Idaho legislator wants to prevent you from making your own medical decisions | Opinion

It’s bad enough that Idaho Sen. Brandon Shippy, R-New Plymouth, doesn’t understand the difference between an mRNA vaccine and “gene therapy.”

What makes it worse is that the freshman legislator wants to inflict his ignorance on everyone else by banning most COVID vaccines for the next decade.

According to reporting by the Idaho Statesman’s Ian Max Stevenson, Shippy is sponsoring a bill that would place a moratorium on “human gene therapy products” until July 2035.

The bill defines those as products that include nucleic acids, “genetically modified microorganisms” and other “engineered site-specific nucleases.” The bill seeks to ban most forms of gene therapy, a set of cutting-edge treatments for some diseases, including cancer. But the bill also would prohibit mRNA vaccines, like those developed by Pfizer and Moderna to combat COVID-19, according to Stevenson’s article.

Shippy clearly is confusing the mRNA technology used in the COVID vaccines with “gene therapy.”

Gene therapy is a technique that modifies a person’s genes to try to treat or cure disease, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It can work by replacing a disease-causing gene with a healthy copy, inactivating a malfunctioning gene, or introducing a new or modified gene to help treat a disease.

That’s not what an mRNA vaccine does.

While gene therapy involves altering the genetic material within a person’s cells, mRNA uses messenger RNA (mRNA) to deliver instructions to cells to produce a specific protein. This protein is recognized by the immune system, which then mounts a defense against it.

In addition to COVID, mRNA technology is being studied to fight all sorts of infectious diseases, including HIV, malaria, influenza, zika, rabies, even tuberculosis.

Gene therapy, meanwhile, is used to treat a wide range of conditions, including genetic disorders, some types of cancer and other diseases in which altering gene expression can have therapeutic effects.

Shippy wants to just ban them all — the vaccines and gene therapy alike.

His bill is named after Doug Cameron, an Idaho farmer who claimed he was injured by a COVID-19 vaccine that he received in 2021.

Cameron’s story is not to be taken lightly nor dismissed. Side effects and injuries from vaccines, including COVID vaccines, can indeed happen, and when they do, they should be taken seriously.

But they should not be used to discount or dismiss the millions of times the vaccines work for people and save lives.

One estimate concluded that COVID-19 vaccines saved close to 800,000 lives in the U.S. How many more lives could have been saved without the vaccine hesitancy and suspicion spread by conspiracy theorists and con artists during the pandemic?

But here’s the thing: Shippy’s bill seeks to restrict the freedom of Idahoans and take away medical decisions through the force of state government.

Rep. Shippy, if you want to ignore science, if you want to believe Joe Rogan over physicians and research professionals, if you want to decline a doctor-recommended gene therapy to treat you for cancer, if you want to forgo mRNA vaccines and withhold them from your family, go right ahead. That’s your choice.

But don’t try to inflict your ignorance on the rest of us.

Don’t prevent the rest of us from making our own choices.

Don’t take away our ability to make our own medical decisions.

This story was originally published February 4, 2025 at 4:00 AM.