This bill has an amendment (2021-0032h) that will more than double the cost of the original bill, calls for a report of a fake cost analysis, prohibits doctors and pharmacists from opting out of this government program, and calls for an unworkable effective date.

This bill will not provide vaccines for you if you are age 65 or older, and covered by Medicare. Your doctor and pharmacist will still have to purchase their own vaccines for you.

This bill will not provide vaccines to the poor, on Medicaid. Your doctor and pharmacist will still have to purchase their own vaccines for you.

This bill will not provide vaccines for you if you are uninsured. Your doctor and pharmacists will still have to purchase their own vaccine inventory for you.

Yet this bill will add a minimum of $848,000 the first year to fund 9 new DHHS staff and to pay for the State Vaccine Registry. This amount can be increased at any time by DHHS.

The board of the NH Vaccine Association, of which DHHS has 3 seats, may vote itself any amount of “start up money for the next two years” above and beyond the $848,000.

Doctors and pharmacists would be required to maintain two separate inventories of vaccines with separate refrigerators and freezers to keep separate the “free” supply of vaccines from DHHS from the vaccines they have purchased themselves. There is no mechanism or program to maintain or monitor separate inventories and to protect the “free” supply from theft and misuse in the vast number of adults not covered by this program.

This bill would create abuse of the federal Vaccines for Children (VFC) contract, a contract intended only for the purchase of vaccines for needy children, based on Section 1928 of the federal Social Security Act that limits this vaccine purchase program to pediatric vaccines only. This violation of federal law would put the NH child vaccine program in jeopardy.

This bill would strip you of your right to legal and financial recourse that you are currently entited to for disability, blindness, and death that may result from a dangerous or defective vaccine.

This bill is likely to increase the costs of vaccines to doctors and pharmacists as it will hurt their ability to maintain volume discount purchase programs. No one is currently paying market prices for vaccine inventory.

Doctors and pharmacists may be less likely to provide vaccines for those age 65 and older when existing discounts are lost. As a result, less people will be vaccinated.

While good intentioned, this bill is truly a solution in search of a problem as private industry (doctors, hospitals, and pharmacists) are already purchasing vaccines cost effectively without adding over a million dollars in administrative costs every year and vaccines are readily available for adults at the doctors, at the hospital, at clinics, at corner drug stores, and even at the grocery store!

This bill was not a request of DHHS or the NH Vaccine Association. In this time of the COVID pandemic with DHHS staff working around the clock for months, it is unreasonable and unfair to even ask them to take on a program of this type at this time.

Talking points from Laura Condon NH Director of Advocacy for NVIC