By ZACH LAIRD, InDepthNH.org
CONCORD — Community members and public officials gathered at Granite Place Wednesday morning for a public hearing on two bills regarding vaccinations in New Hampshire.
House Bill 1811 would repeal statutory immunization requirements for children, and House Bill 1022 focuses on religious exemptions from vaccine requirements.
State Rep. Matt Drew, R-Manchester, was the first to speak on HB1811, saying that public health cannot function without public trust and that public trust cannot survive coercion.
“When public health establishments stop treating patients as people and start deciding to impose statistical risks and real injuries on some in order to protect others, they can and should lose trust of the public,” Drew said.
“Passing this bill into law will not immediately change anyone’s mind on vaccines. Those who are skeptical are already taking advantage of exceptions, and trust takes a long time to rebuild once it’s lost.”
Megan Heddy, chief of the Bureau of Infectious Disease Control at the Department of Health and Human Services, said that if enacted, the legislation would remove immunization requirements for children attending schools and daycares and would prevent the DHHS from requiring immunizations under any circumstance.
“This would eliminate the statutory framework for communicable diseases within the state, and would put the health and safety of every New Hampshire resident at risk, while also increasing health care costs for families and the state,” Heddy said.
Heddy also said the bill would pose serious health and financial consequences, including an increase in children who are unimmunized, leading to a risk of vaccine-preventable disease transmissions.
“Additionally, it would increase outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles and polio, and these outbreaks will allow diseases to spread more broadly between the children, between staff, but also between surrounding communities in the New Hampshire area (and) can affect every single resident or visitor to the state,” Heddy said.
Colleen Palmer, a parent who lives in New Hampshire, also opposes the bill. She discussed the reality that vaccines can be harmful to people.
“As a state, when we retire the vaccines, what we’re saying is that, as a state, we can decide that children will be killed or harmed, that we have the right to decide that those children are worthy of being sacrificed,” Palmer said. “In my opinion as a parent, no one has a right to make risky decisions like that for my child, or for my body.”
Resident Donald Peterson said it’s a constitutional right of parents and families to have final say on whether or not their child is vaccinated.
“This bill supports that,” Peterson said. “The government should not be deciding what vaccines the kids are taking. Our founding fathers knew when they put these things into the constitution that this was a protection against tyranny, and for the freedoms and liberties that we enjoy in this nation. This (right) should be returned to the parents, and that’s why I support HB 1811.”
Later in the hearing, Drew introduced HB 1022, explaining the background behind the bill regarding religious exemptions from immunization requirements.
“We’ve had some issues surrounding the exemption form that the DHHS started using a couple of years ago after a particular bill was passed to modify that language,” Drew said. “This is essentially specifying exactly what the form will say in the statute to bypass all those issues, so people can simply fill out this very simple form and get a religious exemption from the vaccine mandate.”
The only data that would be collected from the form was a “yes” or “no” answer on the exemption, Drew said.
Heddy spoke in opposition to HB1022.
“Presently, (the law) allows for medical and religious exemption from school and childcare immunization requirements,” Heddy said. “The DHHS respects the religious beliefs of families seeking exemption, and has a form approved in 2023, and this form works very effectively to enable parental choice and minimize administrative burden for health professionals (and) administrators.”
Heddy said changes to the form proposed in HB 1022 would omit identifying information for a child or student that claims a religious exemption, such as name or date of birth. Without these details, she said school staff could not identify which child the exemption applies to, which would make it harder to identify which students are at risk of infection.
Former state Rep. Melissa Blasek then spoke to provide background on the bill.
“In 2022, HB 1035 was introduced for the purpose of adding conscientious exemptions,” Blasek said. “The bill ended up being amended and passed as a simple bill to remove the notification from this request. In the process, the term ended up being changed from ‘request’ to ‘form.’ The DHHS now interpreted this to mean that they can, for the first time ever, require the use of their form.”
Blasek clarified that in the past the form was not required to request an exemption, and that people used different forms to file the request.
“Last year, HB 1035 attempted to return the law to the previous language that we had for decades, but it was vetoed,” Blasek said, “HB 1022 is simply the next attempt to rectify the legislature’s previous mistake.”
There was no vote taken on either bill during the hearing, and the discussions are slated to continue next week in executive session.