CONWAY — Two town officials, both fully vaccinated, recently contracted COVID-19. While one admits it changed his opinion on the need to wear masks, the other said he does not plan to wear one when he’s released from the hospital.
Joe Mosca, a member of the Conway School Board, and Steven Steiner, who serves on the Conway Zoning Board of Adjustment, as an alternate to the planning board and as chair of the Mount Washington Valley Republican Committee, said they thought the Johnson & Johnson vaccine they both got would protect them against COVID. It did not.
“Julie (his wife) and I came down with COVID,” Steiner posted on his Facebook page Monday. “She is 100% recovered, meanwhile I have pneumonia. Looks like we caught it in time I will know (more) in the next 24 hours. I’m here in Huggins Hospital in Wolfeboro.”
The Steiners got the J&J vaccine in late spring. “I got it because my president, Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, asked me to,” Steiner said at the time, expressing some concern about his sore arm.
Steiner, 61, was still an in-patient at Huggins on Wednesday.
“I’m sitting here trying to breathe,” he said by phone, adding he had hoped to be discharged but it was delayed until his oxygen levels went up. He said he was in the 70 percent range. “I was hoping for today, but if not, in a couple of days.”
Steiner said his wife began to develop symptoms a few weeks ago. “Julie got it first, but we both tested positive,” he said. “We did everything we were supposed to. We got vaccinated.”
Steiner said he was initially asymptomatic.
“We went to Stephens Memorial (Hospital in Norway, Maine),” he said. “Julie got hydroxychloroquine, but they didn’t have enough for me – I still felt fine but took a turn for the worse on Monday.”
He added: “Julie feels fine. Three days after the treatment, she was symptom-free.”
Steiner said he chose Huggins over Memorial in North Conway because “Memorial doesn’t have the tools, nor do they have the staffing, to deal with COVID like Huggins,”
Steiner said he arrived in the nick of time. “They told me if I had come 24 hours later I’d have been in bad shape,” he said. “Fortunately, I’m not on a ventilator.”
Mosca, 63, also received the J&J vaccine in the late spring. He wore a mask to the school board’s Aug. 9 meeting “out of an abundance of caution” after attending a family gathering out of state and being told he had been in close contact with someone who tested positive.
“Anyone who knows me knows this is not me,” he said of the mask.
The next day, he developed symptoms and spent the next five days in bed able to eat a few bites of watermelon, he said.
“From what I was told, I had a mild case (but) it was like nothing I’d ever had before,” Mosca shared by phone Wednesday. “I can’t imagine what it would have been like if I hadn’t gotten the vaccine.”
According to a Centers for Disease Control report issued Sept. 10, “data shows that the Moderna vaccine effectiveness has a rate of 95 rate when it comes to hospitalizations due to the Delta variant, while Pfizer sits at 80 percent and Johnson & Johnson at 60 percent.”
Mosca said he’s improving daily but gets winded more easily than before getting COVID. “The J&J may have the lowest efficacy rate, but it kept me out of the hospital,” he said.
Steiner has been and continues to be a fervent opponent of mask-wearing (he famously displayed his middle finger during public comments at a Conway School Board meeting in August in response to possible mandatory mask-wearing).
“A paper mask made in China is not going to stop this virus,” he said. “We’ve got to continue to live our lives. I’m against people living in fear.”
Steiner added: “You can’t stop this virus because it’s invisible.”
Steiner, who owns a real estate business, said he sold a home to a doctor 18 months ago.
“I said, ‘Doc, what do you think about this virus?’ He said, ‘Steven, it’s not a matter of if you are going to get COVID, but when.’ We have to go about living our lives with this. Masks don’t work. I would tell people live their life without fear.”
Mosca was disappointed to learn Steiner’s take on masks.
“I was not a mask person until I got (COVID),” he said. “Now that I’ve had it, I don’t ever want it again. If wearing a mask increases the odds 1 percent that I won’t get it nor will I spread it to someone else, I’m wearing a mask.”
He added: “I wish Steven well and hope he recovers quickly, but I couldn’t disagree with him more about masks. If it protects me or someone else that little bit, it’s worth it. I think this should be an eye-opener to Steven and everyone else.”
Mosca plans to mask up. “Now when I’m in a store or going to a restaurant I wear it. I get that everybody should have a choice, but anyone with common sense can see that they do help. It’s not the end-all to have to wear one.”
Mosca added that masks have become a political hot button.
“I’ve been a Republican since I was old enough to vote,” he said. “The radicalized right wing of the Republican Party is making me rethink my choice. I don’t want to be associated with that.”
These articles are being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative. For more information visit collaborativenh.org.