Key Points: 

• Two bills propose giving Arizonans more health freedom

• Supporters say people should have the choice of deciding what they put into their bodies

• Opponents say the bills will drastically affect public health

Six years after the start of the Covid pandemic, health freedom and vaccine mandates are still major issues at the Arizona Legislature. 

At least 17 bills related to vaccinations or medical interventions have been filed this year. Some of them concern insurance prohibitions or requirements, reporting requirements, studies related to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, exemptions and other related topics, but two bills are specifically aimed at the principle of health freedom. 

House Bill 2248 would prohibit businesses, ticket issuers, schools, state, county and local governments or officials from requiring a person to receive or use a medical intervention or discriminate against a person based on whether the person has received or used a medical intervention. Rep. Lisa Fink, R-Glendale, filed the bill, which has since passed third reading in the House and the Senate. 

House Concurrent Resolution 2056, subject to voter approval, would constitutionally recognize the right to refuse medical mandates and prohibits governments from requiring any person to receive or administer any medical treatment as a condition of employment, education or exercising any right or benefit. Rep. Nick Kupper, R-Surprise, filed the bill which currently awaits Senate floor action. 

What initially started out as a conversation about public health emergencies has transformed into a complex negotiation between individual rights and the role of state government. The topic has also brought up parental rights and public health. 

There are some exemptions to Kupper’s resolution prohibiting vaccine mandates, specifically for those in prison. People on death row would not be able to use this law to overrule the death penalty. 

Kupper said he’s not anti-vaccine, he’s anti-mandate, and he wants to give voters the opportunity to have a say in how they treat their bodies. He used lice as an example. The bill says the government or school can’t make the determination as to which product they use to get rid of the lice, he said. 

Schools would still be allowed to require documentation, require vaccinations or exemptions, and much of the status quo that exists today would remain the same, he said. The basic core of his work is to put up a legal barricade so that the state could never tell an individual (outside of limited exemptions) what medical products they have to put in or on their body.

“There’s nothing in my constitutional amendment that says they can’t require documentation. It just says you can’t require what specific treatment they’re taking,” he said. “I don’t believe that it is right philosophically for a government to tell its civilian population what it must put into or on its body, and that’s why I wrote what I wrote.”

Kupper said pandemic-era policies have become a political football that has been constantly passed around, and even though he believes the topic shouldn’t be a partisan issue, he still believes there’s consensus that the pandemic was not handled perfectly. 

“It’s a once in 100 years kind of situation. Our nation never had dealt with the opportunity for a government to take such overt actions on individual liberties when it comes to the control of their own body,” he said. “We saw a lot of maybe even well-intentioned things that kind of verged on tyrannical, depending on where you were, what state you’re in.”

Kupper said his measure, and the principles behind it, might help rebuild trust in the government that was lost during the pandemic. More significantly, he thinks that vaccination rates might rise without any state mandate. 

“I’m not anti-vaccine. I am anti-mandate, but I’m not anti-vaccine at all. We’ve seen this growth of people who are not wholeheartedly against vaccines, but they feel distrusting toward the government,” he said. 

If the resolution passes, it would likely be the first of its kind in the U.S. to give people the opportunity to decide for themselves, he added. 

“Why would I not give the people of Arizona the opportunity to at least determine, do we want the state making these decisions for us or do we want to make them?” he said. “I don’t like politics, honestly. I like policy. I like taking care of people.”

Fink’s HB 2248 differs slightly. Medical intervention is the term used in this bill because there could be future medical interventions that are mandated that we don’t know about right now, she said. The bill is a request from the Make America Healthy Again effort in Arizona, she added. 

The core principle still comes from the Declaration of Independence, including the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the fact that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, Fink said. 

“The pandemic was six years ago, but this doesn’t even have to do with the pandemic in regards to the fact of what we saw was ripping away people’s rights and liberties,” she said. “There’s many people that have concerns about the mandates in regards to medical interventions and in general, and with that, people want the freedom to be able to choose and still be able to participate in society.”

Fink said collective rights and collective freedoms are more of a socialist or communist type of approach to government. People are educating themselves and looking into potential side effects and issues that may come up, she added.

“I know there’s those that (think) ‘You need the vaccination to protect me.’ We can’t do that. We have to have each individual person do the thing that they feel is best for themselves in regards to medical interventions,” she said.

Not everyone is jumping on board

Others are skeptical and disagree. It’s a public health argument, Sen. Lauren Kuby, D-Tempe said.

“When you remove basic public health protections, you don’t get more freedom, as our Republican colleagues are finding. You just get more disease,” she said. 

Under Kupper’s HCR 2056, Kuby said she’s most concerned about schools and how disease outbreaks will be handled. Those actions are meant to keep kids healthy, she said, adding they’re not meant as political or ideological. 

“I think we seem to be valuing the measle. Let’s protect the measle and not protect our kids,” she said. “I don’t understand why we’re pushing back against basic science and decades of public health research.” 

While people can refuse vaccines for themselves and their children in Arizona, the nature of vaccines and infectious disease control is to reduce risk across entire communities, making it a shared responsibility, Kuby said, adding one person’s freedom can be another person’s disease. 

Efforts like Kupper’s and Fink’s could be devastating for public health, she said. 

“It’s important to talk about economic impacts and when you refuse to really treat medical disease outbreaks and take them as seriously as we should … we’ll end up disrupting families and communities and the economy,” she said. 

Will Humble, executive director of the Arizona Public Health Association for the past eight years and former director of the Arizona Department of Health Services from 2009 to 2015, said the ideology around vaccines has changed throughout his career. 

Humble pointed out that the dialogue and party lines surrounding the issue have rapidly shifted. At first, it used to be left-leaning people who didn’t want to vaccinate their kids, but now, people on the right have adopted the ideology of medical freedom. More importantly, he believes the historical distance from the illnesses these vaccines prevent has faded the memory of just how sick people can get to those who now aim to make decisions on the issue.

Measles can cause high fevers, such as the 105F fever that Humble had right before the vaccine was available, he said. His mom had a friend who died of diphtheria, a disease that is now considered eliminated from the U.S. from widespread vaccinations. 

“I think when you have enough people who don’t even know what these diseases are, they start to think that it’s just hogwash,” he said. “The reason the diseases are no longer the threat is because we’re vaccinating. That’s what got rid of the damn things.”

Currently, there are two different school vaccine requirements. The first, for public charter and private schools, requires vaccines for kids entering kindergarten and sixth grade. Humble said there’s an “enormous loophole” that can circumvent the requirement — a personal or medical exemption. 

The second, for pre-school, includes a smaller list of vaccines, but doesn’t offer a personal exemption. It only offers a religious exemption, Humble said.

County health departments have the authority to perform disease outbreak investigations and do interventions, such as informing parents of the outbreak and that they can still vaccinate their child so they don’t get nearly as sick. 

School vaccination rates in Arizona aren’t dismal, but they aren’t perfect either, Humble said. Personal exemption rates have increased over the past 14 years, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services. 

Exemption rates have steadily increased from 14 years ago, according to the data. For the 2024-2025 school year, total statewide personal exemptions rates stand at about 9%, as compared to 3% in the 2010-2011 school year. Sixth grade students see a similar exemption rate for the same set of years, with 7.6% for 2024-2025 and 3.7% for 2010-2011.