Today in Labor History February 20, 1905: The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Massachusetts's mandatory smallpox vaccination program in Jacobson v. Massachusetts. There were lots of problems early on with the vaccine. For one, they reused needles, causing the transfer of syphilis from infected to uninfected people. They also had problems with bacterial contamination of the vaccine that made some people sick. On the other hand, because of global mandatory vaccination programs, the disease was eradicated in 1977, the only human disease to be completely wiped out. By the mid-1950s, over 2 million people were dying worldwide annually.
With respect to personal freedom, the Court ruled in Jacobson that individual liberty is not absolute and is subject to the state’s use of police power. Consequently, Jacobson has been invoked in other Supreme Court cases to justify police power. The ruling led to a mobilization of the anti-vaccination movement and the creation of the Anti-Vaccination League of America. The Jacobson ruling was later invoked to support forced sterilization of those with intellectual disabilities (Buck v Bell, 1927); the federal partial abortion ban (Gonzales v Carhart, 2007); drug testing of students (Veronica School District v Acton, 1995); and, most recently, COVID mitigation mandates, like face masks and stay-at-home orders.
Burkhard Bilger writes about the choice of his German parents to move to Oklahoma after WWII, where his father took a job at a university:
“Oklahoma had its own version of the history [my parents] had left behind. The Nuremberg Race Laws were based on Jim Crow codes passed in the United States after the Civil War and still widely enforced when my parents arrived."
“By 1937, forced sterilization was legal in thirty-two states. [Charles] Davenport set up a laboratory at the Carnegie Institution that kept index cards on nearly a million ordinary citizens and advocated for strict immigration laws and sterilization of the unfit. "
"When the first German eugenics research was done in the 1920s, the Rockefeller foundation helped fund it. Josef Mengele, later known as the Angel of death for his medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz, was among those Rockefeller supported.”
I'm celebrating! A year and a half after my #bilateralsalpingectomy I finally convinced my #gyn to treat my #endometriosis-like condition that I've been dealing with since I started having periods (and I was only diagnosed at all because the doc saw it during the bisalp). Finally, yesterday, I got my #endometrialablation! It took years of fighting the American medical system and speaking up for myself, but I made it! 🎉