George Washington mandated vaccines
You have to wonder how the Founding Fathers would react to today’s Republican arguments.
Gen. George Washington was a lucky man during the American Revolution. Granted, he had his battlefield challenges. He had to cope with losing Manhattan to the Redcoats, had to get across the Delaware and take the war to the British, had to assess the damage done to the American cause by the traitor Benedict Arnold. And in 1777, he had to guard against a deadly outbreak of smallpox that, if allowed to spread, would devastate his army and, arguably, result in total defeat for the new American nation.
The Continental Army’s commander in chief had survived smallpox as a young man and was acutely aware of its mortal threat. In a July 1776 letter to John Hancock, he had labeled the disease “the most dangerous enemy.” He knew if it got loose among his soldiers, it would not only destroy his army but also inevitably spread to the populace. He ordered a mass inoculation among the troops, even though that early method of immunization could be dangerous as well.
“I have determined that the troops shall get inoculated,” Washington wrote in 1777. “Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure, for should the disorder infect the Army in the natural way and rage with its usual virulence we should have more to dread from it than from the Sword of the Enemy.”
Washington, as we said, was lucky — lucky that his soldiers obeyed orders and the disease didn’t spread, but lucky also that Kevin McCarthy wasn’t standing outside his field tent carping about the general’s vaccine mandate for his soldiers, lucky that he didn’t have to read the California Republican’s all-caps social media broadside, “NO VACCINE MANDATES.”
McCarthy, the U.S. House minority leader who longs to be speaker, trumpeted his opposition to mandates in response to President Joe Biden’s decision last week to force companies to require their employees to get a coronavirus vaccine or be subjected to weekly testing. The requirement, still being developed by the Labor Department, would apply to businesses with 100 or more workers.
McCarthy has been uncharacteristically mum about mandates since his all-caps tweet — he deflected some reporters’ questions but defended his stance on CNBC, arguing that although he is vaccinated and believes in the vaccine’s effectiveness, federal mandates would only worsen the labor shortage and increase vaccine avoidance in people who clearly have serious questions about the shot.
Other Republicans have couched their opposition in terms George Washington would have understood. It’s un-American, they shout. It’s about freedom!
U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-NY, labeled Biden’s proposal “authoritarian” and the work of “a power-hungry government.” U.S. Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., declared in a tweet that “vaccine mandates are un-American!” South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster offered the most ridiculous response, pledging to fight Biden and Democrats “to the gates of hell.”
McMaster is among several Republican governors — including Ron DeSantis of Florida, Tate Reeves in Mississippi and Greg Abbott of Texas — who oppose the Biden plan, even though they govern states that mandate student vaccinations against numerous other diseases.
Our own Ted Cruz, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, opposed Biden’s proposal but was a bit more measured than usual. “While I support the vaccine and have received it, Americans have the right to exercise personal choice when it comes to their health,” he said in a written statement from his office.
Cruz and his fellow carpers conveniently ignore the fact that COVID-19 has claimed the lives of more than 669,000 people — or 1 in 500 Americans — that ERs and ICUs in areas of the country where the unvaccinated predominate are approaching collapse and that the nation’s economy can never get back on track until we get the pandemic under control. They also ignore polls showing that most Americans, including business owners, favor a mandate.
If George Washington were among us today, and if he had any patience with McCarthy and his fellow Republicans — still quailing, by the way, under the looming shadow of a bullying former president — he might have instructed his brash and articulate young aide, Alexander Hamilton, to correct a few errors of fact:
First, Biden did not issue an absolute vaccine mandate. Those opposed to vaccination can opt out by agreeing to be tested. And second, we have had, and continue to have, vaccine mandates in schools, the military and in the workforce. Do McCarthy and friends oppose those mandates? Do they want their school-age children exposed to measles, mumps and other childhood diseases?
Dr. Peter Hotez, professor of pediatrics and molecular biology at Baylor College of Medicine, worries that Republican obstinance regarding COVID-19 vaccines will feed public resistance to other vaccines in this country, particularly among children.
“The problem,” he told the Washington Post earlier this week, “is that, with COVID-19, with the social disruptions, there was a steep decline in childhood vaccinations, including things like (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccines and especially teenagers getting the HPV vaccine for cervical cancer and other cancers. It’s starting to rebound, but my worry is that there will be a spillover effect from all of this anti-vaccine aggression that we’re seeing and that we’re not going to get back to baseline.”
When George Washington imposed his vaccination mandate nearly 250 years ago, he was desperately trying to win a war, but Washington was more than a military tactician. As Thomas E. Ricks points out in his book “First Principles,” the people who made the Revolution and wrote the Constitution were political philosophers of a sort; they were deeply influenced by the Greeks and Romans. Washington and the Founders aspired to “virtue,” a word that makes little sense today unless we read it, as Ricks points out, “in the 18th century sense of the word, meaning public-spiritedness, or putting the common good above one’s own interest.”
In a 1905 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court upholding a Cambridge, Mass., vaccine mandate, Justice John Marshall Harlan alluded to a similar sense of public-spiritedness. “The liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly free from restraint,” Harlan wrote. “There are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good.”
“Real liberty,” he wrote, simply can’t exist if each person is allowed to assert his or her own “regardless of the injury that may be done to others.”
Like Washington long before, we are waging a war against a common enemy. We require “virtue,” in the older sense of the word, virtue that would prompt Minority Leader McCarthy and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, to stand shoulder to shoulder against COVID-19.
The fact that such an image seems almost unimaginable suggests how far we have strayed from our founding ideals. The Founders would remind us that we can fight each other tomorrow ( just as they did). Virtue requires that today we wage war against the enemy at hand. For the common good.