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Alan wrote:
> No judge is competent to declare what is and what is NOT a vaccine.

How do YOU know?

https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/on-this-day-the-supreme-court-rules-on-vaccines-and-public-health

On February 20, 1905, the Supreme Court, by a 7-2 majority, said in 
Jacobson v. Massachusetts that the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts 
could fine residents who refused to receive smallpox injections. In 
1901, a smallpox epidemic swept through the Northeast and Cambridge, and 
Massachusetts reacted by requiring all adults receive smallpox 
inoculations subject to a $5 fine. In 1902, Pastor Henning Jacobson, 
suggesting that he and his son both were injured by previous vaccines, 
refused to be vaccinated and to pay the fine. In state court, Jacobson 
argued the vaccine law violated the Massachusetts and federal 
constitutions. The state courts, including the Massachusetts Supreme 
Judicial Court, rejected his claims. Before the Supreme Court, Jacobson 
argued that, “compulsion to introduce disease into a healthy system is a 
violation of liberty.”

On February 20, 1905, the Supreme Court rejected Jacobson’s arguments. 
Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote about the police power of states to 
regulate for the protection of public health: “The good and welfare of 
the Commonwealth, of which the legislature is primarily the judge, is 
the basis on which the police power rests in Massachusetts,” Harlan said 
  “upon the principle of self-defense, of paramount necessity, a 
community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease 
which threatens the safety of its members.”

Jacobson had argued that the Massachusetts law requiring mandatory 
vaccination was a violation of due process under the 14th Amendment, 
particularly the right “to live and work where he will” under the 
precedent of Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897), a case that found that a 
state law preventing certain out-of-state insurance corporations from 
conducting business in the state was unconstitutional restriction of 
freedom of contract under the 14th Amendment. Harlan answered that while 
the Court had protected such liberty,  a citizen:

[M]ay be compelled, by force if need be, against his will and without 
regard to his personal wishes or his pecuniary interests, or even his 
religious or political convictions, to take his place in the ranks of 
the army of his country and risk the chance of being shot down in its 
defense. It is not, therefore, true that the power of the public to 
guard itself against imminent danger depends in every case involving the 
control of one's body upon his willingness to submit to reasonable 
regulations established by the constituted authorities, under the 
sanction of the State, for the purpose of protecting the public 
collectively against such danger.”

The Court did not extend the rule beyond the facts of the case before 
it. Harlan ended his opinion by stating the limitations of the ruling: 
“We are not inclined to hold that the statute establishes the absolute 
rule that an adult must be vaccinated if it be apparent or can be shown 
with reasonable certainty that he is not at the time a fit subject of 
vaccination or that vaccination, by reason of his then condition, would 
seriously impair his health or probably cause his death.”

In the years following the case, the anti-vaccine movement mobilized and 
the Anti-Vaccination League of America was founded three years later in 
Philadelphia under the principle that “health is nature’s greatest 
safeguard against disease and that therefore no State has the right to 
demand of anyone the impairment of his or her health,” and aimed “to 
abolish oppressive medical laws and counteract the growing tendency to 
enlarge the scope of state medicine at the expense of the freedom of the 
individual.” The League warned about what it believed to be the dangers 
of vaccination and allowing the intrusion of government and science into 
private life,

When a separate question of vaccinations—state laws requiring children 
to be vaccinated before attending public school—came up in 1922 in Zucht 
v. King, Justice Louis Brandeis and a unanimous court held that Jacobson 
“settled that it is within the police power of a state to provide for 
compulsory vaccination” and the case and others “also settled that a 
state may, consistently with the federal Constitution, delegate to a 
municipality authority to determine under what conditions health 
regulations shall become operative.” More recently, in 2002, a federal 
district court declined to find a exemption to mandatory vaccinations 
laws for “sincerely held religious beliefs” or a fundamental right of 
parents to make decisions concerning medical procedures of their children.

The application of Jacobson to the modern age of vaccinations is a 
source of scholarly debate, with some arguing that the case no longer 
applies in an era in which vaccines like HPV are not medically necessary 
to prevent the spread of disease. But others maintain Jacobson’s 
importance today in providing ample power to protect the public health, 
especially with the threat of pandemics.

Nicholas Mosvick was a Senior Fellow for Constitutional Content at the 
National Constitution Center.