Yesterday, news broke that state Representative Christina Hagan (Republican, Marlboro Township, Ohio House District #50) is pushing legislation that could endanger the health of tens of thousands of Ohioans as we approach a new 2018 influenza season.
Hagan via the power of state government (i.e. the legislative process) wants to blunt medical providers' ability to require their respective employees to have themselves vaccinated with a flu shot.
Hagan dresses her effort in a gown of protecting the rights individual medical field workers to refuse taking a flu shot.
By virtue of their line of work, these "few" necessarily come into "up close and personal" contact with with "us" many.
In the 2016/2017 flu season in Ohio there were upwards of 10,000 hospitalizations due to influenza infections.
The peak flu season in Ohio is January through March of any given year.
Of course, there are thousands and thousands more Ohioans who do not require hospitalization but nevertheless meet up with medical workers in doctors' offices, pharmacies (who administer flu shots) and public clinics.
Apparently, in Hagan's mind, the rest of us have no right to lessen the likelihood we will be infected with flu and perhaps even die.
Perhaps as many as 50,000 Americans will die from flu/flu related illness in the upcoming flu season.
One never knows when any given flu season is going to getting going into gigantic proportions a la the 1918 worldwide influenza epidemic.
Today, the Columbus Dispatch reported that "cooler" heads are prevailing in the Ohio House with the Speaker of the House putting the brakes on Hagan and her intense group of loyalists who are trying to jam the Hagan introduced bill through to passage.
In an ironic twist in terms of timing, Hagan's pet legislative project of wanting to through the power of state government (her House Bill 258, known as "the heartbeat bill") to severely limit the ability of women to end a pregnancy moved, once again, in the direction of needing a gubernatorial veto in order to maintain the right of a woman living in Ohio in line with the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade to have a "legal" abortion according to the law of the law articulated in the Roe v. Wade decision.
There is something more to Hagan's seeming fascination with lining up with the anti-vaccine crowd.
Her sympathies and support certainly appear to be with those relatively few in America/Ohio who in effect want the right to jeopardize the health of the rest of us with their "gut" feeling that vaccines (not just the flu vaccines, but apparently vaccines in general) are not safe.
The "gut" feeling has a "religious" overtone to it and it would be interesting to check the religious connections of those who constitute the anti-vaccine movement.
The Stark County Political Report deems Christina Hagan to be a religious right politico who in her heart of hearts wants to enshrine her and her followers' religious values on the whole of society.
Not only does her actual legislative agenda constitute a "clear and present danger" to health well-being of most of us, but her religious fever to impose her values on the rest of us makes her manifoldly a "clear and present danger" to the vast majority of Ohioans.
The good news is that she will be gone from the Ohio legislation as December 31, 2018 as she has decided not to run for re-election as an Ohio state representative.
The bad news is that she wants to move on to Congress (the 16th congressional district).
Let's us trust that Republican voters will stop her quest in the May 8, 2018 Republican primary election.
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