My argument in a nutshell
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/397840/vaccine-against-chaos-kevin-d-williamsonOn the matter of vaccines and those parents who refuse to allow them to be administered to their children: First, the case against the ordinary battery of vaccinations is approximately as sound as the case against genetically modified foods, the case against the official account of the 9/11 attacks, or the case for the proposition that the United States is governed by a secret cabal of billionaires run by the Koch brothers. It is about as intellectually defensible as arguments in favor of providing federal subsidies for homeopathy and acupuncture — i.e., 99.44 percent pure horsepucky. There are many reasonable arm-twisting measures that could be taken to encourage vaccination, such as categorically excluding unvaccinated children from public schools, denying unvaccinated persons entry or reentry into the United States, and the like. But the success of the anti-vaccination project is only a symptom of a deeper and more worrisome problem.
The fight over vaccinations is not a new one. Since the invention of vaccines, their use and their mandatory use have been a hotly contested issues. In the early days of the Progressive movement, when panels of experts in thrall to a vision of their managerial expertise rolled over the literally and metaphorically untidy cities and rural communities in which social dysfunction flourished, resistance to mandatory vaccinations became a crusade, especially in New England. The Supreme Court decided in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905) that the state could fine a Swedish immigrant who refused to undergo mandatory vaccination, protesting that he’d been made seriously ill by an earlier vaccination. Just a few years prior, the case of Wong Wai v. Williamson considered whether federal authorities could require that all of San Francisco’s Chinese residents undergo a fairly dangerous vaccination against the bubonic plague or be forcibly prevented from leaving the city.
In Jacobson, Justice John Marshall Harlan found that the vaccine resister in question could be fined, and punished for refusing to pay the fine, but that he could not be physically coerced into accepting the vaccination. But the precedent — that state interests trump individuals’ control of their own bodies — provided Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. with the ammunition he needed to find in Buck v. Bell that “the protection and health of the state” was sufficient to justify involuntary sterilizations of “the unfit” and “defectives” — principally meaning mentally disabled people — whose rights were, in his judgment, not protected by the 14th Amendment, at least not to such an extent that they could not be forcibly neutered like stray dogs. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” the justice infamously wrote. As Jonah Goldberg notes in Liberal Fascism, the lone dissenter in the case was the “archconservative” Pierce Butler. (Read Jonah’s post on Margaret Sanger and contemporary eugenics here.) The subsequent history is pretty ugly.
