If you support mandatory vaccination to fight Covid-19, you are in good company. The first vaccine mandate in American history came from none other than George Washington at the height of the American Revolution. America’s struggle for independence coincided with a major smallpox epidemic that raged through North America in the 1770s and 1780s, and it was an omnipresent threat to the ragtag Continental Army.
“By January 1777 [Washington] ordered Dr. William Shippen to inoculate every soldier who never had the disease,’” historian Ron Chernow wrote in his 2010 biography of the first president. “‘Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure,’ [Washington] wrote, ‘for should the disorder infect the army in the natural way and rage with its usual virulence, we should have more to dread from it than the sword of the enemy.’ This enlightened decision was as important as any military measure Washington adopted during the war.”
Washington’s fears were far from hypothetical. Until the twentieth century, disease outbreaks could be as deadly for the average soldier in the average war as the average enemy combatant. Chernow noted that British generals released infected civilians and captives toward American lines at the siege of Boston and at Yorktown, in a ghoulish preindustrial version of biological warfare. Fighting smallpox and fighting the British, in Washington’s eyes, were one and the same.
Anti-vax groups often allude to basic American values to resist vaccine mandates, asserting that they have the liberty not to take steps to ensure they don’t spread infectious diseases to other people. Public health officials, in their version of events, are derided as authoritarian and tyrannical figures. This juvenile worldview could not be more backward. Getting vaccinated is as American as baseball and apple pie—and so is compelling those who refuse to do so voluntarily.
When Covid-19 vaccines became widely available this spring, the immediate priority was ensuring that those who wanted to get the vaccine could do so. Millions of Americans did their patriotic duty to one another and rushed out to get the jab. But millions of their fellow citizens did not. In May, President Joe Biden set a goal of 70 percent vaccination among adults by July 4, once again linking American independence to a mass vaccination campaign. As of the end of July, however, only 69 percent of Americans have so far received at least one shot, and only 60 percent can be described as fully vaccinated.