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Neuroscience & Behavior student, Tyler Stetson ’21, follows HB220 establishing medical freedom in immunizations.
University of New Hampshire students explore the science behind the underlying aspects of current issues under consideration at New Hampshire's State House.
From UNH Cooperative Extension, this is Relative to New Hampshire.
Step into the classroom and listen in while group of UNH students explore the underlying aspects of current issues under consideration at New Hampshire's State House. We pick apart those issues and connect with experts. All to share with you, insights from our scientific community that enhance our understanding of the biological world right here in New Hampshire, home of the greatest democracy in the world. I’m your moderator, Dr. Anna Kate Wallingford.
Tyler: I’m Tyler. I’m a senior Neuroscience & Behavior major.
Anna: Tyler has been following HB 220 establishing medical freedom in immunizations, which was passed and adopted in this year’s session with an amendment. That amendment essentially added the establishment of a committee to examine the policy of medical intervention going forward. The bill states that “every person has the natural, essential, and inherent right to bodily integrity, free from any threat or compulsion by government to accept an immunization. Accordingly, no person may be compelled to receive an immunization for COVID-19 in order to secure, receive, or access any public facility, any public benefit, or any public service from the state of New Hampshire, or any political subdivision thereof, including but not limited to counties, cities, towns, precincts, water districts, school districts, school administrative units, or quasi-public entities.”
Tyler attended public hearings held by the House committee on Health, Human Services, and Elderly Affairs and reported to our group on a regular basis. The group is a team of science liaisons made up of UNH students from a diverse array of departments in the College of Life Sciences and Agriculture, as well as my co-moderators Extension’s Public Engagement Program Manager, Nate Bernitz and Extension’s Public Affairs Manager, Lauren Banker. Let’s jump right in with Tyler’s summary of the bill and the hearing he attended in Feb 2021.
Tyler: Establishing medical freedom for immunizations, basically it establishes the right for people to have bodily integrity. And, you know, it doesn't compel them to accept any medical intervention that they don't want to have. It also protects them from being discriminated against if they refuse any sort of medical intervention or immunization. I thought it was really interesting because, of course, the pandemic and the vaccines that we have going around and what that might mean for the future this year.
The big argument that kept coming up, of course, was the argument of people having integrity over their own bodies and what they put in their bodies, and what they don't. But kind of an interesting origin for this bill was that apparently, in New Hampshire foster parents have to have all of their immunizations before they can foster children, which I did not know. If they decide that they don't want to get immunized, then they are ineligible to become foster parents. So it's kind of you either get your shots or you can't be parents. This bill - the person who wrote this bill - kind of wanted to bypass that I guess, or make it so that people could be foster parents if they didn't want to immunize.
The conversation really went towards how this bill would affect kids in school once we start having more kids in physical classes. And whether it got into, you know, the whole realm of whether we were going to segregate the non-vaccinated kids to one side of the class and all the other kids to another side of the class and this whole kind of debate started happening somewhere equating getting vaccinated to treating people with like peanut allergies. They would still just be a member of the class and there wouldn't be any segregation, but it's not really the same thing as a peanut allergy. Especially if like the kids are like breathing on the other kids. Let's see. It got into like should schools be mandating vaccines or not? The general consensus was that it should be left up to medical professionals whether we should be mandating vaccines or not.
Then they had a doctor of public health, Beth Daly from HHS come in as a consultant. She did a lot of basic information on vaccines. At that point the conversation definitely turned towards the coronavirus and getting vaccinated. And so she did a lot of basic information on vaccines. And then after that she fielded a bunch of questions. One thing that I didn't know, was specifically about the Moderna vaccine, which claims to be 95% effective, but what it's effective towards is preventing you from getting sick. It has no effect on stopping whether you actually get the virus or not. It's just whether you're symptomatic, which was new information to me, I thought I like prevented you from actually getting the virus. So I feel like that's probably a misconception that a lot of the public will have as well.
Chandra: I have a question. The segregating the students who are not like for not going to get vaccinated in different classes and those kinds of things. Is that just with coronavirus vaccination, or it for any other vaccines as well?
Tyler: It would just happen for the coronavirus vaccination. And just to be clear, they weren't specifically saying that they were going to put them in a separate class. It was more of like, they were going to create some sort of Plexiglas barrier and keep them in the same classroom. Which sounds even more ineffective to me, but I'm not an expert either.
Chandra: There was already a debate that from the set of parents that their kids would not get vaccinated. And since then these things came up? I kind of thought that there were are a lot of other vaccines, right? Like from when babies are born and until they grew up. Maybe they are not getting the kids vaccinated with those vaccines?
Anna: So Tyler, did it sound like the people who were interested in this bill were also interested in the debate about vaccines in general?
Tyler: Yeah, specifically vaccines and children.
Marissa: So is the idea of either having different protocols or like physically separating the kids that were vaccinated or not vaccinated… was that to keep them …they want to keep them from infecting the kids that had been vaccinated? or to keep them from infecting the other kids who had not been vaccinated?
Tyler: To infect the kids who had not yet been vaccinated. Obviously, everybody is concerned about their kids getting a quality education and getting the same education as everybody else. So there was just a lot of speculation and talk about how they were going to do that with, you know, these different philosophies on vaccination. Whether there are some kids that are vaccinated, then you have some kids that their parents don't believe in vaccinations, so they're not going to get vaccinated. And then you also have parents of kids that believe in vaccinations and want to get their kids vaccinated, but they just haven't been able to do it, because of supply & demand or whatever. So you've got these three different factions. There was a lot of talk about how they were going to incorporate each of these categories into the same classroom and make sure that everything was equal and safe.
Ella: That the segregation of the kids who haven't been vaccinated is based on the assumption that the Moderna vaccine does not prevent you from being able to transmit the disease, right?
Tyler: Yeah, I think that that was new information to everybody involved at this public hearing. I'm not sure that they 100% grasped that it does not help with prevention of spreading the virus, it only helps with prevention of symptoms. I would be interested in digging into that a little bit more just to provide education to people about it. It seems like it's a really big misconception.
Ella: Do know if any of the other vaccines prevent transmission or not?
Anna: I just don’t think that the research has happened yet.
Tyler: In addition, it was Beth Daly. She said that currently, Moderna is studying whether if you're vaccinated if you can still spread COVID or not. So Moderna is doing research right now about whether you can spread the virus or not if you've been vaccinated, but it's just so, you know, breaking new that they just don't know.
Anna: I think they all work differently. But I mean, I think and Tyler, correct me if I'm wrong, I'm reading between the lines, this conversation is about Liberty, and not necessarily about vaccination. I think what maybe they were doing was looking for a scenario where students would be unfairly categorized as an unvaccinated or a vaccinated student. And that was just like a hypothetical, that maybe you could say like, Oh, that's, that's not the case with the Moderna vaccine, because separating students wouldn't be helpful. But I'm sure that they would come up with more hypotheticals to say like, Well, what about this? What about this? What about this, and you can't really knock all of those hypotheticals down with science. What do you think?
Tyler: I definitely think that there was a subtext of civil liberties with the kids and everything like that. But I also think that - in more of the sciency direction – and how we could help improve the education was how the Moderna vaccines actually work, …what it prevents or something like that, because it really seems like people just don't understand that.
Anna: A very reductive synopsis on how the COVID vaccines work: First of all, its important to know that viruses are not living things – at least not according to most definitions of living organisms - they’re essentially just pieces of genetic material that float around and trick your body into replicating more virus. This particular piece of genetic material – SARS COV2 - can make us incredibly sick in the process of taking over our bodies and our immune systems have never encountered it before. The processes that normally destroy dangerous microbes entering our bodies are caught unawares, unprepared. Each of the handful of available vaccines are essentially training our bodies to fight this virus so that it cannot cause the disease, the fever, the coughing, the loss of taste, and the deadly symptoms.
While lots of folks might be familiar with some of the first vaccines in history, which were weaker versions of a deadly pathogen, these COVID vaccines different. They don’t give you COVID. The Moderna & Pfizer vaccines are mRNA vaccines. The mRNA vaccines get your body –temporarily - to produce fakes of the protein that’s dotting the lipid coat around the virus – the famous spike proteins that give the virus the corona or crown appearance. Johnson & Johnson is a vector vaccine. Vector vaccines use a different harmless virus to introduce some of those unique coronavirus proteins. This is all to let all the macrophages and lymphocytes living in your body to recognize the real thing if it shows up in your body and that they should to get to work in destroying them.
All this to say that it is technically possible for the virus to be living in the nose of a perfectly healthy, vaccinated individual. It’s unclear on how possible it is for that vaccinated person with the nose full of virus to get someone else sick. The science just isn’t there to answer that question yet.
Ok, so back to the discussion, because this law has had some direct impacts on us in the UNH community, which was one big COVID bubble for the 2020/2021 academic year. Unlike most university in the country, our classes were in-person for the whole year. All of Durham masked up, washed their hands, sanitized everything, all of the time. The University conducted a robust contact tracing program and provided quarantine housing when it was necessary. Students were tested for SARS CoV-2 twice weekly to detect any asymptomatic infections in our bubble. They opened an in-house lab to run all these tests and put students to work in that lab. It’s something we’re all really proud of and we made it through the year with infection rates below 1%.
Being able to mandate vaccination within our bubble would do a lot to bring things back to normal here on campus but this law prevents the University from this kind of requirement. We spoke with Dr. Peter Degnan in May 2021, to get some perspective from the folks in charge of keeping the campus community healthy and thriving. I’ll let him introduce himself:
Dr. Degnan: My name is Peter Degnan. I'm a physician and medical director of Health and Wellness here on UNH in the Durham campus. I've been here, probably seven years now, and I've been in the Medical Director role for about five years. Previous to that I've been out in general community practice, primarily in the seacoast New Hampshire area, for 20-25 years before coming to you.
Tyler: Welcome. The bill that we're talking about today is HB 220. If passed, it would give people in New Hampshire the freedom from immunizations. And that also includes, of course, the COVID 19 vaccine. So we're hoping to talk to a medical professional like yourself to kind of understand the medical ramifications if a bill like this were to pass in the house. The first thing that I'd like to ask you is specifically about COVID-19, and how what you have seen and how that disease has affected campus life and the students and staff?
Dr. Degnan: The impact of COVID-19 on the university, it's just immense. It's probably difficult even from my perspective to account for all of the various impacts across the spectrum. You know, from my standpoint, most importantly, it has to do with the personal well being and health status of the students, faculty and staff that we care for. We were significantly impacted with COVID-19 with I think, I think now it's probably around 2300+ cases of COVID infection that have been detected and tracked by the university. The good news: of those 2300, the majority of those affected are in an age range of, say 18 to 25. Fortunately, that's an age range that - from a public health standpoint - have been probably the least impacted regarding signs and symptoms and complications of COVID infection. That being said, we've had some students that have required hospitalization as a result of COVID-19 infection, or we've had some students that have avoided hospitalization but have been quite ill and as a result have been unable to participate in their normal academic activities.
Not only is there the health risk of but then there's a cascade of effects in terms of impaired academic performance. Also, for those individuals that have been diagnosed with COVID-19 infection, we've seen a substantial number of those identified close contacts on campus that they have identified as an increased infectious risk. As you begin to follow that tree of contact tracing, many of the cases of COVID-19 across campus relate to a previous campus exposure. There's a widespread ripple effect with one individual becoming ill and then interacting with others often before they develop signs and symptoms of illness, and then passing that on to others. That's one of the huge benefits of vaccination. It's incredibly important because it prevents serious symptoms of illness - like needs to be hospitalized or risk of death with from COVID. What it can help, is to break the chain of infectivity. That's why we focus so much on the value of immunizations in general here at the university. It is to reduce the risk of spreading infection on to others.
Anna: We discussed UNH’s vaccination policy in general and we did discuss a recent mumps outbreak on campus, so Dr. Degnan has some personal and professional experience to draw on when it comes to spread of diseases in this community and the importance of vaccination. There are requirements for UNH student to have a rather long list of vaccinations before coming to live and study on campus, including MMR, which protects against measles, mumps, and rubella, DPT for diptheria, pertussis, and tetanus, meningitis, and a chicken pox vaccination or proof of illness that shows immunity from chicken pox. Back to Tyler’s interview:
Tyler: If this bill were to pass, and people across the state were not required to have immunizations if they did not want to have them. How would that affect the student body at UNH?
Dr. Degnan: Well, I think you would see some significant negative effects as a result of that. I think you would likely see more infectivity of illness on campus than previously seen. Pertussis being an example of one - whooping cough - where there's been a bit of a resurgence. They've identified that childhood pertussis vaccination does not confer lifelong protection, but that the protection wears off about the time that one is entering into late high school or college. So without a required vaccines plan, there would be potentially many more people that are inadequately protected against pertussis, that become pertussis carriers, or sources of infection on the others. And that would have, again, a ripple effect through the community. There are more severe types of infections, meningitis being one that can be devastating. The bacteria that causes meningitis can be subtle, and one can be mildly ill and not be aware of their active infection and yet pose an infectious risk on to another person. That other person may be very susceptible for whatever reason to that infection and can become deathly ill. It is potentially fatal. There is a much higher risk for these types of transmissible illnesses, especially in a university setting where we are in very close contact with each other, not only in the classroom, but then especially in some, whether it's on campus or off campus housing.
Marissa: I was just going to ask what are the consequences if you have a community that is mixed vaccination, like some people are vaccinated, some people aren't? How does that affect the overall effectiveness?
Dr. Degnan: Well, there's two parts to your question, Marissa. There are so many more people that are susceptible to illness once exposed. One of the reasons why there's been so much effort to help people get vaccinated as quickly as possible against COVID-19, is that it reduces the general prevalence of virus in the community and prevents breakthrough variants. So you're, you know, there's all this buzz about COVID variants, and we've seen instances here on campus where we've had people become infected twice, from COVID. The lab here has been phenomenal, they've actually stored every single positive sample that they've collected since testing has started. They can go back and identify that their first infection was due to one form of virus and their second infection was due to a different variant form of the virus. The more active virus that's in the community, the more likely it is to evolve in form of variant infection. If you can quickly protect the large majority - kind of the concept of herd immunity - the background activity of the virus drops way down, and there is much less opportunity for it to evolve into a variant.
Tyler: Do you have any insight as to how UNH would ensure students and teachers safety in the classroom? Because at the public hearing, they were talking about grade school children and having if they were not going to require vaccines, having like plexiglass barriers in the classroom, or grouping children by either vaccination status and not vaccinated, how would you go about, you know, ensuring the safety if they couldn't require people to be immunized?
Dr. Degnan: It's a really interesting question. First, some of the consequences may be noted, even at the very beginning before a student actually begins to matriculate at UNH. I'm imagining a situation where a student - may be from Massachusetts, for instance - Massachusetts has a pretty stringent vaccination madate. Look, I'm an I'm an 18 year old high school students are looking to go to college. And I've been accepted at five schools, one of them UNH. I really liked UNH, but all of a sudden, there's no immunization requirement. I'm immunized. I believe in immunizations. I believe in science and the value of public health. Why would I take the chance of going to a New Hampshire state school, when I can go to a high quality educational institution in my own home state, or in a different state to get a great education. I know that I can be in the classroom and don't have to worry about the person that I'm sitting next to.
I think it would be a shame that there had to be some type of barrier, whether it's a virtual barrier or actually a physical barrier, to separate out students with one form of immunization protection versus another. I know there's a lot of controversy just about the issue about COVID vaccination and what privileges one gets over another, if you can prove that you're vaccinated. All it does, in my mind, it reinforces these divisions in our society about what we value and what we don't. I'm all for personal freedom. I do think, however, that there is a difference between exercising your personal freedom versus committing yourself to a college university experience where have to bear some self responsibility. That's my personal belief, not reflective of my role here.
Tyler: Is there any sort of information that you would like the general public to know both about? immunizations or the COVID-19 vaccine that you feel isn't very clear?
Dr. Degnan: Well, there's been a lot made about some of the new technology that's been involved in the generation of COVID vaccinations, at least the three major ones, Pfizer, Moderna, and the Johnson and Johnson/Janssen vaccine. They're all they're all mRNA vaccines. It turns out that the mRNA technology has actually been studied in research for years, and is really a timely and appropriate solution for the creation of a rapid vaccination effort. It's by no means experimental. There's been long proven safety record with mRNA vaccines.
There's no question that they've been effective, and I think we're even starting to see the impact here at the university already, with the numbers of our cases beginning to drop. It’s been multifactorial. I do think that well over a third of our campus community, maybe even approaching a half of our active current active campus population has been vaccinated already. I understand that for some who have been cautious, and not wanting to jump in and receive the vaccination right away, that they see these numbers of new cases dropping, they see society beginning to open again, and they feel that, well, I waited and things are better. So maybe I'll just continue to hold off on receiving the vaccination? I think the more and more that I read, there is a real concern for kind of a resurgence, or reactivation or renewed, activity of the COVID virus as we transition into next late fall and early winter.
This year has been brutal for all of us but I can't even imagine being a student. Having spent a year the way we just spent this last year, I'm really concerned that if we don't have a significant volume of vaccination within our student population, that there's a risk that we could fall back into a more restrictive mode next winter. I don't mean that as a scare tactic, but I just think that's the reality. It’s okay if students are hesitant. It's okay if they want to think about it and carefully weighed their decisions. But if they really, really want to see the university come back into a normal mode of operation and social events and athletic events and the things that we all enjoy. I just need to put in a plug for the importance of being vaccinated to make that happen.
Anna: Correct me if I'm wrong, your role at UNH is the primary care provider of a lot of young people? Am I right about that? And just talking about the general vaccine hesitancy, it sounds like more and more people are turning to their doctors to answer questions. If you wouldn't mind kind of generally talking about what are the main concerns you're hearing? How do you address them? like what has been your approach to addressing those common concerns about the vaccines?
Dr. Degnan: You're correct in that we are essentially a kind of a medical home away from home for many of the students and, for some students, we are their primary source of medical care. They don't have any other options or alternatives for healthcare while they're here. We've always had a larger public health role in supporting University operations, but that's really been amplified this last year, which has been really fascinating and interesting, but a little stressful too.
What we hear from students: Not so much as a sense of caution. A lot of it is concerned about side effects related to the vaccination. They hear in the news and they hear from friends that have received the vaccination, and especially after the second vaccination, that there may be a period of feeling it mildly ill, maybe a little low grade fever, chills, muscle aches, really tired. Typically, that's a very short period of time, often no more than 24 hours. I think for a lot of students, they hear that and perhaps they have in-class responsibilities that they need to attend to, maybe they've got an upcoming exam, maybe there's something important coming up where they just feel like they can't really afford to take that time to lay low and stay in bed for a day while they were recovering. I understand that. Although it would be great for them to be vaccinated right away, I see the end of the semester creating an opportunity for those folks to then pursue vaccinations.
Anna: Are you hearing anybody say something along the lines of, you know, I think I got sick, I think I probably have antibodies so I don't need to be vaccinated. Are you hearing that? What's your response to that?
Dr. Degnan: Well, I'll use my own personal example. I was sure that I had - back in last March, February, March, when we were just really identifying COVID and we started to have our first individuals test positive on campus - I was sure that I had been exposed. I had a period where I wasn't feeling well. I had to take a little time off work. I thought for sure I had COVID. I actually went and had an antibody level done and I had nothing. If I was exposed, I didn't generate an immune response. For me, that was really compelling, to emphasize the importance of adequate vaccination for me. Of those 2300 people that have been diagnosed with COVID, probably 2200 have come through our doors. So it's pretty high risk here. I wanted to be sure that myself and especially all of our staff were protected.
Anna: And how reliable are those antibody tests? Like either the one that you took, or one of the ones that somebody could get their hands on is our big? How do you interpret the results of those?
Dr. Degnan: We don't usually recommend doing an antibody test for precisely that reason. It's possible that you can generate an immune response against COVID, for instance, or any other infection, but it just won't be measurable by doing an antibody level. Or you can show protection against antibody, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you have any long term protection. All it means is that, at that moment, you have antibodies that may be somewhat protective, but in a week or two or a month, that could all be gone and in your right back to ground zero again.
Anna: Just a reminder that this interview was recorded in May of 2021, before we started seeing the impacts of the delta variant of COVID-19. Students have returned to campus this fall and have been asked to voluntarily provide their vaccination record to the University’s health system. More than 80% of faculty and staff were vaccinated as of the start of the semester and students rates were around 70%. The University expects that number to increase as students upload those vaccination records. We’re all still masked up when inside and we are tested regularly, but those of us who are vaccinated are required to test less frequently, and we’re holding the line on COVID infections on campus.
I asked Tyler what his main takeaways were from following this bill and discussing this issue with experts.
Tyler: A message that was almost kind of a sub text message that I really liked, is that science is always changing and updated. As we gain new data, we get new advice and that kind of thing. It's not like a concrete entity, if you will. I think that just in the lay person's perspective, when, especially when the pandemic was just starting, we would get new and conflicting information week after week after week. And it was because we were getting more and more data about what was working, what wasn't working and how to prevent the spread. To the lay person who doesn't really understand how science works, it was more of a inauthentic and conflicting message in that it really made it seem like the people that were in these higher governing bodies didn't know what they were talking about or what they were doing. So being able to communicate that science is always changing once we get new data, I think would not only be really relevant to us as like presenting science in this format, but also would just give the general population a better understanding that science is always changing when we get more information.
Anna: So if you’re not sure what to make of all this…why not talk to your doctor. They’ll be able to put all the noise into perspective. Thanks to Dr. Degnan for helping us to understand the situation on our campus and all the gratitude in the world isn’t enough to all of those health care workers who are putting their lives on the line, keeping us healthy and safe. And thanks to you for listening.
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