CHARLEVOIX, MI – So how is that lottery to raise vaccination rates in Michigan working? Early signs indicate … not very well.
True, more than a million people entered the lottery within days after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, announced it. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, began an almost identical lottery a few months earlier, with each state offering $5 million in total prizes.
Both governors were initially enthusiastic, with DeWine calling it “a resounding success for Ohio, with major increases in vaccines in the first two weeks.” But a Boston University School of Medicine study later found that the Ohio lottery essentially had little or no effect. The people who got vaccinated and entered the lottery had done or were going to do so anyway, the study found.
Early reports from health departments in Michigan indicated much the same. But there is another possible way that every state could drive vaccination rates so high “herd immunity” would almost certainly be achieved, and the pandemic ended.
The states — or perhaps the federal government – could enact laws requiring everyone to be vaccinated and calling for criminal penalties for every healthy adult who fails to do so.
When I asked one militant “anti-vaxxer” what she thought about this, she said if any government were to do that, the courts would rule that this was an outrageous violation of her rights.
What she didn’t know was that the highest court of all, the U.S. Supreme Court, already has ruled on whether governments could, in the time of an epidemic, force people to be vaccinated.
And the high court ruled decisively that they could indeed.
This happened, not in the case of COVID, but before anyone today was alive. Back in 1902, there was an outbreak of smallpox in Cambridge, Mass. Massachusetts had a law saying that local boards of health could require everyone over 21 to get any vaccination they deemed necessary “for the public health or safety of the community. “
The vaccines, like the COVID-19 vaccine, was to be provided free of charge. A Swedish-born pastor named Henning Jacobson refused to be vaccinated, and was convicted and fined. He said the law was oppressive, unreasonable, and arbitrary.
He sued, and two years later the case, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, reached the U.S. Supreme Court — which on Feb. 20, 1905, ruled 7-2 that governments could indeed require citizens to be vaccinated when “reasonably required for the safety of the public.”
Writing for the majority, Justice John Harlan concluded that requiring the vaccine was neither arbitrary nor oppressive, and that individual liberty could not exist if it meant you had the right to do whatever you wanted “regardless of the injury that may be done to others.” Justice Harlan did add that this shouldn’t apply to a person whose health or life might be legitimately threatened by the vaccine.
Two decades later, in 1922, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled that a school system had the right to refuse to admit a student who refused required vaccinations.
So could lawmakers today legally require all adults to get the vaccine against COVID-19?
Legally, it would seem clear that the answer is yes. However, Robert Sedler, professor emeritus of constitutional law at Wayne State University in Detroit isn’t completely sure. “COVID-19 isn’t the same as smallpox. There are other ways to prevent its spread,” he noted, such as masks and social distancing.
However, he acknowledged that like smallpox, COVID-19 is a communicable deadly disease, and masks aren’t foolproof. It is possible that the courts would rule the vaccine might be required.
“And what is completely clear is that any private employer, and probably public employers as well, has every right to fire employees who refuse to be vaccinated,” he said.
Politically, however, getting lawmakers to legally force citizens to get the vaccine is probably impossible. It certainly is in Michigan, where Republicans control both houses of the legislature.
Despite more than a million cases and 21,000 deaths in the state, some GOP lawmakers are still opposed to the vaccine.
But what if these lawmakers, or the ones who will be elected from new districts next year, did decide to legally require the vaccine?
We live in a different world from 1905, or even from 1955, when few would likely have protested had the polio vaccine been universally required. Todd Anderson is a 45-year-old landscape gardener in Mackinaw City at the tip of the Lower Peninsula.
“I am 100 percent pro-vaccine,” he said, but adds that he lives in a “Trump town tourist hellhole,” in a county Trump carried by almost two to one, and where vaccination rates lag statewide and national averages.
“The pandemic and the election brought out the ugliest dark corners of our society,” he said. “What would happen if we enacted an obscure legal precedent from 116 years ago? I’d say we’d see a complete unleashing of domestic terrorism disguised as a revolution.”
As a single parent of four small children, he feels we can’t risk that. There were those two years ago who said it would take something like a nationwide pandemic to unite America again. What is clear is that despite more than 600,000 dead, this one hasn’t.
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