I saw a news report about a Supreme Court case on smallpox vaccinations. This case was decided in 1905. The court ruled that the city of Cambridge, MA, was within their powers, to require people to get a smallpox vaccination.
Things are very different with this virus and the state of modern medicine, but, the point is, legally speaking, this old case is a key legal precedent on the issue of whether we can be compelled to get a vaccination.
Buck v Bell decided it was legal to sterilize the feebleminded for the good of society. That stopped in 1978.
Also what happened to ‘My body My choice”?
From Wikipedia:
Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the authority of states to enforce compulsory vaccination laws. The Court’s decision articulated the view that individual liberty is not absolute and is subject to the police power of the state.
Massachusetts was one of only 11 states that had compulsory vaccination laws. Massachusetts law empowered the board of health of individual cities and towns to enforce mandatory, free vaccinations for adults over the age of 21 if the municipality determined it was necessary for the public health or safety of the community. Adults who refused were subject to a $5 monetary fine. In 1902, faced with an outbreak of smallpox, the Board of Health of the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts adopted a regulation ordering the vaccination or revaccination of all its inhabitants.
Cambridge pastor Henning Jacobson had lived through an era of mandatory vaccinations back in his original home of Sweden. Although the efforts to eradicate smallpox were successful in Sweden, Jacobson’s childhood vaccination had gone badly, leaving him with a “lifelong horror of the practice”. Jacobson refused vaccination saying that “he and his son had had bad reactions to earlier vaccinations” as children and that Jacobson himself “had been caused great and extreme suffering for a long period by a disease produced by vaccination”. Jacobson believed that his family may have some sort of hereditary condition that made the smallpox vaccine particularly dangerous. Because of his refusal to get vaccinated, Jacobson was prosecuted and fined $5 (about $150 in 2020 dollars).
The Supreme Court reaffirmed its decision in Jacobson in Zucht v. King (1922), which held that a school system could refuse admission to a student who failed to receive a required vaccination. Jacobson has been invoked in numerous other Supreme Court cases as an example of a baseline exercise of the police power, with cases relying on it including Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927) (sterilization of those with intellectual disabilities), Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158 (1944) (limitations on parents having children distribute pamphlets in the street), and Vernonia School District 47J v. Acton, 515 U.S. 646 (1995) (allowing random drug testing of students).
During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, the federal United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit relied on Jacobson when upholding a Texas regulation halting abortions by including it in its ban on non-essential medical services and surgeries, consistent with Justice Blackmun’s citing of the case in Roe v. Wade. (See Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on abortion in the United States.) Jacobson also has been a precedent case in justifying government facemask orders and stay-at-home orders throughout the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts
Maryland 2007
“if parents continue to be recalcitrant, they face up to 10 days in jail and a $50 a day fine.”
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/WaterCooler/story?id=3880578&page=1
Dred Scott was precedent, until it wasn’t.
Courts get it wrong all the time, it’s time we stop genuflecting to them.