The Nashua Board of Health is pushing a message of fear creating a deep divide in public support for covid protocols. The best leaders take stock of their decisions and own their failures. Nashua’s stories of failure remain unspoken.

What went wrong:

• Backing the closing of our public school building for 13 months in favor of remote learning, creating an immeasurable negative impact on students.

• Forcing public school masking ‘forever’ policies needlessly on children.

• Backing an agenda to forbid parent volunteers in Nashua public schools despite massive teacher shortages and lost learning.

• Eliminating discussion and failing to balance the mental, physical, educational, and intellectual needs of our students.

• Elevating the effects suffered by students of inconsistent and ever changing policies, lost education, isolation, and family financial stress.

• Mandating an inconsistent city-wide masking policy without proper monitoring, data collection, or enforcement.

• Ignoring and dismissing any discussion on the effectiveness of natural immunity over pharmaceutical immunity.

• Hiding data to balance risk assessment for citizen health choices.

• Adopting a one size fits all health policy approach regardless of existing medical conditions.

Does any of this make sense? Two years into covid, the initial flat-footed response was understandable, but we are well past this point. If you want to wear a mask, wear it. If you want to get a vaccine, get it. Stop blaming one group or the other. As time progresses, no doubt it will be discovered that we should have responded differently. Let’s focus on living.