I am asking for your vote for Mindi Messmer for the New Hampshire Executive Council, District 3 in the September 8th primary election. Messmer is both a scientist and a member of the New Hampshire Science and Public Health Task Force, as well as a former representative in the NH House. Her professional resume includes both work on various environmental issues as well as studies of cancer clusters and prevention, many articles of which can be found in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Since early this year she has been studying the ongoing pandemic of COVID-19 on both technical and political levels, as well as doing a tireless job of formulating and disseminating statistics on how much testing New Hampshire is doing, state virus case and casualty numbers, and running many virtual town hall meetings. And with the assistance of Bonnie Wright, chairman of the Salem Zoning Board, updates are provided on various easily-accessible websites and FACEBOOK pages, including both of theirs. This is data of great importance to all of us, and has enabled us to keep abreast of both what governor Chris Sununu in Concord is doing right as well as areas needing improvement.

Perusing Messmer’s FACEBOOK site, MINDI 4 NH, offers a wealth of regularly-updated charts detailing resident testing numbers along with numerous video/TV clips culled from daily news sources like WMUR-TV with information on the illness. There are also films showing the political workings of the NH Senate and House in Concord responding to the ongoing economic and medical impacts, as well as schedules of all upcoming local town hall meetings and excerpts from the JAMA Coronavirus Resource Center. With school re-openings just around the corner and parents’ concerns for their youngsters about to become paramount, site visitors can sign up for regular coronavirus updates, and can leave comments and suggestions there as well. In fact, going through the MINDI 4 NH site in reverse order will give you a great chronology of our local response to the crisis, as well as data re: our surrounding states, the entire country, and even internationally.

The Executive Council is the governing body that approves and allocates both state and federal funds for all New Hampshire infrastructure, as well as ratifying most government contracts. There will be a myriad of NH executive decisions pertaining to COVID-19 over the foreseeable future concerning state money disbursement, in addition to keeping the Granite State public aware of changes in applicable laws and regulations pertaining to the virus’ health and financial effects on all of us. The recent uptick in coronavirus positive cases in the mid-Atlantic and New England states despite those areas generally doing a far better job of incrementally reopening their businesses compared to the southern and western United States makes it imperative that we have a true scientist as one of the 5-member Executive Council in these fraught times. This is an election cycle that makes someone’s political title, whether Republican, Democrat or Independent, totally irrelevant.

Please vote for Mindi Messmer for Executive Council, District 3 on September 8th. We need a public health scientist’s voice and a true expert on COVID-19’s ramifications in Concord fighting for us in these tragic and perilous times.