First U.S. vaccine mandate in 1809 launched 200 years of court battles
At the turn of the 19th century, a Massachusetts doctor named Benjamin Waterhouse learned that an English physician had been injecting people with the cowpox virus and claiming it protected them from the deadlier smallpox. So Waterhouse decided to test this novel treatment on his 5-year-old son and expose him to smallpox patients.
At the time, it wasn’t unusual for scientists and doctors to use their children as test subjects. When Waterhouse’s son didn’t become ill, he vaccinated other members of his family. Then he raised the stakes.
He repeated the experiment — this time with 19 children. He injected them with cowpox and sent them to Noddle’s Island, a secluded smallpox hospital off the coast of Boston. Twenty days later, not a single one was showing symptoms of smallpox.
Waterhouse published his results within weeks of completing the experiment. He became a passionate vaccine advocate, lobbying every level of government, from the Boston Board of Heath all the way up to the White House, to demand an organized way to vaccinate the public. He even sent the vaccine to President Thomas Jefferson.
Armed with the results of Waterhouse’s experiments, alongside several conducted by other local doctors, the Massachusetts legislature took swift action. In 1809, it passed a law giving local health boards the authority to require vaccination — the first vaccine mandate law in U.S. history.
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While the 1809 law may have been the first vaccine mandate, it was hardly the first public health law of its kind, and similar requirements had been put in place for vaccination’s predecessor, inoculation.
“Mandates were not uncommon,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University. “Even George Washington ordered the inoculation of all of the continental troops. Smallpox was the dominant public health problem, and mandates weren’t foreign to the United States.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/12/12/first-vaccine-mandate-massachusetts-waterhouse/
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