Vaccine Mandates Are 100% Legal. Stop Whining.
Vaccine mandates aren’t new, they’re not a violation of your rights, they’ve been upheld by the Supreme Court, and they’re necessary to stop the pandemic. Get over it and get vaccinated.
Vaccine mandates are as old as the United States. The first one came from George Washington, as he wintered the Continental Army in Morristown, New Jersey, only a few months into the Revolutionary War. Sitting in his make-shift quarters in January 1777, after the important victories in Trenton and Princeton, he wrote to the Director of Hospitals for the Continental Army, William Shippen Jr., “Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure, for should the disorder infect the Army . . . we should have more to dread from it, than from the Sword of the Enemy.” Less than a month later, all soldiers passing through Philadelphia were required to received variolation, a now obsolete method of smallpox inoculation derived from the scabs or puss of those infected with a mild form of the virus.
As the commanding officer of the Continental Army, Washington was well within his rights to mandate measures to prevent the spread of smallpox amongst the soldiers, as it threatened their combat readiness. Likewise, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley said “Getting vaccinated against COVID-19 is a key force protection and readiness issue.” And President Biden, as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces agreed: “being vaccinated will enable our service members to stay healthy, to better protect their families, and to ensure that our force is ready to operate anywhere in the world.”
It’s no question that imposing vaccine mandates on soldiers is legal, but what about everyone else? Can the government legally do the same to private citizens?
10th and 14th Amendment: Society vs. The Individual
The US Constitution clearly separates the powers of the federal government from the powers of the state. The 10th Amendment says “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This means that the powers of the federal government are limited to the ones specifically listed in the Constitution, and everything else falls to the states.
Although the line between federal and state power is constantly moving, it’s clear that the states have “police powers,” which can be defined as “the power to establish and enforce laws protecting the welfare, safety, and health of the public.” This means that states have wide authority to do what they need to to ensure a safe, productive society.
Many opponents of vaccine mandates point to the 14th Amendment, which says that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” This seems to be protection against an encroaching state government, as it protects basic individual rights.
So when it comes to vaccine mandates, which Amendment outranks the other?
All the Way to the Supreme Court
The first important case in this discussion is The Massachusetts Supreme Court case of Commonwealth v. Alger. In 1851, a man named Alger built a wharf in Boston Harbor that crossed a line established by the state legislature. The issue at hand was whether the state had the power to regulate the rights of an individual property owner. In the end, the court ruled that states’ rights superseded the rights of the individual. Justice Shaw said “We think it is a settled principle, growing out of the nature of well ordered civil society, that every holder of property, however absolute and unqualified may be his title, holds it under the implied liability that his use of it may be so regulated, that it shall not be injurious to the equal enjoyment of others having an equal right to the enjoyment of their property, nor injurious to the rights of the community.”
The US Supreme Court used Commonwealth v. Alger to again rule in favor of the state in the 1905 case Jacobson v. Massachusetts. Jacobson opposed a local smallpox vaccine mandate, citing that being forced to get inoculated was a violation of his individual rights protected by the Constitution, particularly the 14th Amendment. However, Justice Harlan said “in every well ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand.” Therefore, the Supreme Court set the precedent that the 10th Amendment overruled the 14th, in that the need for a well-functioning society was more important than an individual’s rights.
The Supreme Court double downed on this idea in the 1922 case Zucht v. King. Zucht refused to get the smallpox vaccine, was barred from entering both public and private schools, and so she sued. The court ruled yet again in favor of the state, saying “it is within the police power of a state to provide for compulsory vaccination.”
Furthermore, Supreme Court found in the 1944 case Prince v. Massachusetts that parental rights can be overridden when the health of their child is threatened. Prince forced her 9-year-old to distribute Jehovah’s Witness literature, thus violating child labor laws. Although the case didn’t involve vaccine mandates, the court cited Jacobson v. Massachusetts to justify state intervention. Because of this, this case is often cited uphold vaccine mandates. The majority opinion was that “The right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or the child to communicable disease or the latter to ill health or death.”
Therefore, states certainly have the legal justification for imposing vaccine mandates on the people and institutions that operate within their borders. All objections of their constitutionality are nonsense.
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