April 7, 2011
Historian Michael Willrich stumbled across an article from The New York Times archives about a 1901 smallpox vaccination raid in New York. 250 men came to a tenement house in the middle of the night and vaccinated everyone they could find. It was not an isolated incident.
His research led him to write the book Pox: An American History, which details how a turn-of-the-twentieth-century smallpox epidemic had far-reaching implications for public health officials and civil liberties. There were little to no regulations governing the pharmaceutical industry, and many people were forced to receive the vaccine against their will. And from the very start of the organized vaccination campaign against smallpox, there was public resistance.
According to NPR:
“It wasn't until 1972 that the U.S. government decided to stop mandatory vaccination against smallpox, in part because the disease had been largely eradicated.”