Forced vaccines and brothel fought smallpox in Deming

You answer a knock at your door. A physician and a sheriff’s deputy greet you. “We are here to give you a vaccination against smallpox,” they announce. Since you are the kind of American who keeps a copy of the U.S. Constitution in your pocket, you proceed to engage them in a discussion of your fundamental rights.

Inconveniently for you, this is the early 20th century. These men are not here to discuss constitutional theory or jurisprudence, nor to explore community ethics. They are here to inoculate you against a deadly contagious disease.

Here in Deming, according to the local historian C.A. “Gus” Gustafson, door-todoor smallpox vaccinations were free to the public, “voluntary to most but forcefully to the reticent.”

Smallpox, eradicated by 1980 thanks to a global vaccination effort yet preserved in frozen vials around the world, laughs at COVID-19. Caused by the variola virus, it is highly contagious, producing dangerous fevers and lesions, often stealing one’s eyesight.

Smallpox was far more deadly than COVID-19, with a case fatality rate of 30%, reportedly even higher in some outbreaks. For comparison, the Johns Hopkins University of Medicine currently estimates the COVID-19 fatality rate at 1.8% in the United States, and highest by far in Mexico at 9.3%.

By the time smallpox arrived in Deming late in 1916, the U.S. Supreme Court had already ruled in favor of compulsory vaccinations in the interest of public health.

That ruling came in 1905 in a case from Cambridge, Mass., after Henning Jacobson refused a vaccination and was fined $5 — equivalent to $154 today.

Since Jacobson lived in a house, he had it much easier than those dwelling on the streets of Boston, who were blamed for spreading disease and often literally held down and inoculated by force. A Boston Globe reporter described “writhing, cursing, struggling tramps … held down in their cots, one big policeman sitting on their legs, and another on their heads, while the third held the arms, bared for the doctors.”

Deming seems to have gone even further than mandatory vaccinations. Physician Pinkney Minor Steed, who led the vaccination effort, also commandeered the brothel on San Carlos Street north of the railroad tracks, by Gustafson’s account, after the local hospital was overrun.

The house was evacuated, fumigated and used as a temporary hospital for the remainder of the epidemic, after which it was restored to its owner — with compensation. The brothel resumed its operations, known by some thereafter as the “pest house” for its service to public health.

Dr. Steed, for his part, later served on the school board, city council and as mayor before his death in 1943.

A century after Steed went door to door injecting people with cowpox, we are in a different time both medically and legally. I walked into the Deming Walmart, a mile away from where the brothel stood, and voluntarily received a newfangled mRNA vaccine against COVID-19.

Instead of introducing a pathogen into my body — which troubles many vaccine resisters — this one instructed my body to create a spiky protein similar to SARS-CoV-2 so my body could practice how to kill it. This is why I experienced a mild fever and fatigue the following day. Mostly I slept, dreaming of Apollo and his plague-tipped arrows.

The vaccine is free and the state is imploring, not forcing, people to take it. The Biden administration maintains it will not seek a mandate. Instead, we are having arguments over how much we should accommodate healthy adults who refuse to be vaccinated.

“Public health programs that are based on force are a relic of the 19th century,” states a 2005 article in the American Journal of Public Health. “21st-century public health depends on good science, good communication, and trust in public health officials to tell the truth.”

Whether it can overcome misinformation and malignant conspiracism, we are soon to find out.