The Supreme Court Rejected Objections to Mandatory Vaccination
Smallpox outbreaks in late nineteenth century America led to more widespread vaccination campaigns. Those, in turn, brought all the anti-vaccine objections out of the wood works. Panic over vaccines led to the 1879 founding of the Anti Vaccination Society of America. Other organizations followed, such as the New England Anti Compulsory Vaccination League, founded in 1882, and the Anti Vaccination League of New York City in 1885. American vaccine opponents sued to repeal vaccination laws in several states, but lost. The most prominent of those cases began in 1902 after a smallpox outbreak in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when the board of health mandated the vaccination of all residents. A Henning Jacobson refused to get vaccinated on grounds that he should be able to do as he pleased with his own body.
Jacobson was criminally charged, convicted, and appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court. In Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 US 11 (1905), the court upheld the authority of states to enforce compulsory vaccination laws to protect the public from infectious diseases. It also ruled that individual liberty is not absolute, but must give way to the state’s police power. Subsequent decisions reaffirmed Jacobson and the primacy of the state’s power over individual rights when it comes to public health. They include Zucht v. King in 1922, which held that schools could deny admission to students who failed to receive required vaccinations.