In the United States, there were few riots, but there were lawsuits. The most important case came out of Cambridge, in 1905. The Supreme Court considered a Massachusetts law that empowered cities’ boards of health to mandate vaccination of all residents if they found it “necessary for the public health or safety.” After an outbreak of a virulent strain of smallpox, the Cambridge board determined that vaccination was “necessary for the speedy extermination of the disease” and required all residents to receive the vaccine. A pastor from Sweden, who claimed that he had been made sick by a vaccine as a child, refused and was criminally convicted and fined. He challenged the law as a violation of due process, arguing that compulsory vaccination was “hostile to the inherent right of every freeman to care for his own body and health in such way as to him seems best, and . . . nothing short of an assault upon his person.”
The Court, in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, disagreed, reciting the principle that individual liberty is not absolute in the face of “the common good,” and that “real liberty for all” depends on restraining individual exercises of liberty that harm others. The Court, as Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote, was therefore “unwilling to hold it to be an element in the liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States that one person, or a minority of persons, residing in any community and enjoying the benefits of its local government, should have the power thus to dominate the majority” that acts through the state’s authority to protect health and safety. The Court therefore held that a state had legal authority to require vaccinations. Seventeen years later, it also held that neither due process nor equal protection prohibited a San Antonio ordinance making vaccination a condition of children’s attendance in schools.
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