Monday, September 20, 2021

Stacey Abrams Most Dangerous Woman In America? Two Critical Op Ed's. Bob Livingston A Rational Alarmist? Pandemic History

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One of the most dangerous females in this nation (edited.)

Stop Stacey’s plot to federalize our elections

This radical legislation would:

 

  • FEDERALIZE our election system
  • FORCE states to adopt national voting standards
  • EMPOWER federal agencies to ignore immigration status and eliminate voter ID

 

It couldn’t be clearer, %%firstname%%. Stacey wants to end state-run elections and replace them with a nationalized system that makes it EASY TO CHEAT! 


 And:


The Mexicans sent them. They were refugees in Mexico. Apparently, (so this article says) Joe didn't deliver on a promise to the Mexican government. This was designed to get his attention - Good luck with that. Joe is on a Delaware beach getting much needed rest!


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 Two very important and meaningful op ed's!


In the op about XI, it appears he understands the benefits as well as the failures of capitalism and hopes through government dictates he can smooth out the consequences/contrasts.


That he apparently may fail to understand, as the Chinese embrace capitalism, a subsidiary spill over effect is they will also want more personal freedom and whether he can finesse that issue will be critical in determining his effort to make a successful transition.


As for the emergence of more women graduating schools at all levels versus male declines it will have meaningful implications for the type of nation we will eventually become.


eventually , since it is a yin-yang matter, it is too early to predict which way the tide ebbs and flows.
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What Explains Xi’s Pivot to the State?

He’s wagering it will help him achieve his goal of a record third term as paramount leader.

By Kevin Rudd



Something is happening in China that the West doesn’t understand. In recent months Beijing killed the country’s $120 billion private tutoring sector and slapped hefty fines on tech firms Tencent and Alibaba. Chinese executives have been summoned to the capitol to “self-rectify their misconduct” and billionaires have begun donating to charitable causes in what President Xi Jinping calls “tertiary income redistribution.” China’s top six technology stocks have lost more than $1.1 trillion in value in the past six months as investors scramble to figure out what is going on.


Why would China, which has engaged in fierce economic competition with the West in recent years, suddenly turn on its own like this? While many in the U.S. and Europe may see this as a bewildering series of events, there is a common “red thread” linking all of it. Mr. Xi is executing an economic pivot to the party and the state based on three driving forces: ideology, demographics and decoupling.


Despite the market reforms of the past four decades, ideology still matters to the Chinese Communist Party. At the 19th Party Congress in 2017, Mr. Xi declared that China had entered into a “new era” and that the “principal contradiction” facing the party had changed. Marxist-Leninist language seems arcane to foreigners. A “contradiction” is the interaction between progressive forces pushing toward socialism and the resistance to that change. It is therefore the shifting definition of the party’s principal contradiction that ultimately determines the country’s political direction.


In 1982, Deng Xiaoping redefined the party’s principal contradiction away from Maoist class struggle and toward untrammeled economic development. For the next 35 years, this ideological course set the political parameters for what became the period of “reform and opening.” In 2017 Mr. Xi declared the new contradiction was “between unbalanced and inadequate development” and the need to improve people’s lives.


This might seem a subtle change, but its ideological significance is profound. It authorizes a more radical approach to resolving problems of capitalist excess, from income inequality to environmental pollution. It’s also a philosophy that supports broader forms of state intervention in the Chinese economy—a change that has only become fully realized in the past year.


Demographics is also driving Chinese economic policy to the left. The May 2021 census revealed birthrates had fallen sharply to 1.3—lower than in Japan and the U.S. China is aging fast. The working-age population peaked in 2011 and the total population may now be shrinking. For Mr. Xi, this presents the horrifying prospect China may grow old before it grows rich. He may not therefore be able to realize his dream of making China a wealthy, strong, and global great power by the centenary of the formation of the People’s Republic in 2049.


After a long period of engagement, China now seeks selectively to decouple its economy from the West and present itself as a strategic rival. In 2019 Mr. Xi began talking about a period of “protracted struggle” with America that would extend through midcentury. Lately Mr. Xi’s language of struggle has grown more intense. He has called on cadres to “discard wishful thinking, be willing to fight, and refuse to give way” in preserving Chinese interests.


The forces of ideology, demographics and decoupling have come together in what Mr. Xi now calls his “New Development Concept”—the economic mantra combining an emphasis on greater equality through common prosperity, reduced vulnerability to the outside world and greater state intervention in the economy. A “dual circulation economy” seeks to reduce dependency on exports by making Chinese domestic consumer demand the main driver of growth, while leveraging the powerful gravitational pull of China’s domestic market to maintain international influence. Underpinning this logic is the recent resuscitation of an older Maoist notion of national self-reliance. It reflects Mr. Xi’s determination for Beijing to develop firm domestic control over the technologies that are key to future economic and military power, all supported by independent and controllable supply chains.


Much of the party’s recent crackdown against the Chinese private sector can be understood through this wider lens of Mr. Xi’s “new development concept.” When regulators cracked down on private tutoring it was because many Chinese feel the current economic burden of having even one child is simply too high. When regulators scrutinized data practices, or suspended initial public offerings abroad, it was out of concern about China’s susceptibility to outside pressure. And when cultural regulators banned “effeminate sissies” from television, told Chinese boys to start manning up instead of playing videogames, and issued new school textbooks snappily titled “Happiness Only Comes Through Struggle,” it was all in service of Mr. Xi’s desire to win a generational contest against cultural dependency on the West.


In his overriding quest for re-election to a record third term at the 20th Party Congress in fall 2022, Mr. Xi has apparently chosen to put the solidification of his own domestic political standing ahead of China’s unfinished economic reform project. While the politics of his pivot to the state may make sense internally, if Chinese growth begins to stall Mr. Xi may discover he had the underlying economics very wrong. And in China, as with all countries, ultimate political legitimacy and sustainability will depend on the economy.


Mr. Rudd is a former prime minister of Australia and the global president of the Asia Society.


And:

Why Men Are Disappearing on Campus

About half of women entering four-year colleges graduate on time, but only 40% of men do.

By Richard Vedder and Braden Colegrove



Some 79% more men than women attended America’s colleges and universities when one of us (Mr. Vedder) was an undergraduate in 1959. Women now greatly outnumber men on campuses. The Journal reported recently that men now make up only about 40% of college students. From spring 2019 to spring 2021, the number of collegiate male students fell by more than 535,000, well over triple the modest 154,000 decline observed for women, according to National Student Clearinghouse data.


Between 1959 and 2021, the number of male students for every 100 women fell by an extraordinary 62%. The decline in the 1960s and 1970s can be explained as women simply catching up with men. But the decline in men on campus continued in the late 20th century, long after parity had been reached and gender equality had improved.


Why has this been happening? Here are four reasons. First, the initial surge in female enrollment is explainable by a rapid rise in female labor-force participation. Women realized that a successful career would be enhanced by a college education. Meanwhile, women are marrying later—at age 28 on average in 2020, up from 20.3 in 1960.


A dramatic drop in fertility has accompanied this trend. The birthrate today is slightly below 12 for every 1,000 people, about half the 23.7 in 1960. Labor-saving innovations in household management and child care—automatic washing machines, disposable diapers, inexpensive takeout restaurants—as well as new forms of birth control helped women pursue college degrees and achieve new vocational ambitions.


Second, labor-market shifts have played to women’s interests and strengths. Even in 1960, women played a large role in healthcare and education. Demand for workers in these service industries has increased far more than in historically male-dominated fields such as automobile and steel manufacturing or coal mining. In general, the importance of physical strength has declined as a credential for employment.


Third, women have, on balance, outperformed men academically. There are more men failing to graduate from high school than women. About half of women entering a four-year college graduate in four years, compared with only about 40% of men. The average collegiate grade-point average isn’t tracked regularly but, according to data from 2009, it’s about 3.10 for women, versus 2.90 for men. Men are also more likely to have disciplinary problems in college from things like bar fights or fraternity hazing.


Fourth, there are about 1.24 million more men who are incarcerated than women, largely preventing them from attending traditional college. Scholars such as Charles Murray have long demonstrated that expanded government entitlements following the Great Society era have reduced traditional family formation, reduced incentives to excel both in school and on the job, and increased crime.


America today is still largely led by college educated males. We looked at 200 corporate and political leaders—CEOs of the largest 100 companies in the Fortune 500 and the 100 U.S. senators. About 71.5% of them are men with a college education. Throughout history mostly educated men have run America—the last U.S. president without a college degree, Harry Truman, left office 60 years ago.


It’s great news that more women are going to college and entering positions of leadership in business, politics—including the vice presidency—and every imaginable corner of the culture. A woman will one day be elected president. That milestone, when it happens, should be celebrated. But men adrift—not keeping up in school, struggling to form families and succeed—will eventually have profound consequences on the nation’s economic prospects and political leadership.


Mr. Vedder is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and teaches at Ohio University, where Mr. Colegrove is an undergraduate economics major.

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Bob Livingston is no fool. He is a real conservative, often an alarmist but his concerns are rooted in reality.


He believes entitlements have become so engrained that it has resulted in a massive army which will cause destruction when and if their "entitlements" are no longer available.


Food will be the most critical element and he urges one to stock up a supply of "caloric" items for a lengthy period as the revolution plays itself out.

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Bob Livingston Alerts


An invasion from a foreign army is about the last thing that we would expect, simply because the United States has a large, specialized defense force with the most sophisticated weapons in the world.


But where is that other army, almost 50 million strong, waiting to be motivated and triggered? This is truly a silent army. No one knows. It's anything but public knowledge. When this army erupts, it will be well armed; and it will spread across America like locusts. Few people will be prepared for such totally unexpected terror because there has never been anything like it in American history.


There will be little defense against this army and dangerous, mad mass.


Watch the documentary on the Battle of Stalingrad, which took place from 1942 until 1943 — about 23 months. Millions died. Those killed by gunfire by German and Russian army gunfire were the lucky ones. Many others who dead either froze or starved to death. Some were reduced to eating horses and dogs and even their fellow man.


Nothing was mentioned in the film about any of the citizens having food stored for the battle. They must have known that a prolonged battle was about to take place, and they also knew that winter was coming — not just any winter, but a very harsh Russian winter.


Unprepared


Even though all populations have a basic knowledge of food storage, the American people, especially today, have access and the capability to store many months of very highly nutritional food. But I dare say they have very little or none.


Simply stated, most Americans by far believe that just because several generations have escaped war and famine in the American homeland, they will never suffer hunger and cold.


Well, it is a threat in our present world. Just look at those suffering after Hurricane Ida. Millions of people in a half dozen states without power, possibly with contaminated water, surely many without food, since grocery stores are closed and without power as well…


And yet, that's nothing compared to the more than 42 million people enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as of April 2021. That means before any storm, and disruption, and illness, and lockdown, that 1 in 8 Americans are using food stamps to buy groceries.


How far do you have to stretch your imagination to think of these 42 million people as a "food stamp army?"


They certainly will become an army of terror, stealing and pillaging for food within just a few days after their food stamps are stopped for one reason or another. The food stamp program is the only thing holding off revolution and collapse.


Please remember that people in America who are getting free food stamps consider it something that they deserve as a right rather than a privilege because of their financial hardship or unemployment. This attitude will be very bad when the food stamp system fails, as it surely will as the worthless paper money piles up in the streets $3.5 trillion at a time.


With economic downturn comes government oppression. Economic panics, famine and social breakdown come about as a result of depreciation and devaluation of a paper currency. Few get this direct connection, but it is a direct cause just as night follows day. It's happening now!


The populace has been conditioned to have the goal of accumulating a worthless middleman — cash — instead of hard assets and commodities. For now, this middleman can still gain us access to commodities, goods and services, but for how long?


Prepare now


The next step in the plan to control you is happening now. With one hand, they are destroying cash itself. With the other, they are slowly destroying the notion of where your income is derived from, or that it is even yours at all. Witness our high percentage of GDP that now comes from government, the massive growth of entitlements like food stamps and of course the attempted and probably continuing takeover of healthcare by government-regulation and corporatist interests.


The infrastructure bill (or as I like to call it, the "woke-frastructure" bill) may put people to work rebuilding our roads and bridges, yet what the White House will not tell you — because they don't want you to know — is that the more people who go on the dole (unemployment, food stamps, public works and urban renewal projects) the more people go under the thumb of the state.


If you are trained to think your income, your health and your rights come from the government, you are conditioned that you are no longer free to choose anything. How you live, where you live, what you say, what you spend money on can then all be decided by your government.


While a record number of Americans are on food stamps, the top 1 percent of income earners is taking a larger share of total income. President Biden has seized on this and uses it to give emphasis to class warfare. This will degenerate into a hot revolution that will end badly for Biden and his elite handlers. The underground becomes a way of life for survival.


Before the Army strikes, buy three months of food stock


Most people are not averse to the idea of preparedness, but many have trouble taking the first steps in the right direction. Starving people will break into stores and loot food, leaving you with nothing if you are not ready. Yes, this can happen in America. We are mere minutes from the Third World without electricity.


This means food supply is the greatest Achilles' heel of the American populace. Most homes store less than one week's worth of food items at any given time. And grocery stores with their vaunted "supply chains" have maybe a day extra more than they need. That will spoil or be gone quickly.


The average person needs between 2,000 and 3,000 calories per day to maintain sufficient energy for survival. Multiply that out if you will be unable to visit a store, or if you have no power for a week or more.


Start with 2,000 calories per day per person. Bulk foods can be purchased cheaply (for now) and can at the very least provide sustenance during emergencies. A 20-pound bag of rice, for instance, can be had for less than $15 and provides about 30,000 calories, or 2,000 calories per day for 15 days for one person. Supplement with beans, canned vegetables and meats, honey for sugar, or freeze-dried goods, and you will be living more comfortably than 90 percent of the population.


Food stockpiling is one of the easiest and most vital measures a person could take. Yet, sadly, it is one of the last preparations on people's minds.


Yours for the truth,


Bob Livingston
Editor, The Bob Livingston Letter®

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The radical Muslims and blacks are winning the war of intolerance as they unite in their common cause which is their hatred of  America and they have found their common pinata.



Everybody Hates the Jews

A disturbing new study confirms what many Jewish Americans are feeling

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I believe it is the personal responsibility of every citizen to be vaccinated so the spread of any pandemic is reduced. 

I also believe those who choose not to be vaccinated should pay a price when they seek a medical response should they become ill.  

They are free to decide and should also be free to pay the consequences of their decision. Freedom carries a price.  

The attached article traces history but does not conclude what The SCOTUS will do regarding Biden's mandate.

I have some serious reservations about what Biden has chosen to do because he has flipped and flopped and everything he ultimately does is politically driven.

Left to the radicals who have been driving the Democrat Party's bus for years they are indifferent to the consequences of an increasingly dangerous government that intrudes wherever it pleases and thus diminished the freedoms that separated us from other nations.

My own solution would be to make vaccines free, advertise widely the essential need and moral responsibility to be vaccinated and then let each citizen choose what to do. As I said above, if they ultimately become sick they should be left to suck it up as the price they must pay.
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The Long History of Vaccine Mandates in America
The Covid-19 pandemic has revived a debate over public health and individual liberty that goes back to colonial times.

By David Oshinsky



In February 1991, five Philadelphia children died from a disease thought to be almost extinct. Measles had once sickened millions of pre-adolescents, hospitalizing 50,000 and killing close to 500 annually before a successful vaccine was developed in 1963. Cases dropped dramatically after that as states began to mandate measles shots for school children. Vaccine hesitancy and resistance were rare.

In Philadelphia that winter, the great bulk of serious cases came from a single source—a church that rejected “all means of healing apart from God’s way.” The members took no medicines, owned no thermometers, saw no doctors. Rejecting birth control, they raised large families in close quarters. “It was like entering a time warp,” a witness reported. “The parents are extremely courteous, caring and honest. Other than the fact that they stay at home and watch their children die of measles, they are wonderful people.”

City officials moved forcefully to contain the threat. Working through the courts, they won access to the homes of the congregants and the authority to vaccinate the children against the stated wishes of their parents. The irony, says Paul Offit, a noted vaccine researcher and author on the subject, is that the parents had probably done nothing illegal because the statute mandating vaccinations in Pennsylvania contained a religious exemption. In these dire circumstances, however, mounting a defense of the parents’ actions was close to impossible. Even the ACLU took a pass.

When claims of individual rights clash head-on with public health measures, who gets to make the key decisions?
Though largely forgotten today, the Philadelphia outbreak raised fundamental legal and political questions. When claims of individual rights clash head-on with public health measures designed to urgently save lives and to protect the larger community, who gets to make the key decisions? How far can the government go, and where does the authority lie in America’s complicated federal system?

Relying on his powers to direct federal funding and to enforce federal workplace laws, Mr. Biden ordered that businesses with 100 or more employees ensure that all workers are either vaccinated or get tested weekly for the coronavirus, with paid time off to get their shots. The new rules also require vaccinations for federal workers and for contractors doing business with the federal government, as well as for workers at healthcare facilities that receive funding from Medicare and Medicaid. “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin,” Mr. Biden warned unvaccinated Americans, “and your refusal has cost all of us.”

The primary authority for the new mandates is a 1970 federal statute that gives the Secretary of Labor the authority to issue an Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS), lasting six months, to protect workers from “grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful.” The provision is an outlier, rarely tried since the courts struck down an ETS for asbestos in the 1980s.

Mr. Biden’s dramatic move has triggered a political and legal battle, with many Republican governors vowing to fight the new mandates in court. Some experts believe that the measures will pass legal and constitutional muster, but others are less certain. Is an infectious disease the same as a toxic substance? Does Covid-19 present a “grave danger”? Has the executive branch exceeded its authority in offering a federal solution to a problem heretofore reserved to the states? Do these mandates violate the 14th Amendment by depriving workers of their personal liberties? Are there other measures, less intrusive than vaccination, for dealing with the situation?

Fierce disagreement over vaccines may feel like yet another way that today’s political polarization has destroyed a previous consensus, but passionate disagreements about public health mandates are nothing new in the U.S. Mr. Biden’s new measures are wide-ranging, but they don’t actually make vaccines compulsory: The government may levy a fine or forbid a child from attending school, but no American will be forced to get an unwanted jab.

During the Revolutionary War, by contrast, George Washington immunized his troops against smallpox even against their will. The fearful disease killed about a third of those it infected, leaving survivors pockmarked but immune for life. Washington, who had survived the virus himself, described smallpox to Virginia’s Governor Patrick Henry as “more destructive to an Army in a Natural Way, than the Enemy’s Sword.” Infection had doomed the American assault on Quebec in 1775, and it now threatened Washington’s main force camped at Morristown, N.J.

At the time, the process known as variolation consisted of scraping the pustule of an infected smallpox victim and transferring the contents to an uninfected person, who contracted a milder case of the disease. The mortality rate was about 3%. In early 1777, Washington ordered his troops to be variolated secretly, to keep the British from learning that so many men were quarantined in sickbay. It proved a brilliant gamble: Smallpox largely disappeared from the ranks.


An 1802 caricature by James Gillray shows Edward Jenner administering his new smallpox vaccine at a London hospital.
PHOTO: JAMES GILLRAY/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
In 1796, the English scientist Edward Jenner discovered a much safer method of immunization using cowpox, a related but milder virus. But the new smallpox vaccine got a mixed reception in the U.S. Some Americans resisted it for reasons of personal safety or religious belief. What good could possibly come from polluting the body with dangerous foreign matter? Why challenge the plans of the Creator? Still, Jenner’s vaccine was a clear improvement, driving a steady decline in smallpox outbreaks throughout the 19th century. States passed laws requiring smallpox vaccinations for school children, and some forcibly vaccinated prisoners, paupers and orphans.

Sometimes the battle over vaccination led to street battles, with police confronting crowds enraged by attempts to quarantine entire neighborhoods or forcibly remove sick children from their homes. A Milwaukee newspaper described one such confrontation in 1894, with “mobs of German and Polish women armed with bats, potato mashers, clubs and bed slats [attacking] Health Department officials and stoning guards.”

In 1905, the issue of vaccine mandates reached the Supreme Court in the case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts. The case involved Henning Jacobson, a Lutheran pastor in Cambridge, Mass., who defied a city ordinance requiring smallpox vaccinations during an outbreak. Those who resisted faced a $5 fine, which he refused to pay.

Does the government have the right to impose a vaccine mandate during times of a public health crisis? Join the conversation below.

A respected community leader, Jacobson aired grievances that resonated well beyond the courtroom. He claimed that the vaccine was dangerous, which wasn’t an unreasonable stance in an era before vaccines were regulated by the federal government. The smallpox vaccine caused serious adverse reactions in some cases and failed to work in others. Today’s vaccines are carefully purified to prevent bacterial contamination; in Jacobson’s time, with handwashing and cleansing additives more-or-less optional, vaccines sometimes carried the germs that caused tetanus, syphilis and other diseases.

Jacobson insisted that “healthy and law-abiding” people like himself posed a minimal danger to the community. Even if his refusal to be vaccinated led to him spreading the smallpox virus, he argued, the only possible victims would be others “who failed or refused to be vaccinated.” Scientists have repeatedly refuted this idea, explaining that many people can’t be vaccinated because they are immunocompromised or allergic to the vaccine’s contents, and that the safety of the community depends upon a high level of vaccination—or herd immunity—to keep infectious diseases from spreading. But it remains a staple of current anti-vaccine thinking, as does Jacobson’s contention that the decision to vaccinate belongs to the individual, not to the state or medical authorities.

The Supreme Court disagreed. The majority opinion, written by Justice John Marshall Harlan, asserted that “the liberty secured by the Constitution does not import an absolute right in each person to be at all times, and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint.” Quite the contrary. The Constitution rests upon “the fundamental principle of the social compact…that all shall be governed by certain laws for the protection, safety, prosperity and happiness of the people, and not for the profit, honor or private interests of any one man, family or class of men.” Jacobson had not only broken the law, the court suggested; he had violated the principle upon which a well-ordered society depends.

At the same time, Justice Harlan attempted to impose a truce between the warring camps. He acknowledged the need for medical exemptions, writing that “we are not inclined to [uphold] the absolute rule that an adult must be vaccinated if it can be shown with reasonable certainty that [it] will seriously impair his health.” And he warned that vaccine mandates must not be implemented in “an arbitrary, unreasonable manner.” Only a public health emergency, as defined by the state legislature in consultation with medical experts, appeared to justify their use.

Justice Harlan’s opinion has been the go-to authority on the subject ever since. In 1922, the Supreme Court upheld an ordinance in San Antonio, Texas, requiring proof of smallpox vaccination for people entering “public schools or other places of education,” using Jacobson as precedent. The fact that San Antonio was not then facing a public health emergency no longer mattered; almost every public health mandate was now defensible. Five years later, in the notorious case of Buck v. Bell, the Court upheld Virginia’s policy of sterilizing women deemed unfit to bear children, also using Jacobson as precedent. “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”

Mandates became a national concern during the “Great Influenza” of 1918, which killed an estimated 675,000 Americans, at a time when the U.S. population was less than a third of what it is today. Public health measures didn’t include vaccination, because a flu vaccine had yet to be developed. Instead, health officials relied on tools that are all too familiar to Americans today: face masks, social distancing, banning public events, closing schools and businesses.

Public health mandates were less controversial in 1918 than they are in 2021, partly because the flu was deadlier than Covid-19.

These measures were less controversial in 1918 than they are in 2021, partly because the flu was deadlier than Covid-19, with no treatment or vaccine at hand. The nation was also in the midst of World War I, which put a premium on obeying authority and remaining healthy to support the troops. A major study of mortality rates during the 1918 pandemic showed that American cities which intervened early, enforced their restrictions and kept the lid on the longest fared far better than cities that didn’t.

But even then, there was controversy over who did and didn’t follow the strict public health guidelines. At an indoor boxing match in San Francisco, a city with strict mandates, a photographer snapped an image of the mayor, the chief health officer and several supervisors sitting together at ringside. The men were easily recognized because they weren’t wearing face masks. The photo, published in the San Francisco Chronicle, led to $5 fines and apologies all around.

Fast forward to 2020, when California Governor Gavin Newsom was photographed having dinner with a group of lobbyists at Napa Valley’s ultra-chic French Laundry—all smiles, no masks. The photos appeared shortly after Mr. Newsom had issued some of the nation’s toughest Covid restrictions, including face coverings outside the home. The backlash played a role in the movement to recall Mr. Newsom from office, which California voters defeated this week. History does repeat itself.

During World War II, the U.S. military made vaccinations mandatory for a host of diseases, such as typhoid, yellow fever and tetanus. While some worked better than others, vaccination became an accepted part of life for GIs, who brought this attitude home. Soon successful vaccines were developed against childhood diseases like polio, measles, mumps and chickenpox. Guided by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Jacobson, all 50 states put laws on the books mandating vaccinations for school children. Medical and religious exemptions were added, though few used them at the time.

Those days of nearly universal compliance with vaccine requirements are long gone. The revival of the anti-vaccine movement in the 1990s was driven by claims of a link between the ever-increasing number of vaccines mandated for children and the proliferation of unexplained afflictions, especially autism. Study after study disproved these links, but some parents now had second thoughts. Why vaccinate against diseases like polio or measles, which had been all but eradicated?

It seemed that vaccines had done their job too well: They had erased the tragic evidence of why they were needed in the first place. Now, with Covid-19, anti-vaccine anxieties have found their way into the political mainstream, especially among Republicans. An estimated 80 million American adults remain unvaccinated against Covid. Many factors have fueled resistance to the life-saving shots, including doubts about their lightning-quick development and their possible long-term effects. But a growing distrust of expertise, including medical science, has also played a role, along with claims that personal freedoms have been abridged.

Almost 300 years ago, Benjamin Franklin went through his own inner struggle over whether to have his sons variolated against smallpox, which was then a cutting-edge medical technology. In his “Autobiography,” he worried that well-meaning people were tragically misjudging the risks and rewards, as he himself had done.

“In 1736, I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the smallpox taken in the common way,” Franklin wrote. “I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of the parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.”

—Mr. Oshinsky is director of the Division of Medical Humanities at NYU Langone Health. His book, “Polio: An American Story,” won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for history.
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The Long History of Vaccine Mandates in America

The Covid-19 pandemic has revived a debate over public health and individual liberty that goes back to colonial times.

 

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