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The Pastor's Childhood Vaccination That Refused to Be Ignored · Healthcare Scandal Investigations

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: $ 5. That was the price Cambridge, Massachusetts put on a
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: man's body in 1902. Henning Jacobson refused to pay it.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: What grew out of that refusal was not a public
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: health footnote. It became the case American courts still reach for,
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: more than a century later, every time the same question
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: comes back around, how much of your body belongs to
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: the state, and where exactly does that claim stop? Cambridge
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: that year was not arguing over an abstraction. Smallpox was
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: moving through its crowded neighborhoods, confirmed case after confirmed case,
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  Speaker 1: and it left the people it did not kill disfigured
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  Speaker 1: for the rest of their lives. This was not a
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  Speaker 1: disease anyone in that city could afford to treat as
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: a rumor. The city's Board of Health issued an order.
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  Speaker 1: Every adult, vaccinated or revaccinated. Refuse, and the fine was $ 5.
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  Speaker 1: Roughly $ 186 in today's money. Vaccination itself cost nothing. The
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: state was not trying to profit from anyone's fear. It
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  Speaker 1: was trying to end an outbreak. and it believed uniform
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  Speaker 1: compliance was the only tool that would work fast enough.
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  Speaker 1: Jacobson said, no. He was not performing outrage. As a
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  Speaker 1: child in Sweden, he had been vaccinated, and by his
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  Speaker 1: own account it caused him what he called great and
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  Speaker 1: extreme suffering. He believed his family carried something in their
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  Speaker 1: blood that made vaccination dangerous for them specifically. His son,
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  Speaker 1: he said, had reacted badly to an earlier shot. He
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  Speaker 1: was a Lutheran pastor. A man who spent his days
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  Speaker 1: tending a congregation, sitting at sickbeds, burying the dead of
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  Speaker 1: a city that was, that very year, losing people to
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  Speaker 1: smallpox itself. He had likely stood at more than one
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  Speaker 1: graveside that season already. Speaking comfort to families who had
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  Speaker 1: lost exactly what the vaccination order was trying to prevent.
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  Speaker 1: He was not a crank waving a pamphlet. He was
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  Speaker 1: a father who had already watched one of his own
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  Speaker 1: children get sick from the very thing the state was
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  Speaker 1: now ordering him to take again, and who could not
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  Speaker 1: separate that memory from the paperwork in front of him.
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  Speaker 1: The question he carried into that fight was simple to
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  Speaker 1: ask and almost impossible to answer. When a government orders
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  Speaker 1: everybody to submit to the same procedure, what happens to
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  Speaker 1: the bodies that cannot safely comply? It took three years
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  Speaker 1: to get an answer. It came from the Supreme Court
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  Speaker 1: of the United States on February 20, 1905, and it
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  Speaker 1: would outlive Jacobson, outlive the courtroom, and eventually outlive the
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  Speaker 1: disease itself. Massachusetts was not improvising when it moved against him.
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  Speaker 1: It was one of 11 states that had already passed
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  Speaker 1: compulsory vaccination laws before the Cambridge outbreak began. The legislature
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  Speaker 1: had built the lever years earlier. The Board of Health
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  Speaker 1: simply pulled it. And the law had a particular shape.
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  Speaker 1: Adults over 21 were covered. The shot was free. The
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  Speaker 1: only thing demanded was compliance, and the only penalty for
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  Speaker 1: refusing was that $ 5 fine. No arrest. No officers holding
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  Speaker 1: a man down. A fine, and nothing more. The state
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  Speaker 1: had built a machine designed to pressure, not to physically force.
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  Speaker 1: For Jacobson, the pressure landed on a wound that had
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  Speaker 1: never closed. In court, he was not arguing that vaccination
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  Speaker 1: was worthless for everyone in Cambridge. He was arguing something
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  Speaker 1: narrower and, in its way, harder to dismiss. That his body,
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  Speaker 1: with its specific documented history, should not be treated as
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  Speaker 1: interchangeable with every other body on his street. He was
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  Speaker 1: asking the law to look at him as one man
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  Speaker 1: instead of one number in a population. The law, as written,
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  Speaker 1: had no place to put that request. It was built
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  Speaker 1: to move an entire population in one direction at once,
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  Speaker 1: and a population moving in one direction has no room
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  Speaker 1: in it for an exception of one. This was not
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  Speaker 1: a fringe position in 1902. Physicians of the period knew
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  Speaker 1: adverse reactions happened. There was live, unresolved debate in the
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  Speaker 1: medical literature about vaccine safety and effectiveness. Jacobson had not
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  Speaker 1: invented that controversy. He was standing inside it. But the
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  Speaker 1: Massachusetts legislature had already made its collective judgment, in a
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  Speaker 1: live public health emergency, The safety of the community outweighed
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  Speaker 1: one man's hesitation, however sincerely felt. Jacobson was prosecuted. He
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  Speaker 1: was convicted. He was fined $ 5. He refused again to pay.
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  Speaker 1: The case climbed toward the highest court in the country.
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  Speaker 1: Two justices would eventually vote against everything that followed. Their
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  Speaker 1: names were David Brewer and Rufus Peckham. They said nothing
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  Speaker 1: about why. Not a sentence, not a footnote, not one
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  Speaker 1: line of dissent committed to paper. Whatever they saw in
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  Speaker 1: Jacobson's argument that their seven colleagues did not, they never
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  Speaker 1: wrote it down. The majority, written by Justice Harlan, did
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  Speaker 1: something more careful than a flat ruling for the state.
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  Speaker 1: It left a door open, a narrow one. It said
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  Speaker 1: that in cases of genuine, documentable individual danger, their vaccination
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  Speaker 1: would amount to real cruelty against a specific body. A
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  Speaker 1: court could step in and stop it. But that door
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  Speaker 1: had a lock, and the key was medical proof, not
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  Speaker 1: a memory, not a father's account of what happened to
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  Speaker 1: his son. A physician's sworn statement, made at the time,
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  Speaker 1: that this particular vaccination would harm this particular man. Jacobson
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  Speaker 1: had the memory. He did not have the statement. The
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  Speaker 1: court did not call him a liar. It called him unprepared.
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  Speaker 1: It weighed his account of childhood suffering, his son's reaction,
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  Speaker 1: everything he believed about his family's blood, against the scale
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  Speaker 1: of an active outbreak spreading through a city, and concluded
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  Speaker 1: that none of it had been verified by a contemporary
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  Speaker 1: medical examination. Sincerity was never the issue. Documentation was. That gap,
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  Speaker 1: between what a man knows about his own body and
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  Speaker 1: what the law will accept as proof of it, is
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  Speaker 1: where this case actually lives, and it is a gap
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  Speaker 1: that is never fully closed for anyone who has stood
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  Speaker 1: where Jacobson stood since. Parlin's opinion also named four limits
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  Speaker 1: meant to keep state power from running unchecked. The measures
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  Speaker 1: could not be arbitrary. They could not be oppressive. They
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  Speaker 1: could not exceed what public safety actually required. They had
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  Speaker 1: to bear a real relationship to the threat they claimed
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  Speaker 1: to address. On the page, those four lines read like guardrails.
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  Speaker 1: What they did not do was say, precisely, where those
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  Speaker 1: guardrails stood, arbitrary by whose judgment, oppressive to whom. Harlan
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  Speaker 1: left that decision for courts that had not yet been convened,
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  Speaker 1: facing bodies that had not yet been born. On February 20, 1905,
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  Speaker 1: the ruling landed. Jacobson lost. The fine stood. The Massachusetts
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  Speaker 1: law stood. States, the court held, could mandate vaccination during
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  Speaker 1: a public health emergency without violating the 14th Amendment. Individual
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  Speaker 1: liberty was real, Harlan wrote. but it could not be
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  Speaker 1: exercised in ways that endangered everyone else. 17 years passed
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  Speaker 1: quietly on top of that ruling. In 1922, in a
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  Speaker 1: case called Zucht v. King, the court used the same
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  Speaker 1: logic to let a city require vaccination as a condition
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  Speaker 1: of attending public school. Jacobson's framework did not bend at all.
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  Speaker 1: It simply walked from grown men on Cambridge streets into
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  Speaker 1: classrooms full of children in San Antonio. Then, five years
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  Speaker 1: after that, it walked somewhere else. In 1927, The Supreme
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  Speaker 1: Court decided Buck v. Bell. Carrie Buck was a young
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  Speaker 1: woman in Virginia. Poor, institutionalized, declared by the state to
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  Speaker 1: be intellectually deficient. She had no wealth, no standing, and
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  Speaker 1: almost no way to be heard by the court deciding
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  Speaker 1: her case. Virginia wanted to sterilize her. The court said yes,
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  Speaker 1: eight votes to one. The justice who wrote that opinion
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  Speaker 1: reached for Jacobson by name. His reasoning was not a
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  Speaker 1: loose echo of the earlier case. It was built directly
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  Speaker 1: on it. If the state could compel a man to
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  Speaker 1: accept a needle for the good of the public, he wrote,
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  Speaker 1: it could compel a woman to accept an operation for
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  Speaker 1: that same good. That is not an interpretation of what
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  Speaker 1: he argued. That is the argument in his own hand.
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  Speaker 1: The door Harlan had built, not arbitrary, not oppressive, not
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  Speaker 1: beyond necessity, bearing a real relationship to the threat, was
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  Speaker 1: the exact door this new court walked through to reach
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  Speaker 1: Carrie Buck. The guardrails that had sounded, in 1905, like
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  Speaker 1: a promise to the individual, held nothing back in 1927.
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  Speaker 1: There are two ways to hear that. One is that
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  Speaker 1: Buck v. Bell was a betrayal of what Jacobson's court intended.
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  Speaker 1: The same legal chassis, loaded with a far darker cargo
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  Speaker 1: than Harlan ever meant to carry. The other is colder.
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  Speaker 1: Harlan's four conditions were never given hard edges. They were
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  Speaker 1: left open on purpose, or at least left open, and
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  Speaker 1: an open door does not choose who walks through it.
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  Speaker 1: The framework was not stolen from Jacobson's case. It was
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  Speaker 1: simply available, and in 1927 it was used. Here is
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  Speaker 1: the detail that makes it worse. The narrow exception. The
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  Speaker 1: one built for a person exactly like Jacobson. Someone with genuine,
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  Speaker 1: documentable danger in their own body. Never once protected Jacobson himself.
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  Speaker 1: He could not produce the medical proof it required, so
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  Speaker 1: he never walked through it. Two decades later, a different
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  Speaker 1: court walked through that same door on behalf of the
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  Speaker 1: state against a woman who had no say in the
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  Speaker 1: matter at all. Something did go right eventually. It just
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  Speaker 1: took most of a century. In 1980, the World Health
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  Speaker 1: Organization certified that smallpox, the disease that emptied Cambridge's streets,
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  Speaker 1: that justified the fine, that gave Harlan's Court its emergency
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  Speaker 1: in the first place, had been eradicated from the planet.
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  Speaker 1: Not contained. Not managed. Gone. The result of a global
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  Speaker 1: vaccination campaign that took decades to finish. Today, the only
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  Speaker 1: confirmed samples left on Earth sit inside two locked freezers,
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  Speaker 1: one in the United States and one in Russia. Humanity
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  Speaker 1: actually won that fight. Somewhere, a disease that once left
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  Speaker 1: survivors scarred for life that once forced a city to
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  Speaker 1: find its own residents into compliance, simply stopped existing outside
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  Speaker 1: of two guarded rooms. That is not a small thing.
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  Speaker 1: It is one of the genuine triumphs in the history
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  Speaker 1: of medicine, and it deserves to be heard as one.
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  Speaker 1: The legal precedent it produced did not go into the
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  Speaker 1: freezer with it. The Anti-Vaccination League of America had organized
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  Speaker 1: itself back in 1908, three years after the ruling, framing
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  Speaker 1: its resistance in the same language Jacobson had used in court.
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  Speaker 1: A claim to bodily sovereignty, it won no cases. Jacobson v.
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  Speaker 1: Massachusetts stayed exactly where it was, and courts kept reaching
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  Speaker 1: for it. Prince v. Massachusetts, in 1944. Crewson v. Director,
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  Speaker 1: in 1990. Vernonia School District v. Acton, in 1995. Gonzalez v. Carhartt,
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  Speaker 1: in 2007. Every time a court had to weigh a
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  Speaker 1: person's claim over their own body against the state's authority,
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  Speaker 1: Jacobson's name turned up somewhere in the reasoning. It has
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  Speaker 1: not stopped. In 2021, the Supreme Court denied relief to
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  Speaker 1: Maine healthcare workers challenging a vaccine mandate, and Jacobson was
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  Speaker 1: cited in the background of that decision. During the pandemic,
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  Speaker 1: it was invoked to defend mask orders and stay-at-home directives,
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  Speaker 1: arguments written by lawyers who had never met Henning Jacobson
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  Speaker 1: and were citing a fine he refused to pay more
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  Speaker 1: than 100 years before their clients were born. A federal
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  Speaker 1: circuit court has reached for it in disputes over abortion regulation.
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  Speaker 1: A century of American body law, in one direction or another,
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  Speaker 1: keeps landing back on a $ 5 fine issued to a
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  Speaker 1: Cambridge pastor who believed no one was listening to him.
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  Speaker 1: You have probably had a moment like his, on a
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  Speaker 1: smaller scale. A form you signed without reading closely. A
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  Speaker 1: shot of school required before it would let your child
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  Speaker 1: walk through the door. A workplace policy you disagreed with
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  Speaker 1: but followed anyway, because refusing would have cost you something
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  Speaker 1: you could not afford to lose. A moment where a
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  Speaker 1: stranger with a clipboard decided something about your body on
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  Speaker 1: your behalf, and you complied because the alternative cost more
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  Speaker 1: than you were willing to pay. Jacobson's case is the
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  Speaker 1: reason that moment has legal shape at all. Somewhere in
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  Speaker 1: the reasoning behind that form, that shot, that policy, is
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  Speaker 1: a $ 5 fine from 1902. There is something about Henning
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  Speaker 1: Jacobson himself that resists a clean ending. He was not
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  Speaker 1: a fringe figure. He was not performing for a crowd.
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  Speaker 1: He was a Swedish-born pastor in Massachusetts who had, by
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  Speaker 1: his own account, been harmed by a vaccine as a child,
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  Speaker 1: who carried that harm as a memory his body kept
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  Speaker 1: long after the wound itself had healed, who believed his
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  Speaker 1: son had suffered something similar, and who stood in front
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  Speaker 1: of the highest court in the country and said, in effect,
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  Speaker 1: this history is real and you are choosing not to
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  Speaker 1: read it. The court did read it. Harlan's majority never
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  Speaker 1: dismissed his account as fabrication or fear. It waited, seriously,
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  Speaker 1: against the scale of a city losing people to an
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  Speaker 1: active outbreak, against a legislature that had judged the risk
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  Speaker 1: of doing nothing to be greater than the risk of compulsion.
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  Speaker 1: And it concluded, in the end, that a man's memory
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  Speaker 1: of his own suffering was not the same thing as
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  Speaker 1: medical proof of danger. That distinction, between what you know
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  Speaker 1: happened to your own body and what the law will
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  Speaker 1: accept as evidence of it, is the entire case, compressed
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  Speaker 1: into one gap that is never fully closed. The $ 5
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  Speaker 1: Jacobson refused to pay became the foundation for how American
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  Speaker 1: courts have understood the state's claim on a human body
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  Speaker 1: for more than 120 years. A sum that comes to
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: about $ 186 today bought a precedent that has outlasted the
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  Speaker 1: disease that produced it, outlasted the century that produced the disease,
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  Speaker 1: and outlasted every political era that has tried to claim
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  Speaker 1: it for its own side since. Smallpox is gone. Sealed
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  Speaker 1: in two freezers on two continents, and nowhere else on Earth.
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  Speaker 1: The case remains. Cited this year, the way it was
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  Speaker 1: cited last year. the way it has been cited in
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  Speaker 1: nearly every decade since 1905. And Brewer and Peckham, the
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  Speaker 1: two justices who looked at all of it and voted no,
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  Speaker 1: are still the only people in this story who never
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: explain themselves. Their dissent survives as a number, and nothing else.
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  Speaker 1: Two votes, out of nine, with no reasoning attached. Whatever
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  Speaker 1: they saw in Jacobson's argument that the other seven did not,
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  Speaker 1: they took it with them when they left the bench,
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  Speaker 1: and no one has ever gotten it back. Henning Jacobson's
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  Speaker 1: name is now the answer courts reach for whenever the
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: same question resurfaces. how much of yourself belongs to the state,
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  Speaker 1: and on what terms. The $ 5 fine was paid, eventually,
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  Speaker 1: by the force of a ruling and not by his surrender.
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  Speaker 1: But in the way that actually matters, the way that
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  Speaker 1: asks whether the law ever fully answered the question he raised,
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  Speaker 1: it is still unpaid. This show is made by Oboe Media.