Extreme Legislation Will Prolong the Pandemic, Not End It
The legislative filing period for the New Hampshire House of Representatives for the 2022 session ended last week with a flurry of bills that will tie the hands of public health officials when it comes to ending the COVID pandemic and when it comes to fighting communicable diseases in the future.
(Note: This is an expanded version of a commentary published in the Portsmouth Herald.)
In a year of critical moments in the state legislature when it comes to public health, we had five more doozies last week:
After witnessing House GOP leaders leading an anti-vaccine protest Tuesday at the State House, practicing physician, state representative, and self-described “Reagan Republican” Bill Marsh announced he was switching his affiliation to the Democratic Party over GOP’s leadership’s refusal to take reasonable pandemic precautions seriously. “I was a physician long before I became a representative. Doctors live by the principle ‘first do no harm.’ I cannot in good conscience support this selfish refusal to take reasonable precautions,” Marsh said in a statement.
At a public hearing Friday on whether to accept $27 million in federal pandemic relief funds for additional vaccination efforts, the chairman of the Legislative Fiscal Committee falsely claimed that 90% of patients now hospitalized with COVID have been vaccinated. This led the commissioner of the Department of Health and Human Services to confront him and bluntly tell him, “That is incorrect, and that’s misinformation. And that is the problem that we are having increasing our vaccination rate: spreading misinformation about the COVID vaccine.”
After this tense exchange, the GOP-dominated Fiscal Committee voted to table approval of the $27 million, with the chairman later proclaiming on WMUR, “Everyone who wants to be vaccinated has been vaccinated.” This means that New Hampshire’s stalled vaccination effort will remain stalled even as COVID continues to surge.
Also on Friday, New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella joined 23 other GOP state AGs in signing a partisan letter threatening to sue the Biden administration over a recently announced executive order mandating vaccinations for federal workers, nursing home workers, and employees working at companies of 100 people or more.This despite the fact that most existing case law comes down firmly on the side of supporting vaccination requirements.
But perhaps the most disturbing event in New Hampshire last week when it came to the pandemic is one that seems to have escaped the notice of all but a few in the media. Friday at 4:00 p.m. was the deadline for members of the New Hampshire House of Representatives to submit new bills for the 2022 session. A quick look at the list (see the bottom of this article) shows GOP state representatives filed a staggering 46 bills related to COVID and public health. While the full language of these bills is not yet available, the titles are evidence of an extraordinary campaign to not only handicap public health officials in their efforts to end the pandemic, but also to severely restrict New Hampshire’s ability to contain the spread of communicable diseases in the future.
The extreme nature and the broad scope of these bills are deeply troubling to anyone who would like to see the deaths, hospitalizations, and the pandemic’s toll on our economy come to an end.
The list includes legislation that would prohibit face coverings in schools, ban employer vaccination requirements, ban businesses and employers from requiring proof of vaccination, ban the enforcement of federal vaccination requirements, and prohibit employers from taking action against employees refusing to be vaccinated. Another extreme measure would classify mask use by children in schools as child abuse, with mandatory reporting required by teachers. Also on the list are bills that would allow the over-the-counter allow sale of horse dewormer (a debunked COVID treatment) without a prescription and that would restrict use of the state vaccine registry to a point where it would be largely useless.
Something worth reflecting on in this moment is that our personal freedoms have never included the right to risk infecting others with a deadly illness. Public health measures, including requiring vaccinations, have been part of the landscape in our schools for many years. They were put there by people eager to avoid the unnecessary death and suffering common in prior generations. Although they have been challenged over the years, vaccination requirements have been consistently upheld by our courts—including the US Supreme Court.
History also reminds us that vaccination requirements for communicable diseases are almost as old as America itself. In 1777, George Washington issued an order that all troops under his command be inoculated against smallpox—a decision that helped the Continental Army survive a very difficult year. Had smallpox raged through his troop at that critical juncture, it’s very possible the war would have ended with the British as the victors.
But one of the best arguments for vaccination requirements isn’t from a dusty book on a shelf. It’s found in our very own New Hampshire Constitution. Article 3 of the Bill of Rights acknowledges that there are times when our natural rights and personal freedom must be weighed against our responsibility to the greater good. “When men enter into a state of society,” it reads, “they surrender up some of their natural rights to that society, in order to ensure the protection of others.”
That concept—the protection of others—has always been one of our strongest values as Americans and as Granite Staters. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the pandemic is that so many people, including some of our state’s top leaders, seem so willing to cast a key part of our identity aside to score political points and feed anti-public health narratives.
As In-DepthNH reporter Gary Rayno said in a commentary last month, “It is time to stop the gaslighting and reward people who have done what they could to stop the pandemic, not the ones who refuse.”
Thanks to the Delta variant, COVID is again surging in New Hampshire, straining our hospitals and ending more lives before their time.
Now is the time to work together and to do the hard things that are necessary to end the reign of COVID over our state and our country. Not to take ill-considered and divisive actions that will only prolong it by handcuffing the people who have the knowledge and the tools to end it.
