Jacobson was a five dollar fine, he wasn’t forced or fired, and removed from society and that was a state mandate, not federal and he refused the second dose because the first dose it almost killed him and his son. And the people who’d recovered from small pox weren’t forced to take the vaccine.
Also it was the precedent for forced sterilization a decade or two later and even the national socialist used it as a defense at Nuremberg.
You also had families or courts that could commit you against your will to state mental hospitals, forced shock therapy, forced lobotomies etc.
A lot has changed in the last 100+ years especially civil rights, bodily autonomy etc.
In Buck v Bell (1927),26 Holmes ruled that the state of Virginia could use police power to protect the public health by involuntarily sterilizing a poor 17-year old single mother, Carrie Buck, who state officials had incorrectly judged to be morally unfit and mentally retarded – in effect, genetically defective- just like they said Carrie’s daughter and mother were.27
In one of the most chilling statements in American jurisprudence, Holmes declared, “It is better for the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough!”
In the merciless 1927 Buck v. Bell decision, just as in the Machiavellian 1905 Jacobson v. Massachusetts decision, ethical principles grounded in respect for individual human life and civil liberties were stripped from U.S. law. The reasoning was that if utilitarianism could be used to create forced vaccination laws to immunize society from infectious disease, then forced sterilization laws could be created to immunize society against becoming infected with bad genes. The immoral premise that “the ends justifies the means” created a perfect climate for what became a tyranny of the majority.
By 1932, mandatory sterilization laws had been passed in 29 states. More than 60,000 Americans were involuntarily sterilized by public health officials before the barbaric medical practice was ended by most, but not all, states in the late 1940s
Utilitarianism was discredited as a pseudo-ethic in 1947 at The Doctor’s Trial at Nuremberg after World War II. The horrifying truth about what can happen when utilitarianism is used to create public health law was exposed for the whole world to see30 31 and gave birth to the informed consent principle articulated in the historic Nuremberg Code.32 The next year, basic human rights that include autonomy and freedom of thought, conscience and religious belief were affirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
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