According to recent reporting by WMUR, New Hampshire is currently the only New England state not to join the regional vaccine recommendation coalition.
This coalition is made up of all other New England states as well as Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey, reported WMUR, adding that it comes as a response to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent guidance no longer recommending the COVID-19 vaccine to healthy children and pregnant women.
In response to questions about why N.H. would not be participating in the coalitions, Gov. Kelly Ayotte said she did not want to politicize healthcare.
“And really making sure that that decision is between a patient and their doctor, and that guidance that comes out is health-based, and that’s what we want it to be,” Ayotte told WMUR. “We always talk to our neighbors about these issues, but we’re going to make sure that we continue to rely on the health experts in terms of our guidance.”
However, in an effort to “not politicize healthcare,” Ayotte has done just that; she made a non-political issue deeply political. It honestly feels as though she is pandering to the Libertarian, Free-Stater ideologues that have been moving to N.H. over the past 10-20 years.
This small minority of the population has capitalized on the state’s dysfunctional and unprofessional government system and has rendered it completely limp and toothless. Any life that was in our government has been completely sucked out of it; this refusal to join the vaccine coalition is another prime example of how something meaningless has become a point of contention and further embarrasses our state.
People may think that if this is meaningless, then why should I care what action the government takes? It is meaningless in the political sense; making recommendations does not force people into getting inoculated for a particular illness. It does not force anyone to make their children get inoculated, as there are already immunization requirements for public school children, and exemptions can be made for those children who qualify. The recommendations program would simply inform the public of their options and what medical experts suggest.
The Free-State Libertarians who are moving to N.H. need to completely detach from the state government. If they are so keen on creating an anarcho-capitalist utopia, they need to find a good place in the North Woods and set up shop there. They need to create their own failed state and not ruin ours; they have already proven their form of government does not function on at the local level. It was so bad that Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling wrote a book called “A Libertarian Walks into a Bear,” in which the town of Grafton, N.H. eliminated all public services including the fire and police department and the town transfer station. Unsurprisingly, not maintaining a functioning government and services in the middle of the woods incentivizes the local bear population to eat the food waste that is not being taken care of.
Now these weirdos want to take the failed experiment to a grander scale, which is just lunacy in its purest form. They do not want to educate our children, they do not want to publicize medical expert recommendations, they do not want to support higher education or help the poor, needy or hungry – all in the name of freedom and liberty, though from what I do not know. No one is forcing anyone to make choices by making health recommendations or any of those other topics either. No one is forcing you to send your kid to public school or college and certainly no one is forcing them to go work in a soup kitchen or support programs that would benefit those in need.
Their fear is not infringement on freedom or liberty, it is a fear they may actually support a good idea for once in their lives. Maybe their parents instilled an individualist set of ideals into them and they fear some sort of godly moral failure so they project it onto others.
I just hope Free-Staters take away two things: do not be afraid of government or good ideas, they are not scary and I can promise you, the fear of people somehow trying to strip you of rights is just fundamentally untrue. Finally, if you got the individualist schtick, it is OK to ask for advice or help. That does not make you a bad person or a failure. However, I would recommend you find a new god and/or find some new people to hang out with. The individualist ideology is only to your detriment and to the detriment of the rest of us as well.
Timothy Fitzpatrick can be contacted at
tfitzpatrick@kscequinox.com
