Dan Snow's History Hit - Are Mandatory Vaccines New?

Episode Date: September 1, 2021

Vaccines have become a subject of great controversy in recent months but the requirement to have them is far from new. Almost since the earliest examples of inoculation and vaccination, they have been a requirement for different parts of society. Dan is joined by Dr Lindsay Chervinsky, a historian of Early America, the presidency, and the government to explore how vaccinations have been used throughout the history of the United States. From George Washington inoculating the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, through the 1905 Supreme Court ruling mandating vaccines in the interest of public health and right up to the controversies of the modern-day.  

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. A lot of talk around vaccine mandates at the moment. In Texas, the governor has just ruled out any vaccine mandates at all. Made it illegal for people to demand a vaccine before attending school or leisure activities or the place of work, anything like that. Vaccine mandates, vaccine passport, vaccine requirements on discussion all over the world at the moment. And let me tell you something, folks, it's nothing new. Ever since we've had vaccines, we've had organizations saying that you require one. And to tell us all about it, we've got Dr. Lindsay Chavinsky. She's been on the podcast before. She's a fantastic historian of early America, the presidency, the government,

and the cabinet. She came to talk about Joe Biden's cabinet a few months ago. She is a terrific historian. She is here to tell us about examples of vaccine mandates from the very earliest days of the US Republic. Like I say, since we've had access to vaccine, folks, people have demanded that we take them. There's nothing new here. If you want to listen to other podcasts without the ads in the History Hit universe, if you want to watch the World's Best History channel, you just go to historyhit.tv. Historyhit.tv. You sign up for a very small subscription, very small indeed. Well, you get 30 days free. Check it out. If you don't like it, you don't have to subscribe. 30 days free. Subscribe after that. Historyhit.tv gets you access to the Netflix of history,

all the documentaries all in one place, all the podcasts. It's awesome. I don't say so myself. So head over after listening to this podcast and check out our new Netflix for history, the world's best history channel, historyhit.tv. But in the meantime, here's the very excellent Lindsay Stravinsky. Enjoy. Lindsay, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. I always call you when there's like some exciting breaking news. You're the contemporary story we all need.

Oh, well, thank you so much for having me back. I'm a big fan of all of your series, so it's nice to be on here. You've been looking into, is it the whole history of mandating vaccines, public health? Tell me what you've been up to. Well, as many of your listeners might know, there's been a bit of a brouhaha in the United States over the vaccines and whether or not states and businesses can implement requirements for their employees or visitors to enter a premises or participate in their job without a vaccine. And as an early American historian, I was getting a little bit frustrated

by that because since the Revolutionary War, we have had requirements for vaccines for various people and at various times with good reason because they're excellent science and they save lives. So I was trying to figure out what the history of those were, what the mandates were, where it started. And of course, the answer, as with almost all answers, is George Washington. Well, it all begins with that traitorous, once adequate, colonel of the militia who then had a dodgy last third of his career. Okay, tell me why. I'd love to know more. So in the 18th century, there had been a long history of smallpox outbreaks in Europe, but a lot of the populations in North America were still susceptible

to those types of outbreaks. And as one can imagine, if you know what a army camp looks like in the 18th century, that sort of territory is rife for smallpox. So Washington was incredibly concerned as outbreaks were starting to sort of tick up among his soldiers, that it would quite literally wipe through his camp and decimate his army. And they were having a really hard time getting people to sign up and stay in the army, let alone not die. So keeping people healthy was a really essential requirement. And so in 1777, he issued a army-wide order that all existing troops were to be inoculated against smallpox, and then all new recruits coming in had to be inoculated as well. And it was both a sensible measure to try and prevent widespread death and a humane choice, but it was also very much a strategic one because

if the army was decimated, then they were going to be quite helpless against the evil British forces that were coming to attack them. That's right. The evil Redcoats. So we've actually had a podcast recently on smallpox and how it was transmitted in some of the early adopters in the UK, where I think it was George II's wife and she vaccinated her family. So this technology was available back then. It was. I mean, it was incredibly gruesome. it was available back then. It was. I mean, it was incredibly gruesome. So the way that that vaccine worked, a doctor would basically carry around a person who was sick and infected, and they would slice open one of the pustules, literally the pox, wipe their knife through the gruesomeness in that pustule, then slice that dirty knife underneath the skin of a healthy person. And if you transmitted

smallpox through blood as opposed to inhaling the virus, then you would usually get a much more mild case. So anyone who was inoculated in this way usually did get smallpox, but it was much less fatal. And then you would, of course, have the immunity against future cases. less fatal. And then you would, of course, have the immunity against future cases. That is, first of all, amazing. And secondly, we all know George Washington's army went through some pretty lean months there. What they didn't need was massive smallpox outbreaks. That could have been decisive in the course of the war. Yes, absolutely. It really could have, especially because usually smallpox tended to spread in the winter when people were in close quarters. Sometimes you didn't have enough food.

You didn't necessarily have the warmth. There was no plumbing and sanitation like you would think of today. So all of the conditions that were rife for some sort of outbreak. So not only would it have destroyed the army, but Washington was also very attentive to making sure no one found out that they were getting these inoculations because it would make the army weaker while the troops were recovering. So it was sort of a grand secret and everyone who knew about it was told on no uncertain terms to keep it quiet and not let the British find out. Very sensible. And are there any examples of soldiers going,

hey, you're infringing my liberty by giving me this mild version of smallpox? So there aren't a whole lot of records of individual soldiers referring to it as a liberty issue. People were very fearful because there were individuals who did not get the mild case. They got the full-on, full-blown smallpox. And people did die, but it was a much lower fatality rate than a standard outbreak. In North America in the 18th century, if smallpox broke out in a city, up to one third of the population could die in that outbreak. So that obviously would be horrific in an army. And there's some evidence to suggest that about one in 10 people died with this type of inoculation. So there was obviously still a risk. And that's why some cities were

sort of reluctant to adopt this medicine. They worried that it would spread the disease. But our concept of personal liberty and infringing on that was not really something that came into the Continental Army because they didn't have a whole lot of personal liberties to begin with. We're in the 19th century now, after the Civil War, attitudes towards public health are changing. What's happening of note in this period? As it was, public health was changing. What's happening of note in this period? So viruses and disease continues to spread as it always does, even in times of peace. And in 1902, Massachusetts was hit by a particularly hard wave of smallpox.

And so Cambridge, the town of Cambridge, issued a regulation that all residents had to be vaccinated. And one of the residents appealed to that decision and sued in court and took the case all the way up to the Supreme Court. And in 1905, the Supreme Court made a decision that said that a state or a town or an entity has every right to mandate a vaccine in the interest of public health if there is a threat,

as long as it is fairly reasonable. So smallpox was obviously an incredibly deadly disease. This was a reasonable request, and they ruled that the mandate was perfectly acceptable. That legal statute and that precedent has held. It has not been challenged. It has continued to be upheld by various Supreme Courts and state courts. And recently, state courts have also upheld it. It has not gone to this Supreme Court and has not been challenged on that level. But there is very clear legal precedent that that is appropriate under the Constitution. Okay, Lindsay, that's an astonishing example of a vaccine mandate. Let's keep going. What else have we got?

The military is the place where a lot of these mandates start for good reason. If you're going to have a large mass of people, they're going to be going into warfare. You want to prevent against any sort of disease that is prone to spread among large groups or would decimate your troops because if they're there to fight a war, you want them to be able to do so. So the smallpox vaccine was given to soldiers through the Civil War and is actually sometimes still given to soldiers depending on where they're serving around the globe. I know that during the wars in the Middle East, some American soldiers did actually continue to receive that vaccine. As the medicine and the technology increased during World War I and World War II, soldiers started to get vaccines for things like typhoid and influenza and tetanus and cholera and diphtheria and plague and yellow fever. So the army is really sort of the starting point in the United States

for where these mandates begin, and then they tend to trickle out from there to other parts of society. So it doesn't strike me that there's any really historical foundations to the argument that this is an unprecedented new assault on our liberties. If anything, vaccines, vaccine mandates, public health mandates, they're the norm through U.S. history. Yes, absolutely. That's the problem with these arguments is they demonstrate a complete lack of knowledge about American history. And if you actually dig into the history of the United States and dig into these mandates, then it really turns those arguments on their head. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about vaccine mandates. More after this.

Hi, I'm Susanna Lipscomb. And in my new podcast, Not Just the Tudors, I'll be talking about everything from Aztecs to witches, Belefketh to Shakespeare, Mughal India to the Mayflower. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Stand a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows,

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week Before the more welfare-type states of the 20th century, the government didn't care. I mean, it cared about its frontline troops, but it wasn't hugely worried about the urban poor, right? That was a relatively modern development.

That's right. And our sense of public health and what it is and our sense of a communal health process has been slow to develop. For example, during World War I and when there was the Spanish flu, people did have a sense that there was a community aspect to trying to prevent some of this disease, but they didn't have the same knowledge that we have today. And some states, as early as the 1850s, Massachusetts was the first state to put in a mandate for the smallpox vaccine for children, for schools. And so schools are sort of the next frontier in those vaccines. But that was much slower. And it actually, at least in the United States, wasn't until the 1980s that all 50 states had school requirements for vaccines. Given that there are requirements for vaccines

existing already, where's the heat coming from in this debate? Like, try and help me understand this. It's a really good question. And it's a frustrating one because every single person that is protesting against these vaccines, I guarantee you that they had to comply with vaccine mandates to go to public school, to go to college. I had to pull out my vaccine records to go to college. Most teachers have to pull out their vaccine records to be able to teach in classrooms. And even in places like Florida, where the governor Ron DeSantis has been so vocal against vaccine mandates. Florida schools require all of these vaccines for both public and private schools. So there isn't a whole lot of logic

behind these positions. A lot of it is partisan in nature and has become a political tool. And the concept that your personal liberty allows you to do whatever you want is antithetical to traditional conservatism. It is antithetical to constitutionalism. The idea of a society is that you have to give up some things in order to live with people. We are not allowed to drive drunk. We are not allowed to drive 100 miles an hour. These are some of the rules that we have to abide by. And that's just what living in a society is. So it doesn't really make sense. It's not a logical choice. And I wish I had a more elegant answer than that. I know it's a very elegant answer. So as a historian of the early years of the US, of the Republic, I see you like whack-a-mole on Twitter every day dealing

with things. But is there evidence for this libertarian take on the founding fathers? What did they mean by liberty? Like that word, because we hear liberty in the 18th century so often, we hear it both in Britain, but also of course around the founding of the American Republic. And today, do you think people have got a different understanding of what that word means? Yes, absolutely. So they were very concerned with personal liberty, but that did not mean that you didn't have to follow any rules or that you didn't have any obligations to your fellow man. It meant that the government couldn't foist troops upon your home without your permission. It meant that you didn't have to attend the state church. It meant that you had the right to take care of your own

farm and your own family and worship how you chose in the privacy of your home. It was not a free for all. And a lot of the language and the ideas behind the revolution have been warped to suggest that it somehow means you can do whatever you want. And if someone tries to impose a rule, then they are tyrannical or they are trying to be a monarch. And that's preposterous because any society has, of course, had rules from the very beginning. And the founding fathers were big on rules. They liked a society that was well-ordered and structured. So they would be aghast that people thought that liberty meant no restrictions. It's like the old line about Rousseau, and he says, man is everywhere in chains. And

scholars have said, Rousseau, he's not trying to dissolve those chains. He's trying to legitimize them, I guess. I guess those fanfares are like, we want government. We don't want arbitrary government. So if things pass through that constitutional process and go from being a bill and getting signed and go through the Hill and go to the White House and get signed on the desk, they would argue that is liberty because it's the people's representatives being consulted, the processes are being adhered to, and legitimate law is being produced. Absolutely. They would have argued that if you had a voice in the process, if you got to elect the people that represented you, if you had the opportunity to give them feedback on measures, and if laws passed, then those were constitutionally appropriate measures. A great example comes up in 1794 when the Whiskey Rebellion breaks out in Pennsylvania.

A bunch of farmers in western Pennsylvania were very resentful of attacks on whiskey distilleries. And they said it was very unfair. And they protested for several years before burning down the house of a tax collector near present day Pittsburgh. And Washington's response was, if you don't like the bill, then have your representatives vote for something else in Congress. You are represented. And that was a distinction they drew with their grievances during the revolution when they felt that they did not have representation in the constitutional process. So as long as you have representation, as long as your vote is counted and there is a free and fair election, which there was,

then this is a constitutional process and it is approved by the appropriate constitutional measures. In the ferment of ideas, the tumult of the period that you're so expert in, were there people going beyond Washington and Jefferson and Madison? Were there people who were experimenting with what we'd now consider far more libertarian ideas? Or is this a modern invention? There were, but they were generally exiled. So they were sort of on the periphery of society and were not welcome in what would consider to be appropriate company. So there aren't any examples that come to mind because generally those people did not want to participate in society because they recognized that they would not be welcome. And so they often went West and participated in what we consider to be frontier activities.

So there certainly were people who were thinking about there should be no government or there should be limited government or government is what I say it should be. But the people who were actually running the government did not feel that way. So Lindsay, thank you for coming on the podcast and sharing all that with us. How can people find out more about this and the rest of your work? Well, thank you so much. As you said, I am pretty active on Twitter. I can be followed at LM Chervinsky and that's C-H-E-R-V-I-N-S-K-Y. I also have a website, which is lindsaychervinsky.com that has all of my work and you can read this article about the vaccines and anything else. Lindsay, you've come on to talk about the cabinet before. Half a year into this Biden administration,

for super geeks, what's going on with the cabinet? Is there anything new or is there a reversion to mean in this cabinet? Well, in some ways, there is a reversion to the mean in that this administration is trying to avoid scandal because scandal tends to impede your ability to get things done. That has been the general rule of things. The previous administration was very happy to court scandal or didn't seem to mind. So in some ways, that is a reversion to the mean because they've been very quiet and they generally stay out of the news. And that is a good thing for government if the cabinet is staying out of the news. There are still some extraordinary firsts. There were some really big selections that had really significant import and a symbolic choice.

Like, for example, the Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, is the first Native American secretary. And as her capacity as Secretary of the Interior, she oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is a huge moment. So there are still some firsts that I think are really exciting. But by and large, it is a delight to have boring competence back in government again. And can I ask, because this is something we deal with in the UK a lot, so far, is the character of this cabinet that decision-making is being pushed out and down to these secretaries, or does it feel like government is being run by a small coterie in the White House? I think it feels pretty cohesive.

It's hard to say because I'm not privy to these conversations. And a lot of these things we won't know until they're declassified documents. But from an observer standpoint, because there isn't scandal and because everyone seems to be generally marching to the same tune and on the same page, that suggests to me that there is a small group that is calling the shots. And that's then being dictated down the various levels of bureaucracy, rather than a bunch of people pursuing a bunch of different agendas. So being a cabinet member for Joe Biden, it might be a steady, easygoing ride, but you're not given that much lead to make the big decisions yourself. My guess is you're given the opportunity to try and convince him, but he has the final say. That's what I would guess.

Lindsay, what are you working on at the moment? Are we allowed to know? Yes. So if I said that I was studying a period of time where there was intense partisan divide, fears about immigration and public health, fears of political violence, fears of dangerous and unsteady transitions and elections being

challenged, you might think I was talking about today. But actually, I'm writing about the last few years of the 1790s and John Adams' incredible impact on the presidency and the country and his ability to basically salvage these two transitions. And I don't think he gets enough credit. So I am looking into that and excited to share that story. Because I guess peaceful transitions, you can't surround George Washington being a good chap. I guess you have to bed in the culture a bit more firmly than that.

Yes. And he did not take for granted that there would be a peaceful transition. I think as Americans until this year, we did. And he was very attentive to the fact that until that point, most transitions in history were very bloody and very gruesome. So he was very careful to try and craft that policy. That is good news. I'm looking forward to the next Stravinsky book. That's very exciting. Thank you. And please come on the podcast when that is out. Absolutely. Thank you so much for talking to us. That was fascinating.

Thank you. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did feel like

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