As I write this, I have just finished the fourth week of the legislative session. February 14 is the last day that I can request new legislation to be written. With the end of the session planned on May 2, you may think this is too early to put the brakes on new ideas. The truth is the legislative process takes time and if we didn’t have a cutoff date for writing new legislation, we would never get done. We will probably have around 900 bills filed this year. Less than a fourth of those will become law.
When I talk about a bill it’s usually because it’s a bill that interests a lot of people, or it’s a bill that I had a part in.
A bill that has a lot of interest by the public is SSB 1051. It deals with the warnings on pesticide labels. We discussed this issue last year, and are working on it more this year. The main avenue that is used to sue a chemical company is a failure to have warning labels about the potential harm they could pose to health. However, the EPA dictates what must be put on the label. If the company doesn’t abide by those rules, they can’t sell the product. It makes no sense to allow the company to be sued for following the law. The company can still be sued, but not for following the law on the label. This would apply to widely used chemicals like Round-Up.
A bill I wrote is SF 128, dealing with what is recorded on the form used to fill out a death certificate of a child from 0-3 years old. Currently there is only one question asked about the child’s vaccinations. Was the child fully vaccinated according to the schedule recommended by the CDC? The same form asks five questions about the last thing the child ate. Some medical examiners have requested that we ask when the child’s last vaccination was, what they were vaccinated for, and did they receive multiple vaccinations at the time.
A large number of moms showed up to testify in favor of the bill. Two medical professionals showed up to say this could lead to people being more reluctant to vaccinate their children. I maintain that the best way to increase confidence in the safety of vaccines is to have hard data to prove it. This is easy to do and hard to fake.
Also dealing with vaccines is SF 120, which would require parental consent before a minor can get vaccinated for sexually transmitted diseases. The best-known of these vaccines has the worst safety record of any vaccine, except for the Covid-19 vaccines. A minor is not ready to weigh the risks and rewards of getting this vaccine before age 18.
I’ll conclude with a quick note about the bill we passed in 2023 to reorganize the state government. Its goal was to make government more efficient by aligning similar departments and eliminating redundancies. It would also help all the departments communicate with each other by getting them all on computer systems that can talk to each other. The Governor announced in her Condition of the State speech that in the first 18 months since the reorganization was implemented, Iowa has saved $217 million. This amount will grow as time goes on, and the speed and efficiency of government response to citizens should also increase.
The last two weeks have been full and tiring. However, I am encouraged by this verse to stay at it — “The hand of the diligent shall rule”. Proverbs 12:24
Thank you Sen. Guth and God bless you. Please ban the Covid “vaccine?”