For the second straight year, the New Hampshire Senate has rejected a House-passed effort to rewrite how families claim a religious exemption from the state’s school vaccination requirements. According to the New Hampshire Bulletin, senators on Thursday, May 15, killed House Bill 1022 outright and stripped the most consequential changes out of House Bill 1584 before approving a substantially narrower version. The result is a familiar pattern for the small but persistent coalition of conservative lawmakers who have made the state’s exemption form a focal point of their public-health platform.
For NH parents weighing how to respond to school immunization requirements this fall, the practical takeaway is that the existing process is staying in place. The form created by the Department of Health and Human Services remains the path through which parents can claim a religious exemption, and there will be no statutory carveout in 2026 allowing any written statement to suffice. That outcome lines up with how Gov. Kelly Ayotte has framed the issue in past veto messages, and it caps a session in which several anti-vaccine efforts have stalled or been narrowed at the State House.
What HB 1022 Would Have Done
State law in New Hampshire requires children to be vaccinated against polio, tetanus, hepatitis B, mumps, pertussis, rubella, rubeola, varicella, diphtheria and haemophilus influenzae type B before entering school or childcare. Families with religious objections or medical contraindications can apply for an exemption, and the religious version of that exemption is granted through a DHHS-issued form.
House Bill 1022, sponsored by Manchester Republican Rep. Matt Drew, would have replaced the existing form with a much shorter standardized attestation. Under the bill’s proposed text, parents would have signed a single statement: “I, [insert parent or legal guardian’s name], hereby attest that I sincerely hold religious beliefs and/or engage in religious practices or observances that dictate the refusal to accept the required vaccinations for [insert child’s name], born [insert child’s date of birth].”
Supporters argued the change would reduce administrative friction and respect the sincerity of religious belief without forcing parents to disclose details about the substance of that belief. Opponents argued the simpler attestation would lower the practical threshold for opting out and contribute to declining immunization rates that public health officials nationally have linked to localized outbreaks of measles and pertussis in recent years.
The Senate rejected HB 1022 on Thursday, leaving the existing DHHS process in place. The vote followed last year’s similar trajectory, when both chambers passed House Bill 358, only for Gov. Ayotte to veto it. Ayotte’s veto message at the time noted, “the State already has an established process by which parents can claim a religious exemption, and I see no reason to change it.” Her position has effectively set a ceiling on how far the legislature can move on the question without a substantial shift in political winds.
How HB 1584 Was Trimmed
The Senate did not entirely walk away from the issue. House Bill 1584, sponsored by Rochester Republican Rep. Kelley Potenza, originally combined two ideas. The first would have eliminated forms altogether, establishing in state law that parents are not required to use any specific form and may instead “provide any written statement attesting to the religious exemption.” The second would have required DHHS to better inform parents of the available exemptions when the department promotes vaccines.
The Senate kept the second idea and dropped the first. As passed, HB 1584 leaves the existing form requirement intact, but obligates DHHS to ensure that exemption information accompanies its outreach about routine childhood immunizations. The bill also picked up two unrelated amendments along the way: a pharmacy-pricing provision requiring pharmacies to inform patients of the lowest available price for their prescription medications, and language redirecting revenue from the state’s tobacco tax and liquor sales toward a specific funding line.
The omnibus shape of the amended bill is typical of the closing weeks of a New Hampshire legislative session, when committees and floor sponsors fold unrelated but procedurally compatible policy ideas onto a single moving vehicle. That helps each individual piece survive, but it also means HB 1584 in its final form is no longer primarily about vaccines. The vaccine-related provision that remains, requiring DHHS to mention exemptions in its vaccination promotion materials, is a meaningful disclosure change even if it falls well short of the original bill’s policy goals.
Why the Anti-Vax Bills Keep Coming Back
The pattern is now familiar in Concord. A faction of conservative legislators files a bill each session to ease the religious exemption process. The bill clears the House with relatively little resistance, then meets a tougher reception in the Senate, where committee chairs and the governor’s office have signaled they are unwilling to revisit the existing form. Last year ended with an Ayotte veto. This year ended with the Senate doing the work first.
That dynamic is part of a broader 2026 picture in which several vaccine-adjacent bills have stalled. Our earlier coverage of how the slate of anti-vaccine bills wound down at the State House showed a House Commerce Committee using the interim study procedural maneuver to quietly kill a hepatitis B vaccine assessment fight, while related religious exemption proposals encountered the same Senate brick wall. We covered that hepatitis B fight in more detail in our piece on HB 1719 and Rep. Potenza’s role in steering it to interim study.
What is changing, slowly, is the public health context. New England has been spared the worst of the recent measles resurgence, but NH public health officials have spent the past year reminding pediatricians and school nurses that herd immunity thresholds are not abstract numbers. The MMR vaccine, for example, must reach roughly 95 percent coverage in school populations to reliably suppress measles transmission. A handful of communities in the state already sit below that line, particularly in places where religious or philosophical objections have clustered.
Public health groups have consistently opposed the religious exemption rewrites on the grounds that any friction-reducing change is likely to push coverage rates lower in the communities most at risk of an outbreak. The counter-argument from sponsors is that the existing process is more cumbersome than necessary and effectively penalizes families with sincere objections. Both arguments are essentially about how high the bar to opt out should be. Thursday’s votes leave that bar where it has been.
Ayotte’s Posture and the Senate’s Discipline
Ayotte’s first-term posture on vaccine policy reflects a governor willing to defend the existing administrative structure even as she has been willing to break with her party on other public health questions. Her active role in salvaging the FAST Forward wraparound mental health initiative under SB 498 demonstrated she will spend political capital to keep specific programs alive. On the vaccine exemption question, she has been equally specific about defending the current process.
Senate leadership’s decision to dispose of HB 1022 this year before it could reach the governor’s desk is a small but telling sign of internal coordination. By killing the bill themselves, senators avoid the optics of a second consecutive veto on essentially the same idea. That keeps the legislative-executive relationship cleaner heading into the final weeks of the session and frees both branches to focus on bigger fights, including the closing rounds of the budget and the end-of-session education package.
For families, the operational picture is simple. Children entering NH schools or licensed childcare programs this fall still need to be up to date on the state’s required immunizations or hold an active medical or religious exemption. The DHHS religious exemption form remains the path. Pediatricians, school nurses and town clerks should not expect a procedural change to land between now and the start of the school year.
What to Watch Next
The most likely next moves are quieter. DHHS will need to update its public-facing vaccine outreach materials to comply with the new HB 1584 disclosure requirement once the bill becomes law. That work will play out administratively rather than legislatively, but the substance of how DHHS describes exemptions in its materials is itself a policy choice with real consequences. Advocates on both sides of the issue will pay close attention to the tone and prominence of the new disclosures.
A second open question is whether sponsors will file another exemption rewrite in 2027. Given the consistency of the Senate’s posture and the governor’s stated position, that bill would face the same headwinds. But the political coalition that has driven these bills shows no sign of retreating. The same arguments, slightly reworked, are likely to land back in the House early next year.
For now, the 2026 chapter on religious vaccine exemptions has closed with the status quo intact and a narrow disclosure requirement headed for the governor’s desk. That is a small win for public health advocates and a familiar disappointment for the lawmakers who have been pushing the issue every session for the better part of a decade.
