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Kerry Ann McKim is a widowed mom and blogger, formerly employed in the healthcare industry. She lives in eastern Maine.
As national leaders revisit vaccine policy — from COVID-19 boosters to the childhood immunization schedule — questions about safety, access, and trust are once again in the spotlight. These debates, combined with lingering frustration over pandemic-era government mandates, have left many uncertain about where to turn for reliable information.
But Maine families know from their own lived experience the value of vaccination. They’ve seen childhood vaccines wipe out polio, drive measles to the margins, and turn chickenpox from a rite of passage into a rarity. They have long kept our kids healthy.
To turn back now, and abandon these time-tested, routine childhood immunizations, would only open the door for the very diseases we’ve worked so hard to beat back.
I believe the Biden administration’s response to COVID-19 went too far on many fronts. It piled on mandates — both mask and vaccine — lockdowns, and restrictions that eroded public trust. Heavy-handed rules cost jobs, kept classrooms closed, and left many more skeptical of vaccines. That skepticism is now being reinforced by voices like Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy.
But, here in Maine, we’ve shown that we can still separate our views on mandates from medicine when it matters — and do right by our families. More than 97% of our school-age children are fully vaccinated — our highest rate ever. That success belongs to parents and pediatricians who put kids’ health and community safety first.
Routine vaccines have earned that trust. Every shot on the childhood schedule has gone through years of testing, followed by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) monitoring once in use. Extensive data show they are among the safest medical tools ever developed.
Vaccines have fundamentally changed children’s — and families’ — health. Chickenpox cases have dropped 97% since the vaccine was introduced. The measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) shot has driven measles incidence down by more than 99% nationwide. Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccination protects infants against a virus that sends 58,000 to 80,000 American children under five to the hospital each year.
And Maine is helping lead the way forward with new breakthroughs. At the University of Maine, students are looking into a potential universal vaccine for flu viruses. At the MaineHealth Institute for Research, scientists are advancing a Lyme disease vaccine trial that Sen. Susan Collins has championed. These efforts remind us that vaccines aren’t just our past success story — they’re our future, too.
But this hard-won progress can vanish when we let our guard down. Maine has seen it before. Just a few years ago, vaccination rates slipped below community immunity levels in several counties, with more kindergarteners claiming non-medical exemptions. That breakdown in protection opened the door to outbreaks: measles returned to Farmington for the first time in 20 years in 2017; chickenpox spread in a Westbrook daycare; and whooping cough and mumps cropped up on school campuses.
When these diseases resurface, the costs are high: missed school, strained hospitals, and severe illness. Prevention is the answer — not scrambling to contain an outbreak.
The moment calls for clarity. We can acknowledge frustration with COVID-19 policy without undermining trust in long-standing childhood vaccines, or disrupting the childhood vaccination schedule that makes routine vaccination possible. Vaccine skepticism risks undoing decades of progress that conservatives, parents, and doctors alike have worked so hard to achieve.
I believe Collins is the kind of pragmatic leader Maine needs right now. While she opposed the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for healthcare workers, she has long supported vaccine research and uptake. She also recently spoke out against Secretary Kennedy’s move to oust the government’s independent vaccine advisory committee members. With misinformation on the rise and federal cutbacks, her voice matters more than ever.
Maine has become a model for protecting children’s health in recent years. Let’s keep it that way by standing behind routine vaccines.
