What would the Founding Fathers think about vaccine mandates? | Commentary

The Kansas Legislature’s recently created Special Committee on Government Overreach and the Impact of COVID-19 Mandates has conducted high profile hearings designed to build a case against mandates and lay the groundwork for a special session of the Legislature devoted to that subject.

Attorney General Derek Schmidt promised the committee he would take the government to court (yet again) to block the federal vaccine mandate, Sen. Mike Thompson said COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous and repeated other false claims about them, and a Wichita union representative compared having to wear masks if unvaccinated to forcing Jews to wear the Star of David.

There were other suggestions that mandates are reminiscent of the Holocaust, more scare stories about vaccines and dark predictions about our future if “government overreach” is not reversed — “the war at hand is for the soul of our nation.” One man called mandates tyrannical and warned that Kansas “neighborhood militias” would resist government attempts to enforce them.

Outside the capitol, anti-mandate demonstrators were even more apocalyptic in their rhetoric. There were calls to resist government tyranny, and a few Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flags were waved. In other words, a good time was had by all.

Coincidentally, last week an article in an online publication called The Conversation, offered some thoughts on quarantines and vaccination — as seen by our Founding Fathers.

The author, Maurizio Valsania, a professor of American History at the University of Turin, made some interesting points for our fellow citizens who regard vaccine mandates — or any kind of “mandate” — as dictatorial and un-American. George Washington would not have agreed. On the contrary, the Founding Fathers believed strongly that circumstances sometimes require limitations on our freedoms.

In fact, it’s pretty easy to think of examples of laws that abridge our freedoms in our daily lives. We can’t drive without a license, or drunk, or even without a seatbelt. And we can’t send our children to public schools without vaccinating them against measles and mumps.

Vasania noted that vaccination mandates have existed in the past — always unpopular, but nevertheless enforced — even in George Washington’s time.

His prime example is that in 1777, in the midst of war, Washington had the entire Continental Army inoculated against smallpox. There were no exceptions, no religious exemptions, and this was not something individuals could “research” and eventually decide what was “best for them and their families.”

Washington said, “I found …that there was no possible way of saving the lives of most of those who had not had it, but by introducing innoculation generally.”

During the summer of 1793, Vasania continued, a yellow fever epidemic struck Philadelphia, then the US capital. Within three months, 5,000 of the city’s 55,000 people were dead. Strict quarantines were imposed there and in other cities, and almost everyone complied.

Mandates and quarantines, enforced by the government, are not un-American, suggested the professor. On the contrary, what is un-American is the argument that individual rights trump the greater good.

That attitude, he contends, would have been considered by the founders as a sign of “ambition” — seen as a devotion to personal interests rather than higher goals. People afflicted by ambition became “slaves to their own opinions” and lost sight of the public good.

Speaking to the union representative in that Topeka hearing, a Democratic senator asked him how the state of Kansas should fight COVID-19. “Well, whatever works,” he said. Asked if his fellow union members believe the COVID-19 vaccine works, he said “it’s not a vaccine.”

I’d say that fellow — and too many other Americans today — have lost sight of the public good and instead remain “slaves to their own opinions.”

David Lambertson is publisher of The Fairview Enterprise in Brown County. He is a retired Foreign Service officer and former US ambassador to Thailand.

This story was originally published November 12, 2021 at 2:17 AM.