Tired of the raging, highly contagious disease, a town passed an ordinance requiring adults over 21 to get vaccinated. The process was free, and there was a fine for noncompliance. A religious leader in the town, a pastor who had emigrated from abroad with his family, objected. He had seen forced vaccinations in his old country, he said, and said he had had a “bad experience” with it. It had left him, he said, with a lifelong horror of vaccinations. He refused to be vaccinated, and also refused it for his son, who he claimed also had had a bad reaction to some previous vaccination.
The fine was assessed, and the pastor got a lawyer. The vaccination mandate was, he said, a violation of his rights. Of his liberty. The law itself was “unreasonable, arbitrary, and oppressive.” The pastor held that anyone who puts forth an objection to the vaccination — for example, on religious grounds, or even for personal reasons that should not have to be explained — should be automatically granted an exemption.
The pastor was not, of course, the only one to object to vaccine mandates, nor was his town the only town to impose one. In fact his whole state imposed the same regulation, as did others. The people opposed to the idea began to, loosely speaking, organize. Or at least when they spoke up, they found some in agreement. They had several reasons for their opposition. Some thought the whole idea of a vaccine mandate, or anything like it, was a violation of their civil liberties. “This is a free country,” they argued, “and you can’t make me get vaccinated if I don’t want to.” Arguments about other ways they accepted limitations on their unlimited freedoms (to, say, steal or murder or ignore traffic laws) didn’t convince them in the least.
Another group of “anti-vaxxers,” as they came to be called, objected based on a loosely constructed resentment about rampant profiteering by the pharmaceutical industry. Although the vaccines were provided to them for free, they countered that somebody was paying for them, and the money was going to the very companies trying to get people vaccinated. Arguments that there was a measurable public-heath benefit to vaccinations that could be easily demonstrated, and that vaccines did get paid for but if you run the numbers, it doesn’t look remotely like profiteering didn’t convince this group in the least.
Those weren’t the only arguments put forth by the anti-vaccination folks. Some thought the vaccines themselves — maybe any vaccines for any disease — were dangerous. More dangerous than the diseases they (supposedly) targeted. Evidence of mortality from the diseases in vaxxed versus unvaxxed people didn’t carry any weight with this group; they were just as likely to claim that data that didn’t support their position was simply false. This contingent attracted a few prominent and wealthy business leaders, who funded some of the anti-vaccination efforts and organizations. Several national anti-vaccination societies and movements were founded, but none lasted very long.
Throughout all of the controversy, public bickering and argumentation, and even physical confrontations in some cases, the pastor’s case was working its way slowly through the court system. Each time there was a decision at one level of the judiciary, the losing side appealed the decision, bumping the case up to the next level. It took years, which is usually the way it goes with legal challenges and appeals, but eventually the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. The legal arguments were made in December, and then, on February 20, the decision came down. This is what they said:
“In every well ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand” and that “[r]eal liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own [liberty], whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.”
So there we have it. The Supreme Court of the US, ruling that vaccine mandates were not oppressive, not arbitrary, were intended for everyone’s safety, and were certainly perfectly acceptable under the Constitution.
That particular February 20, by the way, was in 1905. The vaccine in that case was aimed at smallpox, a disease that was subsequently completely eradicated. By vaccines. So the real question, I guess, is whether we can find a vaccine against the refusal to learn.
