Defending COVID-19 policies against legal challenges, government officials relied heavily on Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a 1905 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a smallpox vaccine mandate imposed by the Cambridge Board of Health. But the breadth of the license granted by that decision is a matter of dispute, even as applied to superficially similar COVID-19 vaccination requirements.
Critics of those mandates argued that COVID-19 shots, unlike smallpox vaccination, do not prevent disease transmission, so requiring them amounts to paternalistic intervention rather than protection of the general public. Last summer in Health Freedom Fund v. Carvalho, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit dismissed that distinction as constitutionally irrelevant.
