The 1905 U.S. Supreme Court decision established the constitutionality of state compulsory vaccination laws when they are “necessary for the public health or the public safety. Jacobson involved compulsory vaccination in the midst of a smallpox epidemic when there was no other less coercive means available to staunch the outbreak.
Vaccine efficacy against infectious diseases rests on the concept of herd immunity. Vaccines are never one hundred percent effective for everybody, so even vaccinated people can become infected with diseases against which they were immunized. But if enough people in a population are effectively immunized against a disease, the population can achieve a herd immunity that protects everybody. The idea is that the disease will not break out in the population because too few people are capable of carrying it and passing it on to others.
In 1901, a smallpox epidemic swept through the Northeast. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the city government sought to subdue the epidemic by requiring all adults to receive smallpox inoculations. Failure to do so would result in a five-dollar fine ($5 in 1901 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $164.00 today).
In 1902, Henning Jacobson refused to be vaccinated and to pay the fine.
In state court, Jacobson argued that the vaccine law violated both the Massachusetts and U.S. constitutions. The state courts, including the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, rejected his claims. Jacobson appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The stakes were high for the anti-vaccine movement. At the time, only 11 states had compulsory vaccine laws.
Jacobson’s argument boiled down to the claim that the treatment could not be imposed upon healthy citizens simply because they have the potential to contract the disease.
“Compulsion to introduce disease into a healthy system is a violation of liberty,” he argued.
Jacobson v. Massachusetts 1905, the Supreme Court upheld a state’s mandatory compulsory smallpox vaccination
Argued December 6, 1904
Decided February 20, 1905
Writing for the 7–2 majority, Justice Harlan rejected Jacobson’s arguments. He grounded the opinion in social compact theory and state police power — that is, the power of the states to protect public health and safety. Constitutional liberties, he wrote, are limited by a fundamental “social compact” and the “government is instituted ‘for the common good, for the protection, safety, prosperity and happiness of the people, and not for the profit, honor or private interests of any one man.’” The Court recognized a sphere of protected individual liberties, but insisted that the state had broad powers to encroach on that sphere when “the safety of the general public may demand.”
The Aftermath
Soon after Jacobson’s holding came down, the inchoate antivaccine movement exploded. Most prominently, three years after Jacobson, the Anti-Vaccination League of America was founded in Philadelphia.
–“Toward a Twenty-First-Century Jacobson v. Massachusetts” -Harvard Law Review
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Dilemma X 
January 22, 2022
Did you know?, Government/Politics, Laws, Remember yesteryear