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After months of vocal opposition to government-imposed vaccine mandates on private businesses, Republicans on the state House Education Committee passed one of their own. They approved an amendment banning any “entity” — including private businesses — from requiring COVID-19 vaccines.

“The Education Committee passed HB255 in the name of medical freedom,” said House Speaker Sherman Packard (R-Londonderry). “Employers are struggling to fill vacancies, gas and food prices are rising, and chaos reigns at the border – the president has shown his ineptitude to lead. He has instead chosen to rule by mandates. That is not the New Hampshire way – and today’s small victory proved that.”

If the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate goes into effect — it’s currently being challenged in court — it will supersede New Hampshire law. House GOP leadership acknowledged Tuesday’s vote was to send a message, not set policy.

“I applaud the members of the Education Committee who took this amendment up today and did the right thing for New Hampshire,” said House Majority Leader Rep. Jason Osborne (R-Auburn). “While it is my hope that the president pays attention to the message we sent him on the heels of his visit today, I will not hold my breath. I look forward to passing this bill at our first opportunity when it comes before the House in January.”

Critics noted the irony of calling a measure that forbids private business owners from setting their own vaccine policy a “medical freedom” bill.

Gov. Chris Sununu opposed the move for the same reason his administration is suing to stop the Biden administration from imposing vaccine mandates.

“As the governor has repeatedly said, he is opposed to the government either prohibiting or mandating vaccines on private businesses,” Sununu spokesman Ben Vihstadt told the New Hampshire Bulletin when asked about the House Education Committee’s bill. 

Democrats, many of whom also believe government should have the power to decide the vaccine policies of private businesses, dismissed the legislation as a “political stunt.”

“Republican leadership hand-picked the vote, permanently removing from the committee the one Republican member who may oppose this absurd proposal,” said Rep. David Luneau, D-Hopkinton. “This political stunt should be a concern to everyone. The House Speaker’s decision to gerrymander the proceeding is a disgrace.”

Luneau is referring to Pittsfield Republican Jim Allard, who was removed from the committee by Speaker Packard in advance of the vote.

Neither Packard nor Allard responded to requests for comment.

The regulation extends beyond businesses to cover “any political subdivision of the state, corporation, association, club, firm, daycare, public or private school, public or private institution of higher education, partnership, society, nonprofit, joint stock company, or any other entity, including any governmental entity or religious entity.”

Even churches would be banned by government edict from setting vaccine rules for their own clergy and employees.

Supporters of the legislation, including the anti-vaccine organization ReOpenNH, argued government force was required to prevent private businesses from imposing rules on their employees. Business groups pointed out employers impose rules on their employees all the time.

David Juvet with the New Hampshire Business and Industry Association said the state needs to leave those decisions up to private business owners.

“BIA staunchly opposes legislative proposals that would prohibit private employers from mandating vaccination for its workers should they want,” Juvet said. “Requiring vaccination is a safety measure to protect employees and customers and others who may visit the place of business. It’s not unlike other employer requirements from hard hats to hair nets and even dress codes.”

Steve Ahnen, president of the New Hampshire Hospital Association, said the bill would make it harder for hospitals to keep patients safe.

“It would really hinder their ability to do what they need to do to protect the health and safety of staff and patients,” he said.

Ahnen said vaccines are mandated for a host of illnesses across the healthcare industry. While he doesn’t want to see anyone lose their jobs, hospitals need to be able to take care of the health of the patients and staff. The anti-mandate bill would impede that effort.

The libertarian New Hampshire Liberty Alliance also opposed the legislation. “While we support legislative efforts to mitigate the harm of the federally imposed mandates, this amendment negatively impacts freedom of association by restricting the actions of private entities who wish to require vaccination independent of federal mandates,” it posted on the group’s website in advance of Tuesday’s hearing.

Patients and visitors arriving at Concord Hospital masked up and ready to go were caught off-guard when staff told them their cloth masks were no longer adequate and they would have to wear hospital-provided blue paper procedure masks instead.

The policy change, which went into effect earlier this month, brings Concord Hospital in line with other New Hampshire hospitals where cloth masks are being banned, in favor of disposable, medical-grade masks.

Jenn Dearborn with Concord Hospital’s public affairs department said the change reflects the fact that more personal protective equipment, like masks and gowns, are now available for use which makes it easier for hospitals to offer the masks. It’s also an acknowledgment that disposable masks offer better protection against COVID-19 than cloth masks.

“PPE supplies of masks are now at a level where we can provide all patients wearing a cloth mask a procedure mask. Procedure masks are more effective at protecting against COVID-19 when compared to cloth masks,” Dearborn said. “We are making this change because we can now safely supply patients with a procedure mask and still have an adequate supply for the hospital and practices.”

Cloth masks are currently the norm in most settings, most notably public schools where a debate over their efficacy is currently raging. On Friday, administrators at Deerfield Community School banished unmasked children to the gymnasium after the school board suddenly imposed a mask mandate with little notice. On Monday, they began turning unmasked children away.

Concord Hospital isn’t the only hospital requiring procedure masks. Lauren Collin-Cline, director of communications at Catholic Medical Center, said the Manchester hospital now requires people to wear either a paper procedure mask, or a KN-95, or N-95-type mask.

“The reason for this is consistency in filtration,” she said. “Cloth masks vary widely in materials, layers, and fit around the nose and we don’t know what level of protection they offer. In the healthcare setting, we need to be confident in the level of protection people have given the current level of transmission in the community.”

Collins-Cline said the hospital did allow for cloth masks in the summer when the virus levels were going down. But that changed as cases have gone up and the delta variant is rampant. 

“We have always had a mask requirement. Earlier in the summer, we did relax to allow cloth masks but went back to procedural and higher when the positivity rate began to climb back up,” she said.

Adam Bagni, director of communications and community relations at Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover, said the use of facility-provided masks has been required throughout the pandemic at their facility.

“This is to ensure the quality and cleanliness of every mask in our facilities. We carefully select and assess the masks that we provide to staff, patients, and visitors, for traits like performance, layering, and breathability. We issue a new mask each day, or visit, to ensure they are both sanitary and effective,” he said.

Martha Wassell, director of infection prevention at Wentworth-Douglass, said that in order for a cloth mask to be effective in curbing the spread of COVID-19, it must be double-layered, comfortable, fit snugly, and easy to breathe through.

While cloth masks are fine for general settings, like the grocery store, medical masks should be used in hospitals and health clinics, Wassell said.

“Medical-grade masks are typically prioritized for healthcare settings,” she said.

The debate over masks and mandates began almost as soon as the COVID-19 pandemic started, in part because public health officials told the general public — falsely, it turned out — that masks were unnecessary.

“There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said during a 60 Minutes interview on March 8, 2020. “When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”

Fauci now acknowledges he wasn’t telling the truth, out of concern there wouldn’t be enough masks for health care workers.

Beginning with the outbreak of COVID-19 at a nursing home in Kirkland, Washington, policymakers were on notice as to the contagiousness, and lethality, of the virus in a congregate care setting with residents who are medically fragile.

The nursing home resident population is very elderly, with 41.6 percent of all residents 85-or-older according to the most recent federal data. New Hampshire is one of 10 states where more than 10 percent of nursing home residents are 95-or-older. Prior to the pandemic, I traveled around to my state’s nursing homes to interview centenarians.

One of the disturbing findings in Washington was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine: “More than half of residents with positive test results were asymptomatic at the time of testing and most likely contributed to transmission.” The stealthy nature of COVID-19 made it immune to the infection control procedures of nursing homes that had been so successful in the past against contagions such as the respiratory flu or the norovirus.

What was known about COVID-19 makes it inexcusable that some policymakers, including the governors of New Jersey and New York, insisted on bringing it into nursing homes, by forcing facilities to take COVID-positive hospital discharges, even as a state like Louisiana barred facilities from admitting hospital discharges positive with COVID-19.

Health experts warned against the consequences, beginning with a March 26 article in the Wall Street Journal. But it was clear nursing homes were to be sacrificed to free up hospital capacity.

While New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in April described the nursing home setting as a “feeding frenzy for this virus,” that did not cause him to change his administration’s policy of continuing to feed the virus new victims. It was only in May that Cuomo finally rescinded the policy, a point at which the worst was past for New York’s hospitals — but unimaginable horrors had occurred in the state’s nursing homes.

It was reported by the Wall Street Journal on May 14 that “[d]espite the homes’ elderly, frail populations, the state long put its major focus on the safety, staffing and supplies of hospitals, according to researchers, consumer groups and nursing-home executives.”

And, typically, Cuomo did not apologize for the tragedy his administration had created.

Instead, as the New York Post editorialized, Cuomo “ordered an investigation that’s plainly supposed to pin all the blame on nursing and adult-care facilities: It’s led by state Attorney General Tish James, who got her job with Cuomo’s crucial assistance — and it’s only looking at what homes did wrong.”

In March, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission’s annual report to Congress had found that the nursing home sector operated at a loss in 2018 for the first time since 2000. Now Cuomo, who has actively worked to cut nursing home funding, is ordering nursing homes to pay for a twice-weekly testing regime — an unfunded mandate with new costs that reportedly might be as high as $60 million a week for the beleaguered sector.

Cuomo may yet succeed in decimating the safety net for New York’s most vulnerable citizens.  It is small wonder that nursing homes, and their heroic staff members, feel abandoned amidst this pandemic.