DOTHAN, Ala. – A few weeks ago, I drove my wife to UAB to get her second covid shot. I hardly had time to pick up coffee around the corner before she left the university hospital with a new bounce in her step, a Band-Aid on her shoulder and one of those now-ubiquitous cards in her hand.
I’m glad she got it done then. Because if that happened next week, I’m not sure it would have been legal for the UAB staff to give her one of those cards.
This week the Alabama Legislature passed a bill to make vaccine passports illegal. However, somebody needs to make sense of this bill, because it appears to do a lot more than that. It’s a mess. And it sure does appear to make it illegal for state employees to hand out those now-common vaccination cards.
At the very least, it’s an example of the confusion lawmakers create when they pass bills for the sake of winning a partisan merit badge.
Take, for example, Section 1(a) of the bill lawmakers just passed. The emphasis is mine.
“A state or local government entity, or any of its officers or agents, may not issue vaccine or immunization passports, vaccine or immunization passes, or any other standardized documentation for the purpose of certifying the immunization status of an individual, or otherwise require the publication or sharing of immunization records or similar health information for an individual, except as otherwise required by Chapter 30 of Title 16, Code of Alabama 1975, or other applicable state law.”
UAB is a state government entity.
That little card sure looks like “standardized documentation for the purpose of certifying the immunization status of an individual.”
So are those cards now verboten at county health departments and state university hospitals?
When I called the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Arthur Orr, and it’s author, Legislative Services Director Othni Lathram, neither were clear on what the bill did.
My conversation with Orr wasn’t very productive. He wanted to talk a lot about how even the liberal ACLU supports a vaccine passport ban, and I wanted to talk about what his bill actually does. For reasons I’ll get to in a bit, it became clear Orr didn’t know what his bill did.
Lathram, at least, argued that the covid vaccination cards were exempt because they were issued by the CDC, a federal entity. I said to him that my wife had gotten hers from a state hospital and that county health departments were giving them out, too. Lathram said “issued” meant “created by,” and I asked why he didn’t just write “created” in the bill if that’s what he meant. That’s pretty much where we left it.
Next, I reached out to the Jefferson County Health Department and the Alabama Department of Public Health, neither of which seemed confused that they were the ones issuing cards at their clinics. ADPH used that very word for what they did.
Unfortunately, they were mixed up about other stuff.
At first, Jefferson County said it was in the clear because the bill had been amended to exempt healthcare providers, hospitals and clinics. However, they had misread the legislative record and that amendment had been voted down. The language they depended on never made it into the bill.
Oops.
Next, the state health department came up with a different sort of argument — putting their head in the sand.
“The issuance of personal vaccination records, in the form of a card, by the Alabama Department of Public Health as well as other vaccine providers, would not be prohibited by the Act,” ADPH communications director Ryan Easterling wrote. “Personal vaccination records are not passports or passes.”
I pointed out that he ignored the part where the bill says “or any other standardized documentation for the purpose of certifying the immunization status of an individual” and asked him to explain why that didn’t apply to the covid vaccination cards.
“The Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH) does not have any additional information or comments about the vaccine passport bill,” he wrote back in a second email. “Thanks for your coverage, we appreciate your support!”
I hope Easterling still appreciates my coverage after this column.
At the very least, the University of Alabama had the sense to keep its cards face down when I posed the same questions to them.
“The University of Alabama System is continuing to examine the bill’s potential impact on our institutions, including UA, UAH, UAB, and the UAB Health System,” the university system communications director, Lynn Cole, said in an email.
If it seems no one is taking this seriously except maybe me, well then, we’re creeping up on my point.
No one is.
Not the sponsor of the bill, Orr, who didn’t seem to understand what was in his own bill.
Among other things, the bill limits which vaccines universities can require students to have before arriving on campus. I asked Orr what might happen if, say, the smallpox virus or some other disease returned. Could the University of Alabama require that vaccine?
He said they could because that vaccine is not under an emergency use authorization.
Except — and here’s the important thing — that’s not at all what his bill says. Instead, it says colleges and universities may only mandate the vaccines they required on Jan. 1, 2021. It doesn’t say anything at all about emergency use authorizations. Our universities are, from here on out, frozen in time.
Orr should know that, but he didn’t.
I asked Orr what should happen if state agencies violated his act. He said the local district attorneys should enforce the law. However, that might be difficult since the law doesn’t set out any penalties for anyone who violates it.
That’s right, for all this trouble, the bill doesn’t have any sort of enforcement provision.
Because there’s something all these folks — futzing, fumbling and flailing about for well-reasoned answers — won’t say: None of them expect this law to do a dang thing.
And there are even more problems with the bill I won’t get into here, like whether the bill makes the state’s immunization database illegal. It’s a messy bill. But none that really matters.
It’s all for show.
Whether you agree with it or not, a well-written law should be clear. It shouldn’t have any more cogs in its machinery than are absolutely necessary to do its job. And it should never cause confusion.
The vaccine passport ban is no such law.
These folks we send to Montgomery are supposed to write our laws with care and caution. But too often, they do brain surgery with a hammer.
They’re supposed to be our law-makers. But they’re too busy being politicians, instead.
