Kansas pastor lost her mom to COVID-19; now denied vaccine because she’s too healthy | Opinion
Five years ago, the Rev. Shelly McNaughton-Lawrence performed her first funeral for a victim of the COVID-19 pandemic — her own mother.
LuAnn McNaughton was buried in a sealed coffin without being embalmed, because the family made a decision to minimize the risk of COVID exposure for the mortuary workers.
In April 2020, “We couldn’t even go into her room until after we made the decision (for hospital staff) to not offer any more heroic care. It was just traumatic. And then we had to leave before she passed, because they didn’t want us exposed to her. They didn’t have enough PPE (personal protective equipment) for us to stay in the room with her for very long.”
The COVID vaccine came too late for her mom, but ever since it was invented, McNaughton-Lawrence has been deliberate about keeping her shots up to date, to protect herself and the parishioners she visits in the hospital when they’re ill and vulnerable to infection.
But now, McNaughton-Lawrence can’t get the current updated COVID booster.
The reason, frankly, is that our national health system is being run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose only discernable qualification for his job is that he helped get Donald Trump reelected president.
The quest for a COVID shot
Under Kennedy’s so-called leadership, the Food and Drug Administration revised its guidelines for the COVID vaccine, limiting it to those age 65 and older and those with underlying medical conditions that make them more vulnerable to severe COVID illness.
It has sown unnecessary chaos in what once was a quick and orderly process of going to a local pharmacy, filling out a form, getting your shot, and getting your vaccination card stamped — all of which was required to be covered by insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
That’s what McNaughton-Lawrence expected this year, but in the wake of Kennedy’s interventions, things didn’t go as planned.
“I went to the CVS website, which is where I usually get my vaccines, to make an appointment for my flu shot and my COVID,” said McNaughton-Lawrence, 63. “It had a series of questions, my age, what was wrong with me that made me immunologically compromised — and I don’t have anything like that. So it told me I wasn’t eligible.”
She contacted her doctor’s office with the University of Kansas Health System and got more disappointing news.
“I emailed my doctor’s office to say, ‘Hey, CVS won’t give me the shot. What should I do?’” McNaughton-Lawrence said. “And they said ‘Well, we’re not going to be giving them out this year either. You really need to try CVS.’ And so I tried again with CVS. The answer was still no.”
She said friends have suggested she simply lie on the form and claim she has an underlying condition.
“Everyone tells me, ‘Oh you can put anything in there and they’ll give it to you,’” she said.
But there are two problems with that: 1) Pastors are supposed to tell the truth, and 2) It would create a permanent record at the pharmacy of a medical condition that doesn’t exist, which could affect her future prescriptions.
Part of what makes this situation all the more ironic is that McNaughton-Lawrence once had a serious weight problem that would have made her vaccine-eligible, but she’s worked hard to improve her health.
“I have no underlying health concerns. I’ve just lost 100 pounds, so I’m in the best health I’ve been in for a decade,” she said.
I can attest. I first met her about 20 years ago when she served a two-year stint as associate pastor at my church, East Heights United Methodist in Wichita, before she moved on to a senior pastor role at Aldersgate United Methodist Church in Olathe. When I ran into her at a church conference in Nebraska a couple of years ago, she’d shed so much weight that I barely recognized her.
Another irony here is that the Kansas Legislature passed a law saying employers can’t mandate vaccines if it “violate(s) sincerely held religious beliefs of the employee.”
But that’s a one-way street. It doesn’t apply if your sincerely held religious beliefs compel you to get vaccinated, as McNaughton-Lawrence believes.
“The three simple rules of John Wesley (the founder of Methodism) are do no harm, do good and stay in love with God,” she said. “And one of the ways we do that as a community is I make sure when I go visit hospitals that I’m fully vaccinated, so I’m doing the best I can to not spread things to vulnerable, vulnerable populations, right? I’m living out, in my mind, that Wesleyan charge, and living out the Great Commandment to love your neighbor as yourself.”
“My frustration is that I can’t just go get the shot I want, because I believe I should have it,” she said.
The frustration is justified, because Kennedy’s COVID vaccine restrictions aren’t based in science, unless we’re talking political science.
RFK Jr. puts politics over people
Vaccine availability and insurance coverage are based on recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Shortly after Kennedy took over as secretary of Health and Human Services — his reward for ending his long-shot campaign for president and endorsing Donald Trump over Kamala Harris — he sacked all 17 members of the advisory committee.
He hand-picked the replacements, bypassing the normal vetting of committee members for expertise and scientific rigor. Several of his appointees are linked to antivax political movements.
The panel met on Friday to vote on COVID vaccination recommendations going forward. The meeting was supposed to clarify access policy but only muddied it further.
The panel barely rejected a proposal to require a doctor’s prescription for a COVID booster, which would have made the shot all but inaccessible to millions of un- and under-insured Americans.
But the group did overturn last year’s recommendation that everyone over six months of age get an updated COVID booster — replacing it with a vague recommendation for something called “shared clinical decision-making,” which appears to involve playing “Mother May I?” with some as-yet-unspecified health professional.
The weakened recommendation also raises as-yet-unanswered questions of whether pharmacies — where nine out of 10 Americans get their shots — will actually offer vaccinations to the under-65 crowd, and whether insurance will have to pay for it.
And into the fray steps Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas, a physician who I’d be more inclined to believe if I hadn’t once been in a room when he told a bunch of aircraft workers that COVID vaccines contain “aborted fetus parts” (they don’t).
In a recent appearance on CBS Face the Nation, Marshall praised Trump (he can’t order a cheeseburger without praising Trump) for the invention of the vaccine and said Trump should get a Nobel Prize for it. A few breaths earlier, he had praised Kennedy for “turning the CDC upside down” and a few breaths later praised him again for restricting the vaccine to the elderly and infirm.
Called out on that apparent contradiction, he had this to say: “I think it’s just a different time today than it was five years ago. Five years ago we had a novel virus, none of us had any immunity to it. It was a strange virus made in a lab in Wuhan, China (insert eyeroll emoji here). But today, Americans on average have had COVID five times. We now have our natural immunity to it and not everybody needs the vaccine.”
The CDC — the real one, not RFK Jr.’s conspiracy theory knitting circle — would tell you that natural immunity only goes so far, and you need to stay up to date on your vaccines to get ahead of emerging virus variants.
That, and each time you’re reinfected with COVID you increase your risk of getting Long COVID, which can have lifelong consequences — and the best way to reduce your risk of reinfection is to get vaccinated.
Marshall did say one thing that made sense: “Let the patients decide.”
To that I’d reply: Don’t tell us, tell RFK Jr. He’s the one restricting patients’ access to vaccines, when he’s not swimming in sewage and abusing bear-cub carcasses. He works in the same town you do, and if you need directions to his office I’ll gladly send them to you.
That, and Free Pastor Shelly!
This story was originally published September 23, 2025 at 4:12 AM.
