Besides choosing our favorite presidential candidate during the March 3 primary, Maine voters will also decide whether to repeal a 2019 law requiring vaccinations for all schoolchildren.

John Balentine, a former managing editor for the Lakes Region Weekly, lives in Windham.

The issue is a complicated one with wide-ranging impact, but voting yes is the best prescription, since parents – not the state – should determine whether their children are vaccinated.

Gov. Janet Mills signed the law that eliminated philosophical and religious exemptions for school-required vaccines last May, but it doesn’t take effect until Sept. 1, 2021. A yes vote on Question 1 would repeal the new law while a no vote would keep it in place.

While no one wants a child to suffer a preventable illness such as whooping cough, no one should want the government telling parents what they must do with their children, especially when it comes to implanting or ingesting or injecting something.

Parents should have the right to refuse such things, lest we become like China with forced hospitalizations and martial law, as seen in the wake of the COVID-19 coronavirus.

While I’m against Maine’s new law forcing children to receive vaccines, I don’t buy the argument from the law’s opponents regarding autism, which many parents tout as the main reason they don’t want inoculations.

If there were sufficient evidence of such a connection, the scientific community would rush to ban vaccines. Instead, I’m voting yes on 1 because I fear sweeping government edicts.

I’m against any law that limits personal freedom. A law requiring vaccines is bad enough but could easily morph into future laws requiring chips being embedded in our skin or any number of other tracking measures being mandated by the state in an effort to reduce crime or terrorism.

If government can force you to inject a serum to stop whooping cough under the guise of protecting an individual’s or the community’s health, why not a serum to stop other physical and social ills? The slippery slope argument applies.

With that said, there are reasons to vote no. Supporters say the law is needed to protect children who can’t get vaccines because their immune system is compromised due to illness. This is a valid concern, but I wonder how many cancer-stricken children are even attending school. A wise parent would probably homeschool.

The answer to the issue of an unvaccinated child infecting others, however, isn’t more regulation but better education of why vaccinations are beneficial.

My generation’s parents didn’t think twice regarding vaccinating their children because they knew firsthand the perils of disease and saw vaccines as miracle cures, not threats. The answer today is to educate skeptical parents as to the benefits of vaccines, not to adopt laws increasing government control.

Education, as usual, is key to eliminating fear. Parents’ fear regarding the alleged autism-vaccine connection reminds me of the growing number of children experiencing “extinction illness,” based on the pseudo-science of climate change.

Millions of kids are afraid of the world ending in a dozen years because wacky, overreacting United Nations climate scientists and politicians have told them so. Similarly, impressionable parents are afraid of vaccines because of warnings from the pseudo-scientific community. Such parents are misguided because they are miseducated.

If armed with real science, these parents would quickly choose, just as their parents did, to vaccinate their children. That they choose not to vaccinate is not a call to action by overreaching government, however, it’s a wake-up call to the scientific community to broaden their education efforts regarding the benefits of vaccines.