Proposed bill seeks to eliminate COVID-19 vaccine, gene therapy mandates in public schools
ST. LOUIS- The Missouri Education Senate committee revisited a proposed bill on Feb. 3 that looks to remove COVID-19 and gene therapy mandates in public schools, including higher education, at the start of the 2025-2026 academic year.
Introduced by State Senator Nick Schroer, SB222 prevents public institutions from authorizing direct vaccinations, such as COVID-19 or gene therapy, to employees and students. SB222 allows students and employees to attend public events, premises or facilities without any requirements from their respective institutions.
SB222 also states that vaccinations should not bar employees from employment or students from acceptance into schools.
It does, however, imply that COVID-19 vaccinations cannot be given without the consent of an employee, student (if of age) or parent/guardian (for students underage).
According to the bill, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education as well as the Department of Higher Education and Workforce Development will be required to investigate violations against the act.
The bill's language also states that students, parents/guardians or school employees can bring civil action against any violators of SB222, which can include a public school, higher-educated institution or school employee.
Instructors who are believed to violate SB222 face consequences, such as possible suspension or revocation of their licenses.
School districts, as well as higher educational institutions, who are believed to violate SB222 are not 'entitled to receive state aid or any other revenues of the state' until those places become compliant with the act, the bill summary states.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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NIH employees publish ‘Bethesda Declaration' in dissent of Trump administration policies
In October 2020, two months before Covid-19 vaccines would become available in the US, Stanford health policy professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and two colleagues published an open letter calling for a contrarian approach to managing the risks of the pandemic: protecting the most vulnerable while allowing others largely to resume normal life, aiming to obtain herd immunity through infection with the virus. They called it the Great Barrington Declaration, for the Massachusetts town where they signed it. Backlash to it was swift, with the director-general of the World Health Organization calling the idea of allowing a dangerous new virus to sweep through unprotected populations 'unethical.' Bhattacharya later testified before Congress that it – and he – immediately became targets of suppression and censorship by those leading scientific agencies. Now, Bhattacharya is the one in charge, and staffers at the agency he leads, the US National Institutes of Health, published their own letter of dissent, taking issue with what they see as the politicization of research and destruction of scientific progress under the Trump administration. They called it the Bethesda Declaration, for the location of the NIH. 'We hope you will welcome this dissent, which we modeled after your Great Barrington Declaration,' the staffers wrote. The letter was signed by more than 300 employees across the biomedical research agency, according to the non-profit organization Stand Up for Science, which also posted it; while many employees signed anonymously because of fears of retaliation, nearly 100 - from graduate students to division chiefs - signed by name. It comes the day before Bhattacharya is due to testify before Congress once more, in a budget hearing to be held Tuesday by the Senate appropriations committee. It's just the latest sign of strife from inside the NIH, where some staff last month staged a walkout of a townhall with Bhattacharya to protest working conditions and an inability to discuss them with the director. 'If we don't speak up, we allow continued harm to research participants and public health in America and across the globe,' said Dr. Jenna Norton, a program officer at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and a lead organizer of the Declaration, in a news release from Stand Up for Science. She emphasized she was speaking in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the NIH. The letter, which the staffers said they also sent to US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. 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It also challenged assertions put forward by Kennedy, who often compares today's health outcomes with those around the time his uncle John F. Kennedy was president, in the early 1960s. 'Since 1960, the death rate due to heart disease has been cut in half, going from 560 deaths per 100,000 people to approximately 230 deaths per 100,000 today,' they wrote. 'From 1960 to the present day, the five-year survival rate for childhood leukemia has increased nearly 10-fold, to over 90% for some forms. In 1960, the rate of measles infection was approximately 250 cases per 100,000 people compared with a near zero rate now (at least until recently).' They acknowledged there's still much work to do, including addressing obesity, diabetes and opioid dependency, 'but,' they wrote, 'glamorizing a mythical past while ignoring important progress made through biomedical research does not enhance the health of the American people.' 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‘We're Just Becoming a Weapon of the State'
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More than 300 officials, from across all of the NIH's 27 institutes and centers, have signed and sent a letter to Bhattacharya that condemns the changes that have thrown the agency into chaos in recent months—and calls on their director to reverse some of the most damaging shifts. Since January, the agency has been forced by Trump officials to fire thousands of its workers and rescind or withhold funding from thousands of research projects. Tomorrow, Bhattacharya is set to appear before a Senate appropriations subcommittee to discuss a proposed $18 billion slash to the NIH budget—about 40 percent of the agency's current allocation. The letter, titled the Bethesda Declaration (a reference to the NIH's location in Bethesda, Maryland), is modeled after the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter published by Bhattacharya and two of his colleagues in October 2020 that criticized 'the prevailing COVID-19 policies' and argued that it was safe—even beneficial—for most people to resume life as normal. The approach that the Great Barrington Declaration laid out was, at the time, widely denounced by public-health experts, including the World Health Organization and then–NIH director Francis Collins, as dangerous and scientifically unsound. The allusion in the NIH letter, officials told me, isn't meant glibly: 'We hoped he might see himself in us as we were putting those concerns forward,' Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and one of the letter's organizers, told me. 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But since January, the NIH has canceled thousands of grants —originally awarded on the basis of merit—for political reasons: supporting DEI programming, having ties to universities that the administration has accused of anti-Semitism, sending resources to research initiatives in other countries, advancing scientific fields that Trump officials have deemed wasteful. Prior to 2025, grant cancellations were virtually unheard-of. But one official at the agency, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of professional repercussions, told me that staff there now spend nearly as much time terminating grants as awarding them. And the few prominent projects that the agency has since been directed to fund appear either to be geared toward confirming the administration's biases on specific health conditions, or to benefit NIH leaders. 'We're just becoming a weapon of the state,' another official, who signed their name anonymously to the letter, told me. 'They're using grants as a lever to punish institutions and academia, and to censor and stifle science.' NIH officials have tried to voice their concerns in other ways. At internal meetings, leaders of the agency's institutes and centers have questioned major grant-making policy shifts. Some prominent officials have resigned. Current and former NIH staffers have been holding weekly vigils in Bethesda, commemorating, in the words of the organizers, ' the lives and knowledge lost through NIH cuts.' (Attendees are encouraged to wear black.) But these efforts have done little to slow the torrent of changes at the agency. Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH and one of the letter's signers, told me that the NIH fellows union, which he is part of, has sent Bhattacharya repeated requests to engage in discussion since his first week at the NIH. 'All of those have been ignored,' Morgan said. 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Many signers of the Bethesda letter are hopeful that Bhattacharya, 'as a scientist, has some of the same values as us,' Benjamin Feldman, a staff scientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, told me. Perhaps, with his academic credentials and commitment to evidence, he'll be willing to aid in the pushback against the administration's overall attacks on science, and defend the agency's ability to power research. But other officials I spoke with weren't so optimistic. Many at the NIH now feel they work in a 'culture of fear,' Norton said. Since January, NIH officials have told me that they have been screamed at and bullied by HHS personnel pushing for policy changes; some of the NIH leaders who have been most outspoken against leadership have also been forcibly reassigned to irrelevant positions. At one point, Norton said, after she fought for a program focused on researcher diversity, some members of NIH leadership came to her office and cautioned her that they didn't want to see her on the next list of mass firings. (In conversations with me, all of the named officials I spoke with emphasized that they were speaking in their personal capacity, and not for the NIH.) Bhattacharya, who took over only two months ago, hasn't been the Trump appointee driving most of the decisions affecting the NIH—and therefore might not have the power to reverse or overrule them. HHS officials have pressured agency leadership to defy court orders, as I've reported; mass cullings of grants have been overseen by DOGE. And as much as Bhattacharya might welcome dissent, he so far seems unmoved by it. In early May, Berg emailed Bhattacharya to express alarm over the NIH's severe slowdown in grant making, and to remind him of his responsibilities as director to responsibly shepherd the funds Congress had appropriated to the agency. The next morning, according to the exchange shared with me by Berg, Bhattacharya replied saying that, 'contrary to the assertion you make in the letter,' his job was to ensure that the NIH's money would be spent on projects that advance American health, rather than 'on ideological boondoggles and on dangerous research.' And at a recent NIH town hall, Bhattacharya dismissed one staffer's concerns that the Trump administration was purging the identifying variable of gender from scientific research. (Years of evidence back its use.) He echoed, instead, the Trump talking point that 'sex is a very cleanly defined variable,' and argued that gender shouldn't be included as 'a routine question in order to make an ideological point.' The officials I spoke with had few clear plans for what to do if their letter goes unheeded by leadership. Inside the agency, most see few levers left to pull. At the town hall, Bhattacharya also endorsed the highly contentious notion that human research started the pandemic—and noted that NIH-funded science, specifically, might have been to blame. When dozens of staffers stood and left the auditorium in protest, prompting applause that interrupted Bhattacharya, he simply smiled
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Retired educators to continue substitute teaching in Missouri without losing benefits
State Rep. Stephanie Boykin, D-Hazelwood, speaks on the Missouri House floor during the final week of the 2025 legislative session (Tim Bommel/Missouri House Communications). Missouri lawmakers have extended a rule allowing retired teachers to serve as substitutes without losing their retirement allowance. This measure is part of efforts to fill classrooms during a statewide teacher shortage. The state legislature first took notice of the issue in 2022, when the COVID-19 pandemic chiseled away at the teacher workforce. They passed a law that, among other provisions, encouraged retirees to become substitutes and set an expiration date of June 2025. In May, lawmakers voted to extend the sunset to 2030 as part of a bipartisan education package currently awaiting the governor's signature. State Rep. Ed Lewis, a Republican from Moberly and chair of the House Education Committee, was part of the effort to pass the legislation in 2022. 'It is definitely something that needed to happen,' he told The Independent. 'And really needed, this year, to be revisited.' Lewis credits state Rep. Stephanie Boykin, a Democrat from Hazelwood, for bringing the issue to his attention. Boykin was one of a handful of lawmakers who filed a bill to extend the law's sunset, and she got the legislation added onto a large Senate bill during committee work. 'It is a win for that retired teacher that doesn't have to be concerned about being penalized or having to come out of retirement,' she told The Independent. 'And, of course, it is a big win for our students to have a teacher with knowledge and with an educational background.' This provision is different from a statute allowing retirees to work full-time. Since 2003, retired teachers have been able to return full-time for two years, which lawmakers increased to four years in 2023. Missouri has been loosening requirements for substitute teachers while it struggles to find educators, reducing the amount of college credit required to be certified as a substitute and providing an alternative certification course online. Many of these efforts emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, but the shortage remains today. At the beginning of the 2024-25 school year, there were over 12,000 vacant teacher spots of which 9% went unfilled and 12% were filled by teachers without the proper certification, according to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. But veteran teachers are stepping up. In the 2023-24 school year, 4,500 retired educators served as substitutes, according to data from the Public School and Education Employee Retirement Systems of Missouri. The average monthly benefit for retirees in the Public School Retirement System is around $3,800 a month. With most substitute gigs paying $101-$125 a day, retirees would lose money to come out of retirement to substitute. Without the law securing retirement allowances, Lewis says there would be widespread vacancies. 'There would be open positions that would not get filled around the state,' he said. 'Many of them we would have completely unqualified people in those positions, when you have perfectly qualified people who might be a little bit older but have tons of experience.' Over two-thirds of Missouri substitute roles were filled by those ages 50 and older in 2024, according to a Department of Elementary and Secondary Education survey. 'It makes a difference when you have that experience there, versus someone that might like children but they are just looking for a job and they don't mind being there,' Boykin said. 'But nothing can take the place of an experienced teacher.' Boykin understood the benefits of having retirees back in the classroom, she said, as a former educator of nine years. 'We want to remove any barriers from experienced teachers filling that gap,' she said. 'And that is what this bill does.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
