Board of Aldermen 05-25-2021 Page 32
Next paragraph — The Board of Health strongly recommends that all those with conditions who are
taking medications that weaken your immune system, continue to take all precautions even if you are
fully vaccinated as you may not be fully protected. This does not keep us from rescinding the mask
mandate as directed but it gives additional guidance to the citizens of Nashua as presented to us from
the Health Department through Legal.
ON THE QUESTION
President Wilshire
You’ve heard that motion. Alderman Lopez.
Alderman Lopez
Thank you. Sol! had approached Alderman Wilshire earlier, well immediately after the Board of Health
meeting regarding this because as Alderman Clemons had mentioned, he had looked at the CDC Guidelines
and did not wait for the Board of Health to have their discussion and make their recommendation. The Board of
Health has been asked to have that discussion and that recommendation since January and their difficulty as
medical practitioners and their role as Board of Health professionals that we appoint them to make health
recommendations is that it is very difficult to figure out statistical, data driven guidelines for this particular
situation; when it is safe and when it is not because there isn’t a way to identify who is vaccinated and who is
not. And there isn’t universal access to the vaccinations yet so there are populations and situations, | know
that public transportation was one that was mentioned and that schools were mentioned, although the point
was made that that’s in the Board of Education’s not ours. But then it additionally in places like homeless
shelters where you can’t account for what everybody’s experience is, what their infection rate, and it is very,
very important to prevent an outbreak in Nashua. Because, while the vaccine improves your resistance to the
infection, it’s not 100% and although it does increase your ability to manage the infection, you can still get it,
you can still transport, you can still pass it on to people who are unvaccinated.
So the Board of Health struggled with that very heavily. They struggled with what the messaging should be
and throughout that process it has been very, very confusing for business owners and people in the community
who see the CDC recommending one thing and the CDC allowing another thing. We see the Governor
authorizing one thing and his health care advisors recommending a different thing. And then the dangers as
perceived by local authorities changes from town to town. Some places have masking ordinances; some don't.
So the difficulty now is that in transitioning from having a masking mandate to not having a citywide one is we
could confuse the public, we could create a scenario where there’s either confrontation or willful violation of a
City Ordinance because people just don’t understand where we are at with that. In addition to all of those
circumstances, it also makes sense as motioned to make the masking ordinance recommendations that we
receive take effect tonight so that it is clear to the public. We've made a decision we have changed the
guidelines, we have acted quickly and we are not waiting for another Committee from the Aldermen to rehash
what the Board of Health has already struggled with.
| just wanted to clarify those points with regards to the Board of Health’s position. They are not saying that it is
safe to remove masks, | heard some people talking about let’s have mask burning parties; that’s ridiculous
there’s a fire danger right now for one thing. But there are definite positive signs, we do need to move forward
and we do need to figure out how to encourage vaccination. So it is the intent of the Board of Health to
encourage vaccination. Some people talk about a reward, some people talk about this being the end of the
road. It probably isn’t. As far as Public Health goes, there’s always thing to watch out and they are going to be
the ones who continue to be the sentinels watching to see if there’s another outbreak overseas of something
that’s resistant to vaccines or if there’s a surge in vaccine resistant cases here in Nashua. So the Board of
Health wants to make it clear that it is not time to celebrate. They don’t celebrate until everybody is healthy
and until risk is mitigated but they do recognize that this is a point where we can start to modify some
behaviors and some guidelines and encourage vaccination over the masking.
