For a long time, the individual states have had the authority to mandate vaccination for smallpox. The case deciding this is Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905).
The American people didn’t rise up against smallpox vaccination. They didn’t place in doubt the legitimacy of their state governments over mandated smallpox vaccinations.
Governments have powers that are limited by us deplorables, us citizens. The states do not have an unlimited police power that they can field in order to achieve safety of their citizens. The states stay within fuzzy limits so as to not to be thrown out of office or worse, face an army of irate citizens armed with pitchforks and rifles.
Political legitimacy or consent is “messy”; there’s no formula for it. There is no way to map the attitudes of thousands and millions of people into a formula that tells a politician whether or not a law is being received favorably or not.
Suppose in 1905 200 vaccines were discovered that worked against all sorts of diseases. Would the people have been willing to be made to be on the receiving end of 200 shots and additional boosters every 5-10 years? No theory can answer what should happen in this situation, one that we may soon face, or what will happen. The outcome depends on many factors that are imponderable. There are unknown costs and benefits to all concerned.
The words “safety of the citizens” are too broad and too open-ended to provide exact guidance even to a well-meaning government as to how many shots to mandate and how much resistance to them the public will offer. What of a government that’s not well-meaning, that is, a real government staffed by ordinary self-interested and corruptible mortals, but a government of people who also do not want a rebellion on their hands? It too has no formula to rely upon.
Closing down an economy and imposing arbitrary measures over COVID-19 is a parallel kind of situation to mandating vaccinations. The state governments are manned by people some of whom are well-meaning and thinking of public safety. But also they’re manned by others who are not, far too many of those. They are guessing how far they can go to add to their powers, control people, push their favorite causes, and change election outcomes. The parallel is that, in the final analysis, the people decide. Their consent decides what’s acceptable and what isn’t.
Americans in greater numbers are resisting the restrictions being imposed on them in the name of safety against COVID-19. Trump is encouraging them. Good. State governments have been treading on us, adding to our dangers and woes, and the time is overdue to be recoiling and biting them back.
Even Thomas Hobbes, a strong supporter of government authority, recognized that when governments threatened the very safety that they claimed to be promoting, the people had a right to withdraw from the social contract and resist the government’s impositions.
And this is the case with vaccinations too. The public will decide either by accepting or resisting. The costs and benefits will be weighed up by all sorts of forces, calculations and considerations in a non-transparent way. Politics is a black box, and we do not know what goes on inside it to produce the results. What we can do is to seek truth and promote its dissemination. It’s difficult to think of anything more important than truth in influencing what comes out of murky political processes that will actually contribute to safety and not undermine it.
10:29 pm on May 12, 2020
