Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Saturday, October 09, 2021

More on Freedumb

I think that in the present political climate, a small history lesson may be in order. The first safe and effective vaccination was discovered by the English physician Edward Jenner in 1796. It depended on the lucky coincidence that infection with the cowpox virus, which causes only mild disease in humans, confers cross-immunity to smallpox, a terrible scourge which had afflicted humanity for thousands of years. (That's why we call it vaccination, by the way, from the Latin vacca for cow. Modern vaccination used killed virus and caused no disease.) Nobody knew at the time what a virus was or why this worked, so it would be another 100 years until the work of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch figured out that microbes cause disease and that a less virulent strain of a pathogen could protect against serious disease. Pasteur developed a vaccine for anthrax, which is a bacterium. It would be a while longer before viruses were identified and vaccines were developed against numerous pathogens.

In fact, although Pasteur was the first person to understand why this worked, even before Jenner's discovery it was a common practice to inoculate people with pus from smallpox blisters of people who had relatively mild disease, which was known to protect against more serious disease. This procedure was not entirely safe; sometimes it did cause serious disease or even death. But the elite of society felt it was worth the risk, the aristocracy and wealthy people commonly availed themselves of it. George Washington required that his troops be inoculated, so there was a vaccine mandate in the U.S. before there was actually something called a vaccine.


In1902, Massachusetts was one of 11 states that had some form of vaccine mandate. In addition to a mandate for schoolchildren, the state allowed municipalities to mandate vaccination of adults if they deemed it necessary for public health. In 1902, facing an outbreak, Cambridge mandated vaccination. A local pastor named Henning Jacobson objected. Interestingly, he objected on what would be considered medical grounds, rather than philosophy or a broad assertion about civil liberty. He had been vaccinated as a child, in his home country of Sweden, and apparently had, or thought he had, a bad reaction, so he believed he and his family might be predisposed to side effects. 


In 1905, the Supreme Court upheld the Cambridge ordinance, writing: 


[I]n 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.

(Edited quotation lifted from Wikipedia.) 

Today, all 50 states mandate certain vaccines for schoolchildren. All of them allow medical exemptions, and the majority allow some form of religious or philosophical exemption, which I think is ridiculous. We don't allow religious exemptions to speed limits or environmental regulations. Anyway, until this year only a small fringe objected to this. There are also long standing vaccine mandates for members of the armed forces, and vaccination has long been required for Americans traveling to certain countries. We heard no objection to any of this until this year

Right now, the government is not in fact mandating Covid-19 vaccination, except for its own employees. The Biden administration, using powers the president unquestionably has, is ordering employers to institute mandates, as many have done already. That doesn't mean you have to get the shot, but it does mean you have to agree to vaccination or regular testing if you want to keep your job. But the states could in fact, constitutionally, mandate that all adults be vaccinated. So sayeth the Supreme Court. Mandatory vaccination of adults for other diseases has obviously not been an issue until now because almost everybody was already vaccinated as a child. That's the only thing that's different about Covid-19. 


The Covid-19 vaccines have been administered to hundreds of millions of people all over the world. Maybe close to a billion by now. Serious side effects happen to less than one in a million people. That's if they occur at all; the rate is so low it can't be established with certainty that vaccination is really the cause. These are probably the safest vaccines ever. And like the men in black wrote, "Real 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."





3 comments:

Don Quixote said...

I wish there were a way to get the entire country to read today’s blog post. It would be good preventive medicine.

mojrim said...

Sadly, Don, it would not because this isn't how people make decisions. Our beliefs are not thoughtfully considered, but a garbage pile of influences built up over decades. Parents, priests, teachers, the telly... these dump various ideas into our heads to be simmered and stirred with no conscious input from ourselves.

As Marina put it "...we're just animals still learning to behave."

Don Quixote said...

Yes, Mo, I see ... could you please let me know who "Marina" is? This does seem to be the crux of the problem: a species whose technology has evolved exponentially but we still don't (as a group) know basic things: owning another human is wrong; the planet is our home and must be treated respectfully; all animals and species have a right to be here. All people are created equal. Act with kindness and empathy. People with physical mental illness need treatment. Live and let live. Don't kill.