If you like compulsory vaccinations, you'll love child labor and the Espionage Act
A reader makes a terrific point about the context of the 1905 Jacobson Supreme Court decision (which upheld Massachusetts's right to force smallpox vaccinations)...
I hadn’t even considered this, but of course he’s right. He mentions 10 terrible Supreme Court rulings below. Most - including, of course, Plessy - have been stuffed in the dustbin of history, where they belong. The left loudly cheered their reversal.
But Jacobson - a 116-year-old ruling about a virus roughly 100 times as deadly as Sars-Cov-2 - must be preserved forever and forms the core support for a mandatory vaccination scheme.
Makes total sense.
All the happy talk about Jacobson/vax has really been bothering me, so I went back and looked at the period surrounding this alleged Jewel of the Enlightenment.
Between Dred Scott and the New Deal court, the Supreme Court continuously held that individuals had few if any rights as individuals. The vax decision [Jacobson] sits squarely in the middle of a timeline where nine white men in robes loudly scoffed at the idea that there was anything more important than the sheer brute power of business and government.
Check out the line-up of horrific cases that surround the alleged "mandatory vax is permissible" law.
Who would want to live in a time and place where this kind of legal thinking held sway?
1883: "Racial discrimination is awesome" - Civil Rights cases [8-1]
1895: "Monopolies are awesome" - US v EC Knight [8-1]
1896: "Separate but equal" - Plessy v Ferguson [7-1]
1905: Jacobson v Massachusetts [7-2]
1905: "Workers do not have and cannot have any rights vis-a-vis their employer" - Lochner v New York [5-4]
1917: "You can go to jail for questioning the government" - Debs v US [9-0]
1919: "You can go to jail for speech we don't like" - Schenck v US [9-0]
1918: "Child labor is A-OK" - Hammer v Dagenhart [5-4]
1923: "Minimum wage laws are illegal" - Adkins v Childrens Hospital [5-3]
1927: "Your Fallopian tubes belong to us" - Buck v Bell [8-1]
I am an attorney and I have been struggling to come up with a legally feasible way to fight these mandates. When the 7th Circuit denied injunctive relief recently they stated in essence that there is no legally recognizable right not to take a vaccine. The best strategy that I have been able to come up with so far would hinge on recharacterizing these shots as therapies rather than vaccines which is a more scientifically accurate characterization any way. There is a much stronger legal argument to be made for a right to refuse a medical therapy because a therapy only benefits the recipient rather than the community. Since these shots do little (if anything) to prevent contracting or transmitting the virus, they do not function as vaccines. The best analogy I've heard is to using sunscreen to prevent sunburn. Whether I get a sunburn or not has zero correlation to whether somebody else is wearing sunscreen.
Yep. Just had an argument (wish it could have been a discussion) about this very topic yesterday. With a true believer. I try to avoid these conflicts but he would not leave me alone re the vaccine. I HAD COVID. I HAVE ANTIBODIES. He accused me of killing him. In fact, he accused me of killing millions of people every day! I yelled, "Are you dead? I've been hiking with you for weeks now! Are you dead???" He then referenced the small pox decision. One cannot have a reasonable discussion with a true believer.