MK3|MK3Blog|Oct. 22, 2025

True healers do no harm, assisting the body to recover from imbalances, working with the whole individual in prevention of disease.

Ghandi's understanding of vaccine ineffectiveness, filthiness and immorality ring true today 

The following article has been republished and used in my blog. I did not write nor do I endorse anything contained within. The following article is being used in this blog so the reader may understand the mindset of those that are opposite of the critical thinker. These people want nothing more than to label and ruin the lives of anyone that dare question vaccines and the medical industry for the fraud that it is.There are some images missing and can be found in the links provided, outside of that I have not added or removed anything from the original article -MK3 

James Colgrove 1,✉, Sara J Samuel 1

PMCID: PMC8802588  PMID: 35080944

 Abstract

We analyzed how activists opposed to vaccination have used arguments related to freedom, liberty, and individual rights in US history. We focused on the period from the 1880s through the 1920s, when the first wave of widespread and sustained antivaccination activism in this country occurred. During this era, activists used the language of liberty and freedom most prominently in opposition to compulsory vaccination laws, which the activists alleged violated their constitutionally protected rights. Critics attacked vaccination with liberty-based arguments even when it was not mandatory, and they used the language of freedom expansively to encompass individuals’ freedom to choose their health and medical practices, freedom to raise their children as they saw fit, and freedom from the quasicoercive influence of scientific and medical experts and elite institutions. Evidence suggests that in recent years, vaccine refusal has increasingly been framed as a civil right. We argue that this framing has always lain at the heart of resistance to vaccination and that it may prove consequential for the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. (Am J Public Health. 2022;112(2):234–241. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306504)

 Organized opposition to vaccination has grown in strength and visibility in the United States over the past two decades because of a complex set of factors, especially the rise of the Internet as a medium for spreading misinformation and connecting likeminded activists. Historically and in the present day, vaccine-critical rhetoric has rested on two principal claims: (1) that vaccination is a dangerous procedure whose risks outweigh its benefits, and (2) that efforts to pressure or compel people to be vaccinated (or to vaccinate their children) violate individual rights.1 A 2019 study of Facebook posts found that in recent years, arguments related to individual liberty have grown more prominent in antivaccination messaging, with vaccine refusers increasingly framing their choice as a civil right.2

 In addition to the potential impact of this messaging on routine childhood immunization, the framing of vaccine refusal as an issue of individual liberty has potentially far-reaching implications for the use of vaccines to control the spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus. One of the most striking aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has been the way that some members of the public have rejected public health measures as unacceptable intrusions on personal liberty. Measures designed to protect the common welfare and vulnerable members of the community, such as quarantine orders and recommendations or requirements for wearing face coverings, have repeatedly been met with opposition by small but vocal minorities who claim that public health interventions are a violation of rights by an overreaching and tyrannical government. Antimask protestors and antivaccination activists have presented their resistance to both measures as matters of personal liberty.3

“No idea is more fundamental to Americans’ sense of themselves as individuals and as a nation than freedom,” the historian Eric Foner writes.4 Freedom is a protean concept, carrying different meanings across successive historical eras and encompassing political, legal, religious, and economic dimensions. Invocations of liberty in the context of vaccination have been similarly multifaceted. Most commonly, the language of liberty and freedom has been used in opposition to compulsory vaccination laws, for which alleged violations of constitutionally protected rights have been at issue. But critics have attacked vaccination with liberty-based arguments even when it was not mandatory. They have used the language of freedom expansively to encompass individuals’ freedom to choose their health and medical practices, freedom to raise their children as they saw fit, and freedom from the quasicoercive influence of scientific and medical experts and elite institutions. In all of these cases, freedom-based arguments have been a reaction to the actual or perceived exercise of power, especially (but not only) by government.

 We examine how claims related to liberties and rights have been used, substantively and rhetorically, in the arguments of antivaccination activists and organizations. Although there is evidence that this discourse has grown in salience in recent years, we argue that it has lain at the heart of resistance to vaccination since the 19th century. We focus on a five-decade period spanning the 1880s through the 1920s, which encompasses the first widespread and sustained wave of antivaccination activism in the United States. This period produced critical jurisprudence on the scope of liberty in the context of vaccination and other public health interventions, as well as numerous legislative and advocacy battles featuring lines of argument that continue to resonate in the present day.

 THE RISE OF ORGANIZED RESISTANCE

From the first use of smallpox vaccination in this country at the beginning of the 19th century, critics of the practice raised concerns about its safety and efficacy, with claims that vaccination posed grave health risks, including transmission of syphilis and other sometimes fatal infections, and failed to prevent the occurrence of the disease. (The smallpox vaccine was crude by today’s standards, and there is evidence that it did sometimes have the serious adverse effects attributed to it.5) Beginning in the 1880s, formal organizations were founded in response to the increasing use of legal compulsion to control smallpox. Although these organizations represented only a small part of the overall landscape of resistance to vaccination, they were influential in shaping the rhetoric used by vaccine opponents. Claims related to liberty and freedom—and their antagonist, tyranny—began to figure prominently. Use of vaccination was framed not just as unsafe and ineffective but as a violation of inalienable rights.

 The movement in the United States was influenced by events in Britain. Organized resistance arose in Great Britain as a response to a series of public health laws passed by the British Parliament in the second half of the 19th century. In 1853, vaccination of infants was made mandatory, and refusers could face fines or jail. Numerous antivaccination organizations were founded in the United Kingdom in the second half of the century that lobbied Parliament and staged rallies, marches, and acts of civil disobedience.6

 Their liberty-based arguments and their notions of the acceptable scope of government action with respect to constraining individual freedom embodied ideas that were captured in one of the most influential works of political philosophy of the 19th century: John Stuart Mill’s 1849 treatise On Liberty. Mill’s work articulated the harm principle, which held that the only justification for the use of coercive state power was to prevent imminent harm to others; a person’s own good was insufficient reason. Although it was generally not named explicitly in antivaccination literature, Mill’s harm principle permeated the debates on vaccination in the United Kingdom and eventually in the United States. In both countries, health officials claimed that people who refused vaccination for themselves or their children posed a danger to other members of the community, thereby justifying state intervention, whereas vaccine objectors argued that the laws were an impermissible violation of individual liberty.

 In 1879, one of the most prominent British antivaccination activists, William Tebb, a businessman and social reformer, traveled to the United States to cofound the Anti-Vaccination League of America.7 The American Anti-Vaccination Society, made up of several of the same members, was founded six years later. Other state and local organizations were founded at around the same time, sometimes making their stance toward compulsion explicit in their names, as in the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League of Brooklyn, founded in 1894. Although the numerical strength and demographic composition of the original antivaccination societies are difficult to determine with precision, some generalizations can be made. Many of the leaders of these groups were physicians, often homeopaths or members of other alternative medical sects that flourished in this era. They were often active in other social causes, such as animal protection and antivivisection, and most were White and of middle- or upper-class backgrounds. The groups often shared officers and members. They were mostly located in the Northeast, with organizations emerging in other regions in response to local controversies.8 Many individual activists not affiliated with any organization also contributed by expressing concerns about the infringement on freedom.

 The discourse of freedom was a direct reaction to the growing use of vaccination laws in the late 19th century, when frustrated health officials sought to contain repeated resurgences of smallpox. In the 1880s, seven states adopted new compulsory vaccination laws.9 The vigilance with which compulsory vaccination was enforced varied widely, however. In some jurisdictions, health departments sent squads of vaccinators with police accompaniment to secure mass vaccination, even when there was no law in effect.10 Conversely, in some cities with laws on the books, enforcement was desultory, either because of limited budgets or because health officials preferred not to antagonize people opposed to the practice. With its decentralized and highly variable public health system and patchwork of often haphazardly enforced vaccination laws, the United States presented a different legal landscape from the United Kingdom, but the political force of the rhetoric of freedom was just as strong, resonating even with people in jurisdictions where vaccination remained voluntary.

 VARIETIES OF FREEDOM

Activists in this era compared the enforcement of vaccination to other institutions of coercion, notably slavery. William Tebb, the British activist who cofounded the first US antivaccination society, had lived for a time in the United States before the Civil War and became active in the abolitionist cause. In subsequent decades, Tebb’s publications, circulated on both sides of the Atlantic, frequently compared the loss of liberty in compulsory vaccination to slavery.11 In a 1900 treatise, another prominent activist, James Martin Peebles, described his work decades earlier on the Underground Railroad and explicitly compared opposition to compulsory vaccination laws to resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act.12

However sincerely held the belief in this analogy, it was also strategic to associate the antivaccination cause with what many people regarded as the most morally righteous crusade of the century. Lora Little, an antivaccination activist and pamphleteer who was active in Minnesota and Oregon in the early 20th century, named her newsletter The Liberator after the newspaper published by the famed antislavery crusader William Lloyd Garrison.13

 There was some irony in the comparison of vaccination to slavery. African Americans often looked with suspicion on vaccination and other practices of White doctors, and the country’s most famous abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, expressed his opposition to compulsory vaccination.14 In antebellum Northern states, however, some free Black people sought vaccination as an expression of their right to control their own medical care, and the Black press often expressed support for vaccination, praising its safety and efficacy and associating the occurrence of smallpox with the brutality and material deprivations of slavery. In these accounts, the ability to obtain vaccination—to take advantage of a preventive intervention that was sometimes denied to those in slavery—was a greater expression of liberty than the ability to escape vaccination.15

 The depiction in words and images of physicians in league with police officers was common in the pamphlets, flyers, and posters in both the United States and the United Kingdom in this era (Figure 1). The figure of the policeman symbolized overreaching and tyrannical government, and activists implicitly or explicitly argued that compulsory vaccination was a violation of foundational political documents such as the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the US Constitution. This claim was advanced by Henry Bergh, a prominent antivivisectionist and president of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, writing in the North American Review, a monthly magazine of current events. Bergh observed with outrage that some US jurisdictions had imitated the much-hated 1853 British compulsory vaccination law, which, he argued, “tears to tatters the Great Charter of Englishmen’s liberties.” The law “has been imitated even in free America, in contravention of every citizen’s inalienable right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”16

FIGURE 1—

Open in a new tab

The Cover of Activist James Martin Peebles’s 1900 Book Vaccination: A Curse and a Menace to Personal Liberty, Depicting the Vaccinating Doctor in League With a Police Officer

Note. Such depictions were a common rhetorical trope in the antivaccination literature of this era.

Source. James Martin Peebles, Vaccination: A Curse and a Menace to Personal Liberty (Battle Creek, MI: Temple of Health Publishing, 1900).

 The proposition that freedom from vaccination was consistent with the country’s founding principles diffused widely in this period, with phrases such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” increasingly turning up in newspaper articles, letters to the editor, speeches, and addresses to state legislatures. A representative of the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League of Brooklyn declared that the aggressive school vaccination programs run by the city’s board of health were:

 opposed to the principles of the American constitution. It is an undignified proceeding to go to the public schools and seize children, who are not guardians of their own persons, and vaccinate them without their own consent or the consent of their legal guardians.17

 In their rebuttals to antivaccination arguments, vaccination proponents typically did not engage with the ethical and political objections, preferring instead to stick to matters of empirical fact. The North American Review published a response to Bergh’s essay two months later written by Henry Austin Martin, a prominent Boston physician who chaired the American Medical Association’s Committee on Vaccination. Martin sidestepped the question of liberty entirely, instead rebutting only the empirical claims that Bergh had made about the safety and efficacy of vaccination.18

Although proponents of vaccination tended to foreground scientific arguments, they recognized the resonance that liberty-based rhetoric had with the public and the way such messages could threaten aggressive efforts to secure a vaccinated populace. One physician in 1897 wrote:

 The people of this country are too thoroughly imbued with a sense of personal independence to submit patiently to personal compulsion. The attempt would excite hostility to vaccination that does not exist at present, and would hinder rather than promote the cause of vaccination.19

 LIBERTY, COURTS, AND LEGISLATURES

Paralleling the spread of compulsory vaccination and the rise of organized opposition were increasing numbers of court cases being brought against vaccination laws. Numerous lawsuits were filed in state courts in the 1880s. Conflicting decisions and continued litigation ultimately led to the 1905 Supreme Court case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which affirmed the constitutionality of compulsory vaccination. The constitutional questions at issue in Jacobson v. Massachusetts were whether Massachusetts’s compulsory vaccination law violated the 14th Amendment, which prevents states from depriving any person of “life, liberty, or property” without due process. The Jacobson v. Massachusetts ruling included a statement about individual liberty that remains widely quoted today:

 The liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint. There are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good.20

 With the Jacobson v. Massachusetts decision having foreclosed legal remedies to compulsory vaccination, activists looked for a political solution to their grievances: they turned to their legislatures, where arguments did not need to meet the exacting legal standards of the courts but could speak to laypersons’ notions of rights. The two decades after Jacobson v. Massachusetts saw considerable legislative activity in states around the country, which produced varying outcomes. At least four states either repealed existing vaccination laws or disallowed future laws, and at least two other states made their laws less restrictive. By contrast, antivaccination measures went down to defeat in at least three states.21

 One legislative battle, in Pennsylvania, sparked the formation of a new national organization. John Pitcairn, a wealthy Pittsburgh area businessman who was a devotee of homeopathy and whose son had experienced an adverse reaction to the smallpox vaccination, sought a bill to repeal the state’s compulsory vaccination law. In an address he gave to the Committee on Public Health and Sanitation of the Pennsylvania General Assembly in 1907, Pitcairn’s emphasis was apparent in the opening line: “We are here this evening in the cause of freedom.”22 The address made numerous claims about the dangers of vaccination, but its most prominent arguments centered on liberty. Quoting John Stuart Mill, Pitcairn compared opposition to vaccination with the great political struggles that have defined the nation’s history. He also compared the right to refuse vaccination to constitutionally protected religious freedom.

 The measure passed both houses of the Pennsylvania legislature but was ultimately vetoed by the governor.23 The defeat prompted Pitcairn to found a new organization the following year, the Anti-Vaccination League of America. The league’s cofounder and most active pamphleteer was Charles Higgins, a businessman in Brooklyn, New York. Both Pitcairn and Higgins were civic leaders in their communities and were active in politics and mainstream causes such as historic preservation, and both preached a gospel of individual liberty and freedom from government restraint. Higgins authored the League’s 1912 pamphlet Open Your Eyes Wide!, which demanded that “parents, school officers, editors, judges, legislators, and doctors” rise up to oppose vaccination, and issued a warning “to all vaccinators . . . against forcing vaccination on any person against free will and consent”24 (Figure 2).

FIGURE 2—

Open in a new tab

A 1912 Pamphlet Published by the Anti-Vaccination League of America

Note. This pamphlet sought to persuade multiple audiences that vaccination was a dangerous procedure and that to compel it by law was a violation of fundamental freedoms.

Source. Charles M. Higgins, Open Your Eyes Wide! (New York, NY: Anti-Vaccination League of America, 1912).

“MEDICAL LIBERTY”

After the turn of the 20th century, antivaccination messages increasingly drew on and contributed to a discourse of “medical liberty.” The United States had a long tradition of freedom in medical practice that had found expression in the repeal of medical licensing laws and the proliferation of alternative medical sects in the 19th century.25 Several developments at the turn of the 20th century gave the issue new prominence. The American Medical Association established a Propaganda Department in 1905 and stepped up its efforts to expose quackery, medical fraud, and dubious patent medicines. The federal Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 (Pub L No. 59-384) sought to clamp down on the sale of patent medicines that some antivaccinationists promoted. The publication in 1910 of the Flexner Report, commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to raise standards of medical education, served to close the gates of medical practice to many nonallopathic practitioners.

 All these developments threatened to marginalize medical dissidents who were among the most prominent antivaccinationists, and in some cases threatened their livelihoods. In his book Vaccination: A Curse and a Menace to Personal Liberty, the eclectic physician James Martin Peebles implicitly put mainstream medicine in league with the federal government and the police:

 And this is the free America, is it? This, a land of personal liberty, is it? This a country of inalienable rights, is it? No—it is rather an oligarchy manned by certain “professional” doctors, the repulsive Rules and unconstitutional laws of which, are to be enforced by the militia.26

 Among his other enterprises, Peebles marketed a cure for epilepsy that the American Medical Association analyzed and found to be fraudulent.

 The discourse of medical liberty did not feature only in the context of these intraprofessional rivalries; it extended to arguments about how allopathic medicine might threaten the freedoms of ordinary Americans, especially when it was in league with government agencies. A particular area of concern was the expansion of health inspection for schoolchildren, which was seen as overreach to many ordinary Americans and generated antagonism toward entities such as local and state boards of health and education.27 As historian Kim Tolley argues:

 The medical liberty leagues that arose during this period appropriated and expanded the constitutional arguments advanced by the nineteenth-century antivaccination societies, arguing that Americans had a constitutional right to choose their own medical treatment and a right to freedom from medical interference, not only in the form of compulsory vaccination, but in all areas of social life.28

 The medical liberty movement brought together antivaccination activists in coalitions with other groups whose messages emphasized liberty interests. In 1910 they joined with Christian scientists, chiropractors, and antivivisectionists under the umbrella of the National League for Medical Freedom to campaign against a federal-level department of health.29 Government health programs were also targeted by two organizations founded in 1919: the American Medical Liberty League, based in Chicago, Illinois, and the Citizen’s Medical Reference Bureau, based in New York City.30 In addition to their efforts to overturn state compulsory smallpox vaccination laws and impede the adoption of a newly developed immunizing procedure against diphtheria, both groups lobbied against measures that would strengthen the public health system more generally, such as the creation of health boards and appointments of health officers.31 Their rhetoric capitalized on the anti-Bolshevist environment of the “Red Scare” in the aftermath of World War I.

Activists in this era also found common cause with other organizations and movements premised on notions of freedom, whether political or economic. The leaders of several antivaccination organizations campaigned against Prohibition; Charles Higgins wrote that “religious freedom, medical freedom, and alimentary freedom are equally unalienable rights of the American people and must be kept inviolate.”32 Directors of the Anti-Vaccination League of America and the Citizens Medical Reference Bureau were also financial backers of Sentinels of the Republic, an anticommunist organization founded in 1922 that was devoted to opposing the concentration of power in a centralized government and “checking the growth of Federal paternalism.” The group fought against social reforms it viewed as communistic, including child labor laws and a proposed federal department of education.33

 In addition to shaping public perceptions in ways that were pervasive, if difficult to quantify, the freedom-based arguments of antivaccination activists during these years left behind concrete legacies. In 1911, California added the first clause, modeled on a provision that had been adopted in the United Kingdom, allowing “conscientious objectors” to opt out of the state’s school vaccination law, a precursor to today’s “personal belief” exemptions.34 More broadly, the constitutional arguments activists made in courts helped to define the legal scope of public health compulsion. Although the Supreme Court’s ruling in Jacobson v. Massachusetts affirmed states’ powers to compel vaccination, it also placed important limits on the extent of that power, setting forth principles such as harm avoidance, present danger, and equal protection.35

 VACCINATION, RIGHTS, AND COVID-19

From the 1880s through the 1920s, the rhetorical battle over vaccination was waged on two fronts: that of scientific fact and that of legal and ethical principle. In a 1921 editorial in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, a prominent physician and former president of the Massachusetts Medical Society summed up the twin threads of antivaccination activism:

The extreme individualist who objects to any compulsory measures whatever . . . is lined up with those persons who honestly believe that vaccination is a dangerous thing as well as a useless procedure.36

 During this era, the meaning of “liberty” was mutable, with different connotations depending on who was using it. These claims were used in the context of constitutional challenges to compulsory vaccination laws, and more expansively in other spheres—legislative chambers, newspapers and mass circulation magazines, scholarly and professional journals—to argue against the accrual of power by elites and authorities, whether state governments, boards of health, or the medical and scientific communities, even when no direct infringement on a right or liberty was threatened. The language of liberty was a way for vaccination critics to align themselves—sometimes merely rhetorically, sometimes in practice—with other causes premised on notions of liberty, ranging from abolitionism to anticommunism.

Such a framing may have reflected the sincerely held beliefs of those who espoused it, but it also had a strategic advantage in shaping public opinion about vaccination policies and laws. It shifted the debate from the arena of empirical fact to the realm of principle, thus rendering arguments against vaccination impervious to falsification or disproval. This discourse is an example of what the political scientist Mary Ann Glendon labeled “rights talk.”37 Framing demands for action in terms of an inviolable right has been an effective tool for inspiring justice and extending democracy, but, according to Glendon, it can also be polarizing, serving to foreclose debate and inhibit common ground, and it can overemphasize rights at the expense of communal responsibilities.

 The conceptualization of vaccine refusal as a matter of rights and liberty may be consequential for efforts to control the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, when the first vaccine trial in the United States began, the National Vaccine Information Center, a vaccine-critical organization, warned:

The government has a National Vaccine Plan. It is a Plan designed to make sure you, your child and everyone in America gets every dose of every vaccine that government officials recommend now and in the future.38

The Center’s Web site features prominent references to John Stuart Mill.

 COVID-19 vaccines are being administered in a political climate characterized by the resurgence of often militant antigovernment sentiment directed at public health measures and an energized antivaccination movement. Polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation in early 2021 indicated that about 70% of Republicans believed that getting the vaccine was a matter of “personal choice,” whereas 30% considered it a matter of “collective responsibility”; among Democrats, those percentages were reversed.39 These beliefs appear to correlate with vaccination intentions. Among respondents who said they would “definitely not” get a COVID-19 vaccine, 67% were Republican, whereas only 12% were Democrat.40

 Many experts in public health ethics and law have argued that compulsory vaccination against the SARS-CoV-2 virus would be justified should persuasive and educational measures prove insufficient to achieve optimal vaccine uptake. Such measures can be implemented either by state governments in the form of legislation or regulation or in the private sector as a condition of employment or college attendance, for example. Given the grave public health threat posed by COVID-19 and the safety and efficacy of the available vaccines, compulsory measures are well justified from the standpoints of ethics, policy, and law. Like any compulsory public health measure, a COVID-19 vaccine mandate—whether implemented through the public or the private sector—carries the risk of galvanizing backlash and resistance, which can have the unwanted and unintended effect of eroding, rather than boosting, vaccine uptake. This risk, well known to health officials of earlier generations, is heightened in the current political climate. As in past eras when contagious epidemics were more common, current efforts to protect public health will require confronting questions of freedom and rights, which remain as resonant—and as contentious—as they were during the birth of organized antivaccination activism more than a century ago.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors thank Robert Johnston, Robert Sember, and an anonymous AJPH reviewer for helpful input and feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

The authors report no potential or actual conflicts of interest.

Footnotes

See also Morabia, p. 189, Kapadia, p. 202, Johnston, p. 227, and Shachar, p. 229.

ENDNOTES

• 1.Jason L. Schwartz, “New Media, Old Messages: Themes in the History of Vaccine Hesitancy and Refusal,” American Medical Association Journal of Ethics 14, no. 1 (2012): 50–55. 10.1001/virtualmentor.2012.14.1.mhst1-1201 [DOI] [PubMed]
• 2.David A. Broniatowski, Amelia M. Jamison, Neil F. Johnson, et al., “Facebook Pages, the ‘Disneyland’ Measles Outbreak, and Promotion of Vaccine Refusal as a Civil Right, 2009–2019,” American Journal of Public Health 110, no. S3 (2020): S312–S318. 10.2105/AJPH.2020.305869 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed]
• 3.Tara McKelvey, “Why Are Americans So Angry About Masks?” BBC News. Available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53477121 https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/05/covid-19-anti-vaxxers-442984 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/campaign-against-vaccines-already-under-way/617443 https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-24/anti-vaccine-activists-latch-onto-coronavirus-to-bolster-their-movement
• 4.Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1998), xiii.
• 5.Karen Wolloch, The Antivaccine Heresy: Jacobson v. Massachusetts and the Troubled History of Compulsory Vaccination in the United States (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015).
• 6.Nadja Durbach, Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853–1907 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
• 7.“Is Vaccine Virus Poison? An Anti-Vaccination League Organized in New York,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 4, 1879, 7.
• 8.Kim Tolley, “School Vaccination Wars: The Rise of Anti-Science in the American Anti-Vaccination Societies, 1879–1929,” History of Education Quarterly 59, no. 2 (2019): 161–194. 10.1017/heq.2019.3 [DOI]
• 9.James G. Hodge and Lawrence O. Gostin, “School Vaccination Requirements: Historical, Social, and Legal Perspectives,” Kentucky Law Review 90, no. 4 (2002): 831–890. [PubMed]
• 10.James Colgrove, “Between Persuasion and Compulsion: Smallpox Control in Brooklyn and New York, 1894–1902,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78, no. 2 (2004): 349–378. 10.1353/bhm.2004.0062 [DOI] [PubMed]
• 11.Durbach, Bodily Matters.
• 12.James Martin Peebles, Vaccination: A Curse and a Menace to Personal Liberty (Battle Creek, MI: Temple of Health Publishing, 1900), 154–155.
• 13.Robert D. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
• 14.John Fabian Witt, American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law From Smallpox to COVID-19 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 77–78.
• 15.Dayle B. Delancey, “Vaccinating Freedom: Smallpox Prevention and the Discourses of African American Citizenship in Antebellum Philadelphia,” Journal of African American History 95, no. 3–4 (2010): 296–321. 10.5323/jafriamerhist.95.3-4.0296 [DOI]
• 16.Henry Bergh, “The Lancet and the Law,” North American Review 134, no. 303 (1882): 165.
• 17.“Opposed to Vaccination,” New York Times, April 12, 1894, 9.
• 18.Henry Austin Martin, “Anti-Vaccinism,” North American Review 134, no. 305 (1882): 368–378.
• 19.Clark Bell, “Compulsory Vaccination: Should It Be Enforced by Law?” Journal of the American Medical Association 28, no. 2 (1897): 50. 10.1001/jama.1897.02440020001001 [DOI]
• 20.Henning Jacobson, plaintiff in error v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 197 US 11 (1905).
• 21.James Colgrove, State of Immunity: The Politics of Vaccination in Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).
• 22.John Pitcairn, Vaccination: An Address Delivered Before the Committee on Public Health and Sanitation of the Pennsylvania General Assembly (Philadelphia: Anti-Vaccination League of Pennsylvania, 1907), 1.
• 23.Tolley, “School Vaccination Wars.”
• 24.James Colgrove, “‘Science in a Democracy’: The Contested Status of Vaccination in the Progressive Era and the 1920s,” Isis 96, no. 2 (2005): 167–191. 10.1086/431531 [DOI] [PubMed]
• 25.Lewis A. Grossman, “The Origins of American Health Libertarianism,” Yale Journal of Health Policy and Ethics 13, no. 1 (2013): 76–134. [PubMed]
• 26.Peebles, Vaccination, 311.
• 27.Nadav Davidovitch, “Negotiating Dissent: Homeopathy and Anti-Vaccinationism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in The Politics of Healing: Histories of Alternative Medicine in Twentieth-Century North America, ed. Robert D. Johnston (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004), 11–28.
• 28.Tolley, “School Vaccination Wars,” 185.
• 29.National League for Medical Freedom, Proceedings of the Medical Freedom Convention (San Francisco, CA: National League for Medical Freedom, 1911).
• 30.Johnston, Radical Middle Class.
• 31.“Three Medical Bills that Failed,” Christian Science Monitor, June 23, 1921, 5.
• 32.Charles M. Higgins, Unalienable Rights and Prohibition Wrongs (Brooklyn, 1919), 5.
• 33.Norman Hapgood, ed., Professional Patriots (New York, NY: Boni, 1927), 170–172.
• 34.Elena Conis, “The History of the Personal Belief Exemption,” Pediatrics 145, no. 4 (2020): e20192551. 10.1542/peds.2019-2551. [DOI] [PubMed]
• 35.Michael Willrich, Pox: An American History (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2011).
• 36.Samuel B. Woodward, “Legislative Aspects of Vaccination,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 85 (1921): 307.
• 37.Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York, NY: Free Press, 1991).
• 38.“The National Plan to Vaccinate Every American,” Available at https://www.nvic.org/NVIC-Vaccine-News/March-2020/the-national-plan-to-vaccinate-every-american.aspx
• 39.Liz Hamel, Grace Sparks, and Mollyann Brodie, “KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor: February 2021.” Available at https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/kff-covid-19-vaccine-monitor-february-2021
• 40.Grace Sparks, Ashley Kirzinger, and Mollyann Brodie, “COVID Vaccine Monitor: Profile of the Unvaccinated.” Available at https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/kff-covid-19-vaccine-monitor-profile-of-the-unvaccinated
• From <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8802588/>

MK3|MK3Blog|Oct. 21, 2025

The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld liability protections for vaccine makers, ruling that they can’t be sued in state court for design-defect damages. The 1986 federal law created a no-fault compensation program to shield vaccine manufacturers from excessive tort litigation.

Between 1978 and the mid- 1980s, product liability lawsuits against vaccine makers went from a few single cases to hundreds of actions.  The massive litigation led to two of the largest domestic manufacturers going out of business. Congress responded with the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.  The law allows plaintiffs to file a petition for compensation in the US Court of Federal Claims.  Successful claimants can receive awards for medical,  medical, rehabilitation, counseling and other expenses. Vaccine-related death awards have a $250,000 cap. Is that what a child is worth?

Because vaccine makers have this protection there is little incentive for them to design vaccines that result in fewer side effects and longer lasting immunity.

Executive Summary

The history of vaccine liability protection is a story of the gradual, deliberate transfer of risk from powerful pharmaceutical manufacturers onto the public and the government. It began with common law principles that held manufacturers accountable for their products, evolved through a series of crises that threatened the industry’s viability, and culminated in a near-total legal shield enacted by the U.S. Congress. This framework, designed to ensure a steady vaccine supply, has fundamentally altered the legal relationship between citizens, their government, and corporations, creating a system where financial and physical risk is socialized while profit remains privatized.

Part I: The Foundation (1900 – 1970s) – Common Law and the Cutter Incident

1. The Common Law Era: "Liability Without Fault" Prior to the 1980s, vaccine injury claims were litigated under standard principles of tort law. Plaintiffs could sue manufacturers under several legal theories:

• Negligence: Failing to exercise reasonable care in the manufacture, testing, or labeling of the product.
• Strict Liability: Holding a manufacturer responsible for any defective product that was unreasonably dangerous, regardless of fault or intent. This was a powerful tool for consumers.
• Breach of Warranty: Failure to live up to express or implied promises about the product.

This legal environment meant that vaccine manufacturers, like all other product manufacturers, were exposed to civil lawsuits. Jury awards could be significant.

2. The Paradigm-Shifting Event: The Cutter Laboratories Incident (1955) The first major event to trigger a government response was the 1955 “Cutter Incident” involving the new Salk polio vaccine.

• What Happened: Cutter Laboratories produced batches of inactivated polio vaccine that contained live, virulent poliovirus due to a failure in the inactivation process. This manufacturing defect caused 40,000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10.
• The Legal Aftermath: Victims sued Cutter Laboratories. In the landmark case Gottsdanker v. Cutter Laboratories (1960), the California Supreme Court ruled that while Cutter was not negligent (they had followed the government’s protocol), they were still liable for breaching an implied warranty of merchantability. This established that a company could be held liable for a defective product even without proven negligence.
• The Industry Impact: The financial repercussions from the lawsuits were severe and sent a shockwave through the entire vaccine industry. It demonstrated the existential financial risks of manufacturing vaccines, a product mandated for public health but inherently unpredictable and administered to healthy people. The fear of massive liability began to stifle investment and innovation.

3. The Initial Government Response: The Vaccination Assistance Act (1962) In response to the Cutter crisis and to bolster public confidence, the federal government took its first step into liability protection. The Vaccination Assistance Act of 1962 allowed the U.S. Surgeon General to contract with vaccine manufacturers and provide them with indemnification clauses. This meant the federal government, not the company, would assume financial responsibility for any claims arising from vaccines produced under these contracts. This was a quiet but crucial precedent: the state began acting as a financial backstop for corporate liability.

Part II: The Crisis and The Creation of a New System (1970s – 1986)

1. The DTP Vaccine and the Rise of Organized Skepticism In the 1970s and 1980s, concerns grew over the whole-cell pertussis component of the Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis (DTP) vaccine. A small but significant number of children suffered severe neurological adverse events, including encephalopathy and permanent brain damage.

• Media Attention: Documentaries like “DPT: Vaccine Roulette” (1982) by Lea Thompson on WRC-TV (Washington D.C.) brought these heartbreaking stories into living rooms across America, galvanizing a parent-led movement.
• Scientific and Legal Response: While the medical establishment maintained that the benefits of the vaccine vastly outweighed the risks, plaintiffs’ attorneys found success in court. Juries, faced with profoundly injured children, were increasingly willing to award substantial damages against manufacturers like Wyeth and Lederle Laboratories.

2. The “Liability Crisis” and the Threat of Market Collapse By the mid-1980s, the situation reached a boiling point:

• Skyrocketing Litigation: The number of lawsuits filed against DTP manufacturers exploded, with over 200 lawsuits filed in 1985 alone.
• Spiraling Insurance Costs: Liability insurance premiums for vaccine manufacturers became prohibitively expensive, if available at all.
• Market Withdrawal: The financial risk became too great. In 1984, one of the only two remaining manufacturers of the DTP vaccine in the U.S. announced it was withdrawing from the market. The other threatened to follow. The United States was on the verge of having no supplier for a cornerstone of its childhood vaccination program—a genuine national security and public health crisis.

3. The Legislative “Solution”: The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 Faced with the collapse of the vaccine market, Congress acted with bipartisan support. The NCVIA (42 U.S.C. § 300aa-10 et seq.) was a grand bargain with three primary objectives:

• 1. Create a No-Fault Compensation System: The Act established the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), a federal “vaccine court.” This administrative program was designed to be a faster, easier, and less adversarial alternative to civil litigation. Claimants only need to prove that an injury listed on the Vaccine Injury Table occurred within a certain timeframe after vaccination. There is no need to prove manufacturer fault or negligence.
• 2. Provide Liability Protection to Manufacturers: This was the core of the bargain for the industry. The Act granted manufacturers near-total immunity from traditional product liability lawsuits for FDA-approved vaccines. To sue a manufacturer directly in civil court, a plaintiff must first exhaust all remedies through the VICP and then prove:
• Failure to properly prepare the vaccine (manufacturing defect), OR
• Failure to provide adequate directions or warnings (a very high bar, as labeling is approved by the FDA). This effectively eliminated lawsuits for “design defect,” the most common and successful legal theory used prior to 1986.
• 3. Promote Vaccine Safety: The Act also included provisions for mandatory reporting of adverse events and funded research into vaccine safety.

The VICP is funded by an excise tax of $0.75 per dose of specified vaccines, meaning the program is financially supported by the consumers themselves.

Part III: The Modern Era (1991 – Present) – Expansion and Controversy

1. Operation and Criticisms of the VICP The VICP has processed over 25,000 petitions and awarded over $5 billion in compensation since its inception.

• Criticisms:
• "Vaccine Court": Critics argue it is a “kangaroo court” that is inherently biased toward protecting the program and the industry. The Department of Justice attorneys defend the program, not the injured party.
• A Difficult Process: The process is often slow, complex, and arduous for grieving families. Many claims are dismissed for technicalities or because the injury is not on the official “Table.”
• The Omnibus Autism Proceeding: This consolidated proceeding, which ultimately rejected any link between vaccines and autism, is cited by critics as a prime example of the system’s failure to adequately address widespread public concerns.

2. Further Erosion of Liability: The PREP Act The NCVIA shield was further strengthened by the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act (2005). Initially designed for biological and chemical threats, its scope was dramatically expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Scope of Immunity: The PREP Act allows the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to issue a declaration for a public health emergency. This declaration grants almost total immunity from liability to “covered persons” (manufacturers, distributors, program planners, and healthcare providers) for losses related to the administration or use of “covered countermeasures” (vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics).
• The Sole Remedy: The only avenue for recourse for someone injured by a countermeasure under a PREP Act declaration is the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP). This program is far more restrictive than the VICP:
• A much stricter standard of proof.
• No right to a hearing or to challenge a decision in court.
• Extremely narrow window to file a claim (one year from vaccination).
• Caps on wrongful death damages.
• No payment for pain and suffering or attorney’s fees.
• COVID-19 Application: The HHS Secretary’s declaration for COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics invoked the PREP Act, granting these products the strongest liability shield in American history. This has effectively barred virtually all lawsuits against Pfizer, Moderna, and other COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers for alleged injuries, regardless of the evidence.

3. Global Context The United States is unique in its extensive legal protection for vaccine manufacturers. Most other developed nations have different models:

• No-Fault Systems (Similar to VICP): Countries like Sweden, Finland, and Denmark have administrative compensation programs for vaccine injuries, though they often operate alongside the possibility of civil litigation.
• Full Manufacturer Liability: Many countries, including those in the European Union, maintain traditional tort liability for pharmaceuticals. However, the high burden of proof and the cost of litigation often make successful lawsuits rare.
• State-Funded Programs: Some nations have programs where the government itself assumes responsibility for adverse events from its recommended vaccination schedule.

Conclusion: A Protected Industry

The historical trajectory is clear: from full liability under common law to a state-managed compensation system, and finally to near-blanket immunity under emergency powers. The argument for this protection has always been the same: without it, manufacturers will not produce vaccines, and public health will suffer. The counter-argument is that it creates a moral hazard, insulating powerful corporations from accountability for their products, stifles the natural market incentive to make products safer, and leaves injured citizens with limited and often inadequate recourse against the state, not the corporation that profited from the product.

The legal architecture built since the Cutter Incident, culminating in the NCVIA and PREP Act, has successfully ensured a stable vaccine supply. However, it has done so by fundamentally altering the concept of corporate responsibility and placing the financial and human costs of product injuries onto taxpayers and the injured themselves. This system remains one of the most controversial and consequential intersections of public health, corporate power, and individual rights in the modern world.

MK3|MK3Blog|Oct. 20, 2025

naturalnews.com

October 27, 2011

The "60% effectiveness" claim is a total lie - here's why

Flu vaccine stops influenza in only 1.5 out of 100 adults who get the shots

So where does the media get "60% effective?"

How to lie with statistics

Minimizing side effects with yet more statistical lies

How many people are harmed by influenza vaccines?

Good news for children?

Guess who funded this study?

Seven significant credibility problems with this Lancet study

What the public believes

Outright fraudulent marketing

The real story on flu shots that you probably don't want to know

https://newyorkstate-hotels.com/liamscheff/2011/10/flu-vaccines-the-mainstream-admits-we-want-an-epidemic/

Source: Whale

MK3|MK#Blog|Oct. 20, 2025

There are 10 studies below. The one by James Lyons-Weiler is a great study, but the journal unethically retracted it. The rest are still in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. There aren’t any other vaxxed/unvaxxed studies. 100% show you are better off not vaccinating your kids.

Anthony R. Mawson, et al., “Pilot Comparative Study on the Health of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated 6 to 12-year-old U.S. Children,” Journal of Translational Science 3, no. 3 (2017): 1-12, doi: 10.15761/JTS.1000186

Anthony R. Mawson et al., “Preterm Birth, Vaccination and Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Cross-Sectional Study of 6- to 12-Year-Old Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Children,” Journal of Translational Science 3, no. 3 (2017): 1-8, doi:10.15761/JTS.1000187.

Brian Hooker and Neil Z. Miller, “Analysis of Health Outcomes in Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Children: Developmental Delays, Asthma, Ear Infections and Gastrointestinal Disorders,” SAGE Open Medicine 8, (2020): 2050312120925344, doi:10.1177/2050312120925344.

Brian Hooker and Neil Z. Miller, “Health Effects in Vaccinated versus Unvaccinated Children,” Journal of Translational Science 7, (2021): 1-11, doi:10.15761/JTS.1000459.

James Lyons-Weiler and Paul Thomas, “Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses along the Axis of Vaccination,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17, no. 22 (2020): 8674, doi:10.3390/ijerph17228674.

Note: The above study was wrongly retracted, and the authors are considering legal action. Below is a follow-up study that completely exonerates the Lyons-Weiler/Thomas study of alleged bias.

James Lyons-Weiler, "Revisiting Excess Diagnoses of Illnesses and Conditions in Children Whose Parents Provided Informed Permission to Vaccinate Them" September 2022 International Journal of Vaccine Theory Practice and Research 2(2):603-618 DOI:10.56098/ijvtpr.v2i2.59

NVKP, “Diseases and Vaccines: NVKP Survey Results,” Nederlandse Vereniging Kritisch Prikken, 2006, accessed July 1, 2022.

Joy Garner, “Statistical Evaluation of Health Outcomes in the Unvaccinated: Full Report,” The Control Group: Pilot Survey of Unvaccinated Americans, November 19, 2020.

Joy Garner, “Health versus Disorder, Disease, and Death: Unvaccinated Persons Are Incommensurably Healthier than Vaccinated,” International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice and Research 2, no. 2, (2022): 670-686, doi: 10.56098/ijvtpr.v2i2.40.

Rachel Enriquez et al., “The Relationship Between Vaccine Refusal and Self-Report of Atopic Disease in Children,” The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology 115, no. 4 (2005): 737-744, doi:10.1016/j.jaci.2004.12.1128.