28 hospitals take federal money.
The upcoming legislative session’s main goal is to amend and adopt a statewide budget for the next two-year cycle. It’s also a redistricting year, meaning the Legislature is required to pass a bill that contains a redrawn map of the state House and Senate districts based on the 2020 census.
During the budget session, bills that don’t pertain to the budget or redistricting — including committee sponsored bills — have to pass a lofty two-thirds introduction vote.
“I think this bill may have problems doing that,” said committee member Sen. Dan Furphy, R-Laramie, who has generally voted against bills of this type.
The state Department of Education and the Department of Health declined to comment.
This story was published on Jan. 20.