Repealing statutory immunization requirements for children.
This bill is not about banning vaccines. It is about ending coercion and restoring informed consent.
In medical ethics, informed consent is not optional. It requires two things: knowledge and freedom. When either is missing, consent does not exist. This is not a modern political invention. It is a foundational ethical principle, articulated most clearly in the Nuremberg Code, which states that voluntary consent is “absolutely essential.”
Yet today, we deny medical ethics and claim consent exists even when it plainly does not.
Modern medicine itself acknowledges that many risks are discovered only after approval, through post-marketing surveillance. That means the public is exposed before all risks are fully known. History confirms this pattern again and again: medical products approved, recommended, and sometimes mandated—only for serious harms to be discovered later.
When risks are unknown or undisclosed, doctors cannot fully inform patients, and patients cannot meaningfully weigh benefits and risks. Consent already fails at that point.
Mandates then complete the ethical collapse. A parent facing school or daycare exclusion is not freely choosing a medical intervention. A decision made under threat of punishment is not consent—it is compulsion.
Those who object to removing vaccine mandates may argue that doing so will reduce overall vaccine uptake, endangering the overall health of the population. However, in New Hampshire, religious and medical exemptions are already relatively easy to obtain. That means families who do not wish to vaccinate are largely already not doing so. Ending the mandate is therefore unlikely to dramatically change overall vaccine uptake—but it will restore the ethical requirement of consent. It removes the state from the role of enforcer and returns medical decisions to where they belong: between families and their healthcare providers.
Opponents also argue that mandates are necessary to protect public health — that voluntary adoption is inadequate, therefore compulsion is required. But the evidence does not support that claim. Many developed nations maintain high voluntary vaccination rates without making vaccination a condition of participation in society. They succeed not through coercion, but through education, trust, and persuasion.
That is the proper role of public health.
Public health works best as a voluntary relationship between officials and the public. When agencies rely on threats, compulsion, and exclusion, they may achieve compliance on paper, but they destroy trust. And once trust is gone, every future public health recommendation becomes harder.
Ending mandates does not remove vaccines. It does not prevent parents from choosing to vaccinate. It does not restrict availability. What it does is restore the most basic right of all: the right to say no without penalty.
HB1811 restores informed consent, returns public health to its proper role, and rejects the false idea that coercion is necessary for good medicine.
For these reasons, I urge you to support HB 1811.
