America’s public health situation today is much like that of medieval China around 1000 C.E. Then smallpox had shifted to being a pediatric problem. So many adults had either died off or had survived with immunity, the virus had to direct its attention primarily to children.

The big difference, of course, is that we know both the cause and the preventative solution today, whereas the Chinese had neither. Are we content to be like the benighted Chinese and watch while our children suffer like our adults have?

In 1902 the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, required vaccination of all residents against smallpox, and the nation’s Supreme Court upheld that approach, saying, “The rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint.”

Schools and universities, in most places, require immunization against diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella, polio, chickenpox, hepatitis B, pneumonia and flu. Today, federal, state and city government workers, health care workers, child care workers, passport travelers and soldiers already have or are returning to vaccine mandates. It’s time to do what Cambridge did and act in the public interest state by state, instead of trumpeting a private right to infect and kill other people for no good reason.

Kimball Shinkoskey
Woods Cross, Utah

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