“Vaccine mandates have arrived. And so, too, has opposition led by Republicans. Nineteen Republican governors spoke out against President Biden’s announcement Thursday that American workers in large businesses must be vaccinated or face weekly testing. A half-dozen GOP governors threatened to sue, alongside the Republican National Committee. But the legal ground they have to stand on appears rather shaky, based on a century of Supreme Court precedent.”

“The crux of the debate is where one’s personal freedom lies in relation to the broader health and rights of the nation. About a century ago, in 1905, the Supreme Court was asked a similar question and sided with the vaccine mandates. In 1905, at the height of a smallpox outbreak and at a time when infectious diseases were the No. 1 killer in America, the court considered whether Cambridge, Mass., could force people to get vaccinated for it. A local pastor, Henning Jacobson, resisted, claiming and his son had bad reactions to earlier vaccines. He sued Cambridge and argued that ‘compulsion to introduce disease into a healthy system is a violation of liberty’ and that being forced to take the vaccine violated his 14th Amendment rights, which says that no state shall ‘deprive any person of life, liberty, or property.’ That was a relatively easy no for the court. In a 7-to-2 ruling in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, it decided that jurisdictions do have the right to require people to get vaccinated. Back then, the government was much more forceful about it, knocking down people’s doors to get them vaccinated, the New York Times says. Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote, rather presciently for today’s pandemic, that: ‘upon the principle of self-defense, of paramount necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members'” – Washington Post.