In the Washington Post today was this historical essay: First U.S. vaccine mandate in 1809 launched 200 years of court battles (subscription paywall).
Jess McHugh recounts the history of the smallpox vaccination from 1809 through a Supreme Court review of Massachusetts’s vaccine mandates.
Just as at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, a legal and political contest is playing out between individual liberty and public health. It’s too soon to say whether the current courts will agree, as Justice Harlan wrote in 1905, that personal freedoms should never supersede “the common good.”