Today in Labor History February 20, 1905: The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Massachusetts's mandatory smallpox vaccination program in Jacobson v. Massachusetts. There were lots of problems early on with the vaccine. For one, they reused needles, causing the transfer of syphilis from infected to uninfected people. They also had problems with bacterial contamination of the vaccine that made some people sick. On the other hand, because of the global mandatory vaccination program, the disease was eradicated in 1977, the only human disease to be completely wiped out. Keep in mind that as recently as the mid-1950s, over 2 million people were dying annually, worldwide, from the disease.
With respect to personal freedom, the Court ruled in Jacobson that individual liberty is not absolute and is subject to the state’s use of police power. Consequently, Jacobson has been invoked in other Supreme Court cases to justify police power. The ruling led to a mobilization of the anti-vaccination movement and the creation of the Anti-Vaccination League of America. The Jacobson ruling was later invoked to support the eugenicist forced sterilization of people with intellectual disabilities (Buck v Bell, 1927); the federal partial abortion ban (Gonzales v Carhart, 2007); drug testing of students (Veronica School District v Acton, 1995); and, most recently, COVID mitigation mandates, like face masks and stay-at-home orders.
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