Vaccine Mandates Are as American as Apple Pie

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.”