The History Of Vaccine Mandates In The US

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As employers and the President are pushing vaccine mandates because too many have refused them, voices are crying out for their perceived rights saying “my body my choice.” They do not like their bosses or the government telling them to get vaccinated. This is a clash between individual rights and public health measures designed to save lives and to protect the larger community. Who gets to make the key decisions? How far can the government and employers go? Do individual rights trump community safety?

On Sept. 9, Biden announced the most sweeping vaccine requirements in American history, ordering that businesses with 100 or more employees ensure that all their workers are either vaccinated or get tested weekly for the coronavirus. The new rules also require vaccinations for federal workers and for federal contractors, as well as for workers at healthcare facilities that receive funding from Medicare and Medicaid. This will affect about 100 million people.

The authority for these government mandates, claims Biden, is a 1970 federal statute that gives the Secretary of Labor authority to issue a six month Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) to protect workers from “grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful.” His move has triggered a political and legal battle, with many Republican governors vowing to fight the mandates in court. The mandates raise several new questions regarding this vague statute: Is a virus a “…toxic or physically harmful substance?” Does COVID-19 present a “grave danger?” Has the executive branch exceeded its authority in offering a solution to a problem previously reserved to the states? Do these mandates violate the 14th Amendment by depriving workers of their personal liberties? It is important to note that Biden’s mandates do not actually make vaccines compulsory: The government may levy a fine or forbid a child from attending school, but no American will be forced to get an unwanted jab. This has not always been the case.

There are historical precedents for vaccine mandates and even for forced vaccination.

In February 1991, five Philadelphia children died from measles, a disease that was mostly eradicated in the US, due to vaccination. Measles once sickened millions of kids, each year hospitalizing ~50,000 and killing close to 500 before a successful vaccine was developed in 1963. After that, cases dropped dramatically as all states mandated measles shots for school children. Vaccine hesitancy and resistance were rare because people saw the tangible success of the measles vaccine.

But, in Philadelphia that winter of 1991, the serious cases of measles came from a single source, a church cult that rejected “…all means of healing apart from God’s way.” Church members took no medicines, owned no thermometers, and saw no doctors. Rejecting all birth control, they raised large families in close quarters, a recipe for the measles epidemic, which they cooked. Trying to contain the threat to the rest of the city, officials worked through the courts to gain access to the homes of the congregants and received the authority to vaccinate the children against the wishes of their parents. In this public health emergency, defending the parents’ anti-vax actions was close to impossible. Even the ACLU took a pass.

Vaccine mandates even appeared during the Revolutionary War. George Washington mandated that all his troops be immunized against smallpox, even against their will. He described smallpox to Virginia’s Governor Patrick Henry as “more destructive to an Army in a Natural Way, than the Enemy’s Sword.” As I wrote earlier in these pages, smallpox had doomed the Colonial Army’s assault on Quebec in 1775, and it threatened Washington’s main force. Washington’s mandate proved a brilliant gambit and smallpox largely disappeared from the ranks. Some historians point to the mandate as a major factor in winning the war against the Brits.

During that war, smallpox vaccination entailed a primitive vaccination procedure known as variolation. That involved opening a lesion from an infected person and scraping its contents into the arm of a recipient. It was effective, but the vaccinated person became quite ill for a couple of weeks, and about 3% of them died from the pox. Later, in 1796, the English scientist Edward Jenner discovered a much safer method of immunization using cowpox, a virus similar to smallpox that did not cause significant disease in people. But the new smallpox vaccine got a mixed reception in the US as some resisted it for reasons of personal safety based on the variolation experience. They rationalized, “what good could possibly come from polluting the body with dangerous foreign matter?” Or, “Why challenge the plans of the Creator?” Still, Jenner’s vaccine was a clear improvement over variolation and drove a steady decline in smallpox outbreaks throughout the 19th century. States began passing laws mandating smallpox vaccinations for school children, and some forcibly vaccinated prisoners, paupers, and orphans.

In 1905, the issue of vaccine mandates reached the Supreme Court in the seminal case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts. Henning Jacobson, a Lutheran pastor in Cambridge had defied a city ordinance requiring smallpox vaccinations during an outbreak. He refused to pay a $5 fine so he was arrested. Jacobson posited that “healthy and law-abiding” people like himself (even though he was disobeying the law at the time) posed a minimal danger to the community. He argued that even if his refusal to be vaccinated led to him spreading the smallpox virus, the only victims would be others “who failed or refused to be vaccinated.” In other words, he reasoned that it would be ok to not get the vax because the vaxed would be safe, but wholly ignored the rights to safety of those who were not vaxed. 

It is an argument that is repeated today about the CoV-2 vax. Using modern science that was not available in the early 20^th century, experts have repeatedly refuted this argument, explaining that many people who want the vax cannot be fully vaccinated because they are immunocompromised, or allergic to the vaccine’s contents, or do not have access to the vaccine. Also, we now know that the more RNA viruses, like the coronavirus, are allowed to spread, the greater the chance more deadly variants can appear. Jacobson’s contention that the decision to vaccinate solely belongs to the individual, not to the state, employers, or to medical authorities remains a central tenant of today's anti-vaxers.

The Supreme Court disagreed with Jacobson. The majority opinion, written by Justice John Marshall Harlan, asserted that “the liberty secured by the Constitution does not import an absolute right in each person to be at all times, and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint.” Rather, he argued, the Constitution rests upon “the fundamental principle of the social compact…that all shall be governed by certain laws for the protection, safety, prosperity and happiness of the people, and not for the profit, honor or private interests of any one man, family or class of men.” Jacobson had not only broken the law, the court suggested he also had violated the principle upon which a well-ordered society depends. We are not wholly independent the court ruled. The greater good of the community can trump individual rights.

Using Jacobson as precedent, the Supreme Court in 1922, upheld a local ordinance in San Antonio requiring proof of smallpox vaccination for people entering “public schools or other places of education.”  

Later, during World War II, the US military made vaccines mandatory for a host of diseases, such as typhoid, yellow fever and tetanus, and it still mandates certain vaccines for troops in certain deployments. Soon after the war very successful vaccines were developed against several childhood diseases like polio, measles, mumps and chickenpox. Guided by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Jacobson, all 50 states put laws on the books mandating many of these vaccinations for school children. Even today, many school districts and colleges mandate certain vaccines for students and staff. Hospitals, too, often mandate certain vaccines for their staff. Until lately, vaccine mandates have not generated much angst and anger.

Why is this? Perhaps vaccines have done their job too well: Many of them have erased the tragic evidence of why they were needed in the first place. The world no longer deals with small pox, thanks to the vaccine. Almost no one in this country has seen someone ravaged by polio, or a child hospitalized with measles, or who lost his hearing due to chicken pox, all thanks to vaccines. Yet, now with COVID-19, anti-vaccine anxieties have found their way into the political mainstream, especially among conservatives. An estimated 80 million American adults remain unvaccinated against COVID and represent potential factories for producing the next deadly coronavirus variant, which is very preventable.

As I have addressed before in these pages, many factors fuel resistance to the life-saving shots, including doubts about their quick development and their possible long-term effects. But a growing distrust of professional expertise, including medical science, has also played a role, which is unwarranted. Who are you going to believe, a medical scientist like me with nothing to gain in the debate (except the safety of my friends, family, and self), or someone who read a web post from folks who are selling nostrums they claim will protect you, like Dr. Steve Hotze, or from one of America’s Frontline Doctors whose web site claimed that gynecological problems were caused by having sex with demons? Do you jump on the side of those who tout that their individual freedoms have been abridged, but who do not consider the freedoms from disease of the greater community, and whom the courts already have decided against?

Almost 300 years ago, Benjamin Franklin struggled over whether to have his sons variolated against smallpox. In his “Autobiography,” he worried that well-meaning people were tragically misjudging the calculus between the risks and benefits of the procedure, as he had once done, with a tragic result. He wrote, “In 1736, I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the smallpox….I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of the parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.”