Vaccination Evasion: Legislating a Solution through a Revised Vaccinate All Children Act of 2019
![handle is hein.journals/jleg47 and id is 253 raw text is: VACCINATION EVASION: LEGISLATING A SOLUTION
THROUGH A REVISED VACCINATE ALL CHILDREN ACT
OF 2019
Sophia C. Aguilar*
INTRODUCTION
The first variolation believed to have occurred in the United States is said to
have been performed in Boston in 1721.1 Resistance to vaccination began just as
early. For example, across the Atlantic in 1722, Anglican Reverend Edmund Massey
preached [a] sermon against the dangerous and sinful practice of inoculation at St.
Andrew Church, Holborn in London.2 In this sermon he opined that, among its other
problems, inoculation was a diabolical operation.3
Unfortunately, individuals like Massey represented only the beginning of
vaccine skepticism in the West. Even while early proponents of inoculation and
vaccination included prominent figures such as Louis Pasteur, and Presidents John
Adams and Thomas Jefferson,4 the struggle to convince the population to protect
itself against deadly diseases began nearly as soon as the vaccine was first conceived.
* Candidate for Juris Doctor, Notre Dame Law School, 2022; Artium Baccalaureus in Politics with
Certificates in Latin American Studies and Spanish Language and Literature, Princeton University, 2016. First,
thank you to my family for their support and guidance. Thank you to my readers-especially Momma, Britt,
and JLEG. Thank you also to Professor Nicole Garnett for her advice regarding the constitutionality of my
proposed amendments to VACA 2019. All errors are my own.
'Ira M. Rutko, Zabdiel Boylston and Smallpox Inoculations, 136 ARCH. SURG. 1213 (2001). Variolation
is defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as the deliberate inoculation of an uninfected person with the
smallpox virus (as by contact with pustular matter) that was widely practiced before the era of vaccination as
prophylaxis against the severe form of smallpox. Variolation, MERRIAM-WEBSTER DICTIONARY,
https://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/variolation (last visited May 8, 2021).
2 Edmund Massey, Lecturer at St. Andrew at Holborn, A Sermon Against the Dangerous and Sinful
Practice of Inoculation (July 8, 1722).
s Id.; see also Alexander Muacevic et al., The Anti-vaccination Movement: A Regression in Modern
Medicine, CUREUS (July 3, 2018), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6122668/.
n For example, in 1806, President Thomas Jefferson wrote to Dr. G. C. Jenner, a member of the famous
family who had perfected the smallpox vaccine: Medecine [sic] has never before produced any single
improvement of such utility .... You have erased from the calendar of human afflictions one of its greatest.
Letter from President Thomas Jefferson, to Doctor G. C. Jenner (May 14, 1806) (on file with the College of
Physicians of Philadelphia).
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Vaccination Evasion: Legislating a Solution through a Revised Vaccinate All Children Act of 2019
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