Why This Kansas Doctor Would Do The COVID Year Again

By C.J. Janovy, Kansas Reflector

March 15, 2021

The situation in Fredonia is improving.

The 25-bed critical access hospital hasn’t had a COVID-19 patient for a month and a half or so, and no one has died in the past few weeks.

“Our biggest peak was in January and since then it’s come down steadily,” reports Jennifer Bacani McKenney, who runs a clinic in town with her father and serves as the Wilson County health officer.

McKenney remains hesitant, though, because some people still refuse to wear masks and maintain safe distances.

“But people are getting vaccinated,” she says.

The good thing about being the health officer for a county with fewer than 9,000 people is when a pandemic hits, you can move quickly.

“Thinking back to a year ago, we heard of COVID coming to Kansas on March 6,” McKenney remembers. “By March 9, which was a Monday, we had a countywide meeting of government, businesses, schools and churches to talk about: What is COVID? How do we test? What don’t we know?”

This same group has been in regular contact all year, helping educate people, making decisions quickly, staying in the kind of close communication that’s now helping vaccinations run smoothly, with nurses texting each other to connect extra doses with people who need them.

The bad thing about being the health officer for a rural Kansas county is part of what landed McKenney on national television back in December.

Before the pandemic, her life in Fredonia involved lots of things besides medicine. She was president of the school board (she still serves, but stepped down as president last July). She’d started a community foundation, worked on local beautification and housing efforts.

She became the health officer after the previous one died suddenly.

“I think that’s how a lot of us in rural communities end up being health officers,” she says. “Somebody died or quit.”

For McKenney, as for most county health officers, it was a side gig that involved meeting with county commissioners quarterly, spending a few hours a month signing off on school immunizations and working on smoking-cessation and breastfeeding programs and, one time, inspecting a lagoon.

But over the past year, when public health became political, these people who’d been quietly serving their local communities became targets.

And when that happened, McKenney — who was born in the same hospital where she’s now been practicing for 11 years and where her father has been a general surgeon for 42 years, who graduated from the University of Kansas School of Medicine and did her residency at Via Christi — went on NBC News to talk about it.

The reporter asked her a question about race.

“And I answered it,” McKenney says. “Anybody who wants to dispute that my neck of the woods looks anything like me — Asian American in a pandemic that a lot of people in my community still call ‘China flu,’ ‘Kung flu’ and so on — I answered honestly that there are people who say that. I’m the one telling people to wear masks and social distance and that they can’t have gatherings, and I look like the same people they’re blaming.”

Some Kansans didn’t like hearing this.

“Just the fact that race was brought up, people were on social media saying I was playing the race card, ‘Nobody’s racist here, she’s lying, this is not happening,’ ” McKenney says.

But she was overwhelmed by an outpouring of support.

“Letters in the mail, email, Facebook and Twitter messages from people all over the country and internationally saying, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing, standing up for what’s right,’ ” she says. “My entire office is lined with nice cards and drawings from kids who I’d never met that are just nice and supportive. That helps me get through the day.”

Last week, McKenney’s peers in the National Rural Health Association named her 2021’s Rural Health Practitioner of the Year.

From a year of what McKenney understatedly describes as “ups and downs,” what lessons have emerged?

“It sounds like such a Miss America answer, but we have to work together and stop attacking each other,” she says.

“The thing that blows my mind is how much effort is spent on the negativity, trying to justify the misinformation and all the noise,” she adds. “I believe the right things to spend our energy on are to find good information and protect each other and be kind to each other.”

Then McKenney says something extraordinary about a year of late-night tears, stress, working through weekends and personal insults.

“It was worth it,” she says. “Patients are no longer crying on the phone because they’re so scared and unsure of the future. They’re finally saying, ‘I’m excited, I just got my vaccine, I can’t believe we made it.’ It’s been hard, but I would do it again for the people who need it.”

Let’s make sure she doesn’t have to.