Live Free or Believe Anything: Matt Drew’s War on Vaccines: An Open Letter to Representative Matt Drew

Dear Representative Drew,

House Bill 1811, your effort to repeal all statutory vaccine mandates in New Hampshire, was decisively rejected by the House on a 192–155 vote. Thirty‑four Republicans crossed over to join Democrats in killing the bill, a notable rebuke given the chamber’s narrow partisan balance. The margin suggests that, whatever sympathy some members may have for “medical freedom” rhetoric, a critical mass was unwilling to dismantle long‑standing school and childcare immunization requirements wholesale. In practical terms, the vote leaves New Hampshire’s existing vaccine framework intact and signals that your maximalist “repeal every mandate” project is, at least for now, too extreme even for many in your own caucus.

In a recent op-ed in the New Hampshire Journal titled “DREW: We Must Repeal Vaccine Mandates to Restore Public Trust,” you argue that “vaccine mandates have never really been about science—they have always been about control,” and you urge the General Court to “repeal every vaccine mandate on our books.” In that op-ed, you describe children “forced to take shots they did not need” and accuse public health of “weaponizing” vaccines. In other words, Representative Drew, you’ve handed us a ready‑made case study for “Critical Thinking 101.” Your rhetoric gives us sweeping generalizations, emotionally charged anecdotes, and an absolute allergy to the dull, stubborn details of how evidence is actually evaluated. So let’s take one of your favorite examples and actually look at those details.

Let’s start with the supposedly “weaponized” kidney transplant case at Dartmouth. In your op‑ed, you offer the Dartmouth‑Hitchcock kidney transplant case as Exhibit A in the “weaponization” of vaccines: a New Hampshire hospital “found to be in violation of the law” for refusing a transplant to a patient who declined COVID vaccination. The actual story is more prosaic. Dartmouth, like many transplant centers, required COVID vaccination as one of several conditions for listing candidates, on the unexciting theory that severely immunosuppressed patients do better if they’re protected against a virus that is particularly dangerous to them. After a patient complained, the Attorney General pointed to a 2022 Patients’ Bill of Rights clause that bars denying care “based solely” on vaccination status (Wait, isn’t that a mandate? Telling doctors who they must treat? But I digress). Dartmouth dropped the requirement to comply with state law but publicly reaffirmed that its policies are based on “proven scientific data” and that COVID vaccination is “highly effective” at reducing serious illness, especially in transplant recipients. What you’ve done is take a conflict between an evidence‑based risk‑management protocol and a politically crafted statute and inflate it into proof that “medicine is about control, not care.” That may make for stirring copy, but it’s a terrible way to think about either medicine or law.

I’ll admit I can’t help but be fascinated by your take on these issues. It’s not quite RFK Jr.–level spectacle, but it’s in the same family: you’re causing an intellectual pile‑up on the policy highway, and I keep slowing down to look when I know I should just keep driving. I keep telling patients not to obsess over things they can’t control; these days I have to keep telling myself the same thing, with mixed results. Still, I find myself circling back to your crusade against vaccine mandates, not because I enjoy the stress but because it’s a nearly perfect specimen of how pseudo-argument dresses itself up as sober public policy

Part of the appeal, for me, is professional deformation—déformation professionnelle if we’re being fancy. I’ve spent forty‑plus years reading journals and listening to people misuse the word “data” as if saying it twice makes it real. I’m no biostatistician, but you can’t marinate in science for decades without picking up a feel for how actual evidence behaves. So when you announce that “vaccine mandates have never really been about science—they have always been about control,” my ears perk up. Not because it’s a bold new insight, but because it’s such a clean example of how to slide past facts and head straight for drama.

Your op‑ed reads like a greatest‑hits compilation of our current epistemic mess. Children “forced” to take “shots they did not need,” workers “threatened with exclusion,” public health transformed into a kind of secular cult gleefully “weaponizing” vaccines. No need to distinguish between long‑standing school immunizations and pandemic‑era COVID policy. No need to ask the boring questions—what risks were we trying to reduce? Did vaccination actually lower hospitalizations and deaths? —when you can jump straight to “enslaving free citizens to arbitrary decrees.” Why wrestle with risk/benefit ratios when you can reach for the word “slavery”?

By your logic, we should probably scrap speed limits while we’re at it. After all, they’re “coercive”: drive too fast, lose your license, maybe your job. Yet somehow most of us grasp that the existence of consequences does not mean a rule is “never about safety—always about control.” We accept speed limits, restaurant inspections, and building codes because they measurably reduce harm. Vaccine mandates live in that same boring, evidence‑based neighborhood. You have simply decided to rebrand that as “slavery” when the topic is needles instead of miles per hour.

The funny thing about your “it’s all about control” line is that it doesn’t just kneecap vaccine mandates. If you apply it consistently, you’ve just pulled the rug out from under most of modern law. Anti‑discrimination statutes? Coercive: tell employers they can’t fire someone for being Black or pregnant, and you’re “controlling” them. Sexual‑harassment rules? Coercive: threaten someone’s job if they won’t stop hitting on subordinates. Environmental regulations, food‑safety rules, drunk‑driving laws—all of them limit what you’re allowed to do and attach consequences if you ignore them. On your theory, the fact that they constrain behavior would be proof that they’re “never really about” equality, or safety, or public health. They’re just “control.”

Once you define freedom as “my ability to do what I want, without consequences, even when it hurts other people,” you’ve abandoned any coherent principle that would justify any protective law. On that view, bans on slavery, rape, assault, fraud, or dumping toxins into the drinking water are all just “control.” Most of us, thankfully, still recognize a basic distinction between liberty and license—between protecting your right to live your life and giving you carte blanche to endanger or exploit everyone around you.

This, I would argue, is where critical thinking has gone to die. We’ve managed to create a public discourse in which calling something “coercion” is treated as a full rebuttal of any underlying evidence. The mere fact that a policy has consequences—“Do X if you want to work in this ICU / attend this school / serve in this particular role”—is taken as proof that it cannot possibly be grounded in science. By that standard, seat‑belt laws and restaurant inspections are also “never about safety—always about control.” Somehow, that move rarely gets made.

So that’s where I want to end with you and HB 1811: not with name-calling (tempting though that is), but with the basic habits of thought your argument quietly discards. When you claim that mandates have “never” been about science, you are not just criticizing a few bad COVID decisions. You’re erasing decades of data on how vaccines actually work in the real world—schools where measles stops circulating when immunization is required, nursing homes where residents stop dying quite so often once staff vaccination goes up, transplant units where infection control isn’t just a philosophical preference but the difference between life and death. You don’t have to like every mandate to acknowledge that they were designed with those outcomes in mind.

In other words, Representative Drew, you’ve handed us a ready‑made case study for “Critical Thinking 101,” a course that, as I’ve complained before, nobody ever quite gets around to offering. Your rhetoric gives us almost everything we need: sweeping generalizations, emotionally charged anecdotes, and an absolute allergy to the dull, stubborn details of how evidence is actually evaluated. Once you slow down long enough to look at those details—at Dartmouth’s transplant policy, at school immunizations, at what “control” actually means in law—the story gets a lot less dramatic and a lot more complicated, which is to say, a lot more like the real world you were elected to govern.

Sincerely,
The Samurai Shrink