WASHINGTON — The pandemic is ripping through rural America, but the website for a federal advisory panel on rural health led by former Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer is silent on COVID-19.
And Colyer, a Republican and Overland Park, Kansas, physician, continues to tout the use of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment despite warnings about its use. He also recently posted photos to his Twitter channel that show him standing close to two Missouri Republicans, Sen. Roy Blunt and Gov. Mike Parson, none of them wearing masks.
Colyer, campaigning in Topeka on a Kansas Republican bus tour earlier this month, says he’s been “very, very busy” leading the panel, despite its lack of public information about the health crisis.
Chartered in 1987, the National Advisory Committee on Rural Health and Human Services is supposed to give advice to the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services about the provision and financing of health care in rural areas. Its members are from outside HHS, and it is apparently seen as important enough to the Trump administration to have survived a purge last year of advisory panels across the federal government.
But even though the virus is spreading quickly in rural areas, the committee hasn’t posted information on its website about the pandemic or its health effects in rural America. Public health experts say the government has failed to do enough overall in stemming the outbreak in the nation’s small towns and farm regions as winter nears and temperatures plummet, sending people indoors and in close contact.
Colyer’s committee has regularly published policy briefs over the past decade. But other materials, such as letters to the administration and recommendations and reports to the HHS secretary, have not been published to the site in years.
The committee website’s most recent letter to the administration dates to 2018. Its latest recommendations are from 2014, and its most recent report to the secretary was released in 2011.
The committee held its second meeting of the year nearly three months ago but hasn’t posted information about it. And its most recent policy briefs — published in May — address pre-planned topics of maternal mortality and HIV prevention and treatment in rural America.
According to its website, the committee selects one or more topics to explore every year and produces a report with recommendations for the secretary. Committee members also send letters to the secretary and are authorized to produce white papers on other issues.
A charter document describes committee reports as optional and says the committee may meet up to three times a year, in person or on a webcast. Its annual budget is about $325,000, of which an estimated $189,000 goes to compensation and travel expenses for members and $137,000 goes to staff support.
The committee currently has 21 members, according to its website, but only 14 people, including Colyer, are listed as members — and the committee is in the process of adding members. The charter says the committee must have between 15 and 21 members, and the committee’s website says its size was expanded to 21 in 2002.
Colyer is the panel’s fifth chair and its second (after former U.S. Sen. Nancy Kassebaum Baker) from Kansas. He was appointed in February, about a year after his gubernatorial stint ended.
He has touted hydroxychloroquine throughout the pandemic despite warnings about its use for COVID-19.
In June, the Food and Drug Administration revoked emergency use authorization for the anti-malarial drug and later cited safety concerns, including serious heart rhythm problems, blood and lymph system disorders, kidney injuries and liver problems and failure.
In addition to hydroxychloroquine, Colyer has touted other therapies like convalescent plasma, which President Donald Trump falsely claimed reduces mortality rates by 35%, according to FactCheck.org. The FDA has issued an emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma but hasn’t approved any drugs or therapies to prevent or treat COVID-19.
Colyer did not respond to requests for comment, though he cited his work on the committee on the GOP bus tour.
