[Those who claim that vaccine resistance is an expression of
liberty are historically illiterate. ] [[link removed]]

VACCINE MANDATES ARE AS AMERICAN AS APPLE PIE  
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Matt Ford
July 30, 2021
The New Republic
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_ Those who claim that vaccine resistance is an expression of liberty
are historically illiterate. _

"IPV vaccination" by Sanofi Pasteur, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

 

If you support mandatory vaccination to fight Covid-19, you are in
good company. The first vaccine mandate in American history came from
none other than George Washington at the height of the American
Revolution. America’s struggle for independence coincided with
a major smallpox epidemic
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raged through North America in the 1770s and 1780s, and it was an
omnipresent threat to the ragtag Continental Army.

“By January 1777 [Washington] ordered Dr. William Shippen to
inoculate every soldier who never had the disease,’” historian Ron
Chernow wrote in his 2010 biography of the first president.
“‘Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the
measure,’ [Washington] wrote, ‘for should the disorder infect the
army in the natural way and rage with its usual virulence, we should
have more to dread from it than the sword of the enemy.’ This
enlightened decision was as important as any military measure
Washington adopted during the war.”

Washington’s fears were far from hypothetical. Until the twentieth
century, disease outbreaks could be as deadly for the average soldier
in the average war as the average enemy combatant. Chernow noted that
British generals released infected civilians and captives toward
American lines at the siege of Boston and at Yorktown, in a ghoulish
preindustrial version of biological warfare. Fighting smallpox and
fighting the British, in Washington’s eyes, were one and the same.

Anti-vax groups often allude to basic American values to resist
vaccine mandates, asserting that they have the liberty not to take
steps to ensure they don’t spread infectious diseases to other
people. Public health officials, in their version of events, are
derided as authoritarian and tyrannical figures. This juvenile
worldview could not be more backward. Getting vaccinated is as
American as baseball and apple pie—and so is compelling those who
refuse to do so voluntarily.

When Covid-19 vaccines became widely available this spring, the
immediate priority was ensuring that those who wanted to get the
vaccine could do so. Millions of Americans did their patriotic duty to
one another and rushed out to get the jab. But millions of their
fellow citizens did not. In May, President Joe Biden set a goal of 70
percent vaccination among adults by July 4, once again linking
American independence to a mass vaccination campaign. As of the end of
July, however, only 69 percent of Americans have so far received at
least one shot, and only 60 percent can be described as fully
vaccinated.

These vaccination rates are, unfortunately, not evenly distributed
throughout the country. States in New England are leading the pack:
Vermont, for example, has given at least one dose to nearly 87 percent
of adults in the state and fully vaccinated 77 percent of them, with
Connecticut and Massachusetts close behind. (A recent CNN report on
how Vermonters are enjoying their regional herd immunity
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how the vaccine is pretty successful at fully unleashing what
Americans might call “freedom.”) In the southern and central
portions of the country, things are far worse. Mississippi has yet to
administer at least one dose to more than 50 percent of its adult
population, and 10 other states also haven’t yet fully vaccinated a
majority of their adults.

Some of these shortfalls can be attributed to equity problems. But
many more can be blamed on culture-war nonsense or sheer stubbornness.
My personal patience with the “vaccine-hesitant” ran out when I
read a ProPublica article last week
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eldercare workers who refuse to get vaccinated. Covid-19 is
particularly dangerous for elderly Americans, who make up the bulk of
the American death toll from the virus so far. Their excuses were as
unpersuasive as they were callous. “This is just a personal choice
and I feel it should be a free choice,” one of the nurses told
ProPublica. “I think it’s been forced on us way too much.” It
has not, but it should be.

As with every other aspect of American life, some of this
“hesitancy” has led to litigation against real or imagined vaccine
mandates. Fortunately, vaccine mandates are undoubtedly
constitutional. In 1902, the town of Cambridge, Massachusetts,
experienced a major smallpox outbreak. Its public health board issued
an order for everyone in the community to get a vaccine if they
didn’t already have one or pay a $5 fine. Henning Jacobson, a
Swedish immigrant who feared a bad reaction to the vaccine, refused
the order for himself and his children. He sued Massachusetts, arguing
that the state’s mandatory-vaccination law had violated his
constitutional rights.

Three years later, in a 7–2 decision, the Supreme Court flatly
rejected his stance
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wield what the court called the “police powers”—the basic powers
of any community to regulate its own health, safety, and general
welfare. Mandatory vaccination, especially in an age of plagues and
pandemics, fell well within these powers. “The liberty secured by
the Constitution of the United States to every person within its
jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be,
at all times and in all circumstances, wholly free from restraint,”
the court wrote. “There are manifold restraints to which every
person is necessarily subject for the common good.”

It’s here that we should note that mandatory vaccination doesn’t
mean forcible vaccination. Biden won’t be sending troops
door-to-door with those tranquilizer guns from _Jurassic Park_ to
shoot vaccine-laden darts into unsuspecting civilians. What
it _does_ mean is that those who refuse to get the vaccine despite a
mandate will face certain consequences for it, such as regular Covid
testing or denial of entry into certain places. The private sector has
even more leeway to impose consequences on workers who won’t get
vaccinated: A Texas hospital system ousted more than 150 health care
workers
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this summer who had refused to get the shot.

Such is the nature of living in civilization. “There is, of course,
a sphere within which the individual may assert the supremacy of his
own will, and rightfully dispute the authority of any human
government, especially of any free government existing under a written
constitution, to interfere with the exercise of that will,” the
Supreme Court wrote in _Jacobson._ “But it is equally true that 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.”

For all the anti-vaxxers’ talk of liberty and personal freedom, the
nature of pandemics and infectious diseases means that everyone else
is forced to suffer for their short-sightedness. Covid-19 has imposed
its own subtle tyranny upon our lives for the past 18 months. Even if
they do not get sick and die, people have been unable to find work, to
meet family and friends, to go on dates and fall in love, to hold
weddings and funerals, and to enjoy the full blessings of everyday
life without risking their own health and the health of others. If
anti-vax folks mistake a key for a shackle, that’s only because
their selfishness is part of the problem.

This dilemma, too, the Supreme Court once foresaw. “We are not
prepared to hold that a minority, residing or remaining in any city or
town where smallpox is prevalent, and enjoying the general protection
afforded by an organized local government, may thus defy the will of
its constituted authorities, acting in good faith for all, under the
legislative sanction of the state,” the justices wrote in 1905.
“If such be the privilege of a minority, then a like privilege would
belong to each individual of the community, and the spectacle would be
presented of the welfare and safety of an entire population being
subordinated to the notions of a single individual who chooses to
remain a part of that population.”

Washington, for his part, had some sympathy for vaccine-hesitant
individuals. His wife, Martha, had become one of them after witnessing
her son Jacky’s adverse reaction to smallpox inoculation when he was
young. As a result, as Chernow noted, she did not enter Boston after
the Continental Army liberated the city, for fear of catching smallpox
from one of the town’s residents. But she eventually yielded under
pressure from her husband and out of wartime necessity. After a slight
fever and a brief quarantine, she was safe. The Covid-19 vaccines are
substantially more safe when compared to smallpox inoculation—and
the rewards for mandating them will be just as great.

_Matt Ford is a staff writer at The New Republic. Matt Ford
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_Sign up for a TNR weekly newsletter._
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