The state House voted, 186-168, Feb. 12 to remove hepatitis B from the list of required vaccines in New Hampshire.
Rep. Kelley Potenza, a Rochester Republican and sponsor of House Bill 1719, framed it as an effort to align with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which under new Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy has moved in a controversial direction on vaccines.
In December, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted to change the federal government’s guidance to not recommend the hepatitis B vaccine at birth for infants unless the mother tested positive for the virus. The decision came months after Kennedy fired every member of the panel and replaced many of them with fellow vaccine skeptics and was condemned by dozens of major medical organizations.
Advertisement
Potenza has in the past argued that aluminum ingredients in the vaccines cause myriad health complications. However, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the CDC have all previously reported that aluminum is included in vaccines in doses too small to be toxic.
Supporters say the bill targets government overreach
“What (HB 1719) does is make the hep B vaccination a real choice,” Rep. Matt Drew, a Manchester Republican and co-sponsor of the bill, said on the House floor. “Not a government mandate with the force of the state behind it and the lurking threat of being banned from your day care or school if you refuse.”
State law allows for exemptions on religious and medical grounds, though Drew argued these were insufficient.
Democrats say bill harms public health
The bill was passed over Democrats’ opposition, who decried the bill’s potential effects on public health.
Advertisement
Rep. William Palmer, a Cornish Democrat, noted that since the universal hepatitis B vaccine was introduced in 1991, “there’s been a 99% drop in infant infections.” After 1 billion doses administered around the world, he said, it has proven to be “one of the safest and most effective of all vaccines.” Indeed, from 1993 to 2019, there was a 99% drop in infections among children and adolescents, according to a letter from the American Public Health Association and a coalition of health professionals.
“The peer-reviewed data around the world supports this impressive safety profile,” Palmer said. “And we should not be misled by reports that have not been subjected to such vigorous review.”
This bill will be considered by the House Finance Committee before it heads to the Senate.
Vaccine religious exemption bill passes, too
In a 197-163 vote, the House also approved another vaccine related bill, House Bill 1584. The bill would allow parents to receive religious exemptions from vaccines simply by providing any written statement attesting to the religious exemption as opposed to filling out a specific form created by the Department of Health and Human Services, as is the process now.
Additionally, the bill would require that any time the Department of Health and Human Services promotes vaccines, it must write that “medical and religious exemptions are available under New Hampshire law” in “bold, clearly noticeable, starred print on the front or top portion of the material.”
Advertisement
The original version of the bill imposed a fine of up to $1,000 on any department employee or officer who violates this requirement, but the bill was amended before it passed to allow department management to handle disciplinary action.
SWANZEY, N.H. (WHDH) – An investigation is underway after a man apparently drowned while swimming in a pond in Swanzey, New Hampshire on Sunday afternoon.
Officers responding to a reported drowning at Wilson Pond around 3:30 p.m. learned Fredy Gavilanes Jami, 42, of Ecuador, had been swimming with three friends near the shoreline when he went into an area with a steep drop-off and went missing, according to police.
The first office arriving at the scene found Gavilanes Jami and pulled him from the water. He was taken to Cheshire Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
The incident remains under investigation.
Advertisement
Anyone with information that may assist the investigation is asked to contact Trooper First Class Micah Jones at Micah.A.Jones@dos.nh.gov or (603) 724-8026.
(Copyright (c) 2026 Sunbeam Television. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
Join our Newsletter for the latest news right to your inbox
A 20-year-old Massachusetts man died Saturday after suffering a medical emergency while hiking at Monadnock State Park.
New Hampshire Fish and Game conservation officers were notified at about 4:11 p.m. that a hiker on the Cascade Link Trail, about three-quarters of a mile from park headquarters on Poole Road, was experiencing a medical crisis. Good Samaritans who came upon the hiker called 911 and began CPR as his condition worsened.
Conservation officers and multiple emergency agencies responded to the scene, including mountain patrol rangers, area fire departments, ambulance services, law enforcement and Massachusetts Life Flight.
Despite extensive rescue efforts, the hiker, identified as Joshua Luth, 20, of Lancaster, Mass., was pronounced dead.
Advertisement
The cause of death remains under investigation by the New Hampshire Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
Advertisement
Ryann Brooks is the Ledger-Transcript editor. She was the 2023 Kansas Press Association Journalist of the Year. You can contact her at rbrooks@ledgertranscript.com.
More by Ryann Brooks
Courts have always been the last resort for protecting people’s rights.
When lawmakers and the administration failed you, you could turn to the courts for an unbiased opinion.
Unfortunately, that unbiased opinion is currently thought to be more than slightly tainted judging by some of the decisions made by courts, particularly the US Supreme Court with the potential for tarnishing New Hampshire’s.
However, if you believe courts are inherently nonpolitical, you are either naive or do not know how judges arrived at their lifetime appointments.
In New Hampshire, judges are nominated by the governor and approved by the Executive Council, much like in Washington where the president nominates and the US Senate approves.
Think back to recent nominees from the Trump administration who all came pre-approved by the Federalist Society, an oligarchy-funded Libertarian leaning organization with access to more money than any of us will ever see in our lifetimes to ram their golden boys and girls through the Senate.
And if you do not believe the US Supreme Court is openly partisan then why is gerrymandering fine in Republican Alabama and Louisiana, but not in Democratic Virginia?
Advertisement
The US Supreme Court has been partisan since the Republican majority stopped the vote counting in Florida after the 2000 election.
In New Hampshire, the nominees often come from the ranks of superior court justices, but lately have also come from the governor’s office or administration or the attorney general’s office.
And their partisan leanings do tend to closely follow those of the individual nominating them although there once was an unwritten rule at least one supreme court justice has to be from the minority party — usually a Democrat — but since judge Gary Hicks left the bench with his 70th birthday in November 2023, there has been no Democrat on the state’s high court.
The court is set to decide the Rand education funding case with the state’s brief due next month, and oral arguments before the end of the year.
The court just recently ruled on a very similar education funding case decided by the same judge who wrote the Rand decision, Superior Court judge David Ruoff, that the state has failed to meet its constitutional obligation to provide and fund an adequate education for the state’s children.
Advertisement
The Rand case went a step further saying the state education funding system using local property taxes to cover the vast gap between what the state pays for an adequate education and its costs, is unconstitutional because local property taxes have widely varying rates when the state’s constitution calls for proportional and reasonable taxation.
For more than 30 years, the foundation of the state’s education system and its funding has been the two Claremont decisions first finding public education is the state’s responsibility to provide and fund, and then that the state’s funding system was unconstitutional.
The state has already stated it will ask the court to overturn the two Claremont decisions in its repeal of the Rand case.
The Attorney General’s Office would not ask for the Claremont decisions to be overturned without the consent of Gov. Kelly Ayotte, and if it did, the attorney general would be unemployed and that is not the case.
The attorneys for the Rand plaintiffs, a group of commercial and residential property owners, hence property taxpayers, asked four of the five Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves from the case and they all refused.
Advertisement
Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald was the Attorney General when the state fought the ConVal education lawsuit and a key player in developing the state’s strategy and execution.
He recused himself from that case because he was the attorney general when it was fought in superior court, but not in the Rand case saying the two cases are different, he has a constitutional duty to sit, he has no association with the Rand case, and he swore to be unbiased and therefore should be assumed to be unbiased.
But the court’s rules on recusal are fairly clear when a judge should step aside.
“A judge shall disqualify himself or herself in any proceeding in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, including but not limited to the following circumstances:” the rule reads and goes on to list a number of instances when recusal should be the practice.
The key here is “not limited to” which makes it more expansive, not narrower.
Advertisement
In his order dismissing the recusal motion, MacDonald took the opportunity to slap the hands of the plaintiffs’ attorneys.
“In this case, it is perfectly appropriate for plaintiffs’ counsel to argue the facts and law surrounding whether this is the same ‘matter in controversy’ or that I should not be sitting on a matter involving the potential overruling of a case from which I was just disqualified.
“However, it is not appropriate to suggest, as plaintiffs’ counsel do, that if the outcome they seek — my disqualification — is not achieved, then the integrity of the court, public confidence in the judiciary, and the rule of law itself will be undermined. It has been a highly unfortunate development in our recent national history for public officials to attack judges and courts based on outcomes in cases. Here, the plaintiffs’ arguments are of a similar ilk: if their motion is denied, the court will necessarily lack integrity.
“Such attacks by public officials are not appropriate. Among other consequences, they threaten judicial independence. Because lawyers occupy a special place in our legal system, they should guard against such illegitimate attacks, rather than take a page from the same playbook,” MacDonald wrote.
His potential bias in the Rand case does not disrupt the integrity of the court, but questioning his potential bias does evidently.
Advertisement
Using MacDonald’s logic, how does the integrity of the court not be questioned when Gov. Ayotte blasts the same Supreme Court when it made a ruling she did not like in the ConVal case?
“The court reached the wrong decision today. The fact is, New Hampshire is top 10 in the country when it comes to funding our children’s education,” Ayotte said in a statement about the supreme court’s 3-2 decision affirming Ruoff’s ConVal decision.
And the other thing about her statement, the state may be in the top 10 for spending on public education, but most of that money is from local property taxes, whereas the state is dead last in the percentage of money it spends on education which is why there were the Claremont, Londonderry, ConVal and Rand lawsuits over the years.
On the Legislative side, Senate President Sharon Carson and House Speaker Sherman Packard – the Legislature’s two top Republicans – issued a joint statement criticizing the ConVal decision calling it judicial overreach.
“We are disappointed that the Court continues to insert itself into the Legislature’s role in determining state aid to local school districts,” they said.
Advertisement
The integrity of the court may have taken a bigger hit from the controversy over the dismissal, short-term layoff, and rehiring of Dianne Martin, the former administrative director of the judicial branch, who has been aligned with MacDonald.
A whistleblower raised the issue of the quick turnaround that allowed her to collect nearly $50,000 in severance and owed benefits.
And former associate justice Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi did the court’s reputation no favors when she went to then Gov. Chris Sununu concerning the attorney general’s investigation into her husband Geno Marconi, who was the director of NH Port Authority.
When she came back onto the court after her administrative leave, she had the good sense to recuse herself from all cases involving the attorney general’s office.
Two of the four attorneys the plaintiffs asked to recuse themselves were at the attorney general’s office and involved in the Claremont and ConVal cases.
Advertisement
Associate Justice Patrick Donovan was one of the attorneys fighting the original Claremont lawsuit, the court is now being asked to overturn by the state.
Associate Justice Daniel Will was the solicitor general working with MacDonald in developing the strategy of and oversaw the state’s legal fight and worked with two of the attorneys who will argue the state’s case in the Rand case before the Supreme Court.
Bryan Gould was a long time attorney for the state Republican Party and Republican causes including issues raised over the original Claremont decisions.
He called the plaintiffs’ contentions “innuendo” in his dismissal of the recusal motion, while the plaintiffs noted in their request for reconsideration, “the public statements and expressions of concern that Plaintiffs documented are not ‘innuendo.’ They are legitimate, on-the-record evidence that reasonable members of the public have, in fact, questioned Justice Gould’s impartiality.”
With four of the five justices on the court associated with cases if not issues that will be front and center in the Rand appeal, no matter which way they rule, there is bound to be concern how unbiased any human being can be in such a controversial situation.
Advertisement
That certainly appears to comply with “A judge shall disqualify himself or herself in any proceeding in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”
Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.
Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn and their two rescue dogs.
