A big ol’ tip of this freedom-loving American’s hat to James Dill of Old Town, Erin Herbig of Belfast, Louis Luchini of Ellsworth, and David Miramant of Camden, the Democratic state senators who at least for the moment have preserved personal choice in medical treatment by casting apparently determinative votes against L.D. 798.

Two recent Sunday editorials, “Vaccine vote fails to protect public health” (May 5) and “Vaccine policy not working” (April 14), betray an all-but-unforgivable shallowness of understanding regarding bio-medical and concomitant jurisprudential human rights issues.

Brevity requirements do not allow detailed discussion about safety and efficacy, but doubts about both are real, and substantial.  They easily suffice to make government mandated compulsion a bad public policy idea just because of the stunting effect it will have on the very human autonomy our great but troubled nation was at least theoretically founded on.

National governments, vaccine makers and health bureaucracies are sufficiently invested in the, “Vaccines are an unmitigated health discovery miracle” narrative to ignore any and all untoward follow-ons.

Some Editorial Board members may have done straight reporting assignments, in which many of the same people keep coming back, and back, and back to State House hearings about vaccination bills. They keep doing it because their precious children have been damaged.

It’s also my personal opinion that these mothers know what they saw, and what they saw was regression. Motherhood automatically confers a certain level of credibility to their claims.

I’d also ask those reporters and writers what, if any, limits they’d place on what can be forced upon us in the name of “public health.”

James Silin

Whitefield