Argument For Anti-Vaccination Movement

HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR ANTI-VACCINATION MOVEMENTS In 1796, Edward Jenner presented his article on the successful use of vaccination to prevent smallpox to the Royal Society of London (Wolfe and Sharp 2002). The acceptance of the validity of his methods gave scientific merit to this preventative technique. The rise of widespread use of vaccinations in the early 1800s is attributable to Jenner’s work. As the use of vaccinations to prevent smallpox spread, the government felt it necessary to make vaccines available to more people. The United Kingdom passed the first Vaccination Act in 1840, providing free vaccines to the poor. As pressures to vaccinate to decrease smallpox outbreaks continued to increase, another Vaccination Act in 1853. This

The Act of 1853’s addition of implementing penalties for non-compliance sparked further outrage in citizens and the Anti-Vaccination League was founded in London that same year. A third Vaccination Act was passed in 1867, extending the age of compulsory vaccination to 14 and implementing cumulative punishments for non-compliance. The Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League was founded in 1867 to argue against government infringement on personal liberty and choice by mandating vaccination. Anti-Vaccination sentiments continued to spread and in 1885, over 100,000 people demonstrated against vaccination in Leicester, England. A royal commission was formed to address and investigate the anti-vaccination movement in response to the demonstrate. After a seven-year investigation, the commission concluded that there was scientific proof that vaccination protected against smallpox but recommended the removal of cumulative penalties to appease the opposition. The Vaccination Act of 1898 repealed the accumulation of penalties and enacted a clause allowing parents who did not believe in the safety or efficacy of vaccination to obtain documentation exempting them from complying. This act appeased the opposition which

Three Supreme Court cases in the early 1900s established the government’s stand on vaccinations in terms of public health. The first case is Jacobson v. Massachusetts. In 1902, a smallpox outbreak prompted the Cambridge Board of Health to require all residents to be vaccinated (Parmet, Goodman, and Farber 2005). Reverend Henning Jacobson refused to be vaccinated and was convicted and fined $5. Jacobson appealed his case, arguing mandatory vaccination violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of an individual’s right to due process and equal protection under the law. The rhetoric used in his appeals to the court was religiously charged but his argument was not an attempt to cite religious freedom as a cause for anti-vaccination. In February of 1905, the Supreme Court rejected Jacobson’s contention and ruled that states had the right to limit an individual’s liberty in cases of well-established public health interventions. The court also contended that the state may not use public health laws in an arbitrary and oppressive manner. The 1922 Supreme Court case of Zucht v King, the court examined the issues of mandatory vaccination and requiring children to be vaccinated before entering the public school system (Silverman and Thomas 2001). In this case, a young woman was denied access