A federal judge on Oct. 8 denied a request to block Michigan State University’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate on the basis of natural immunity, reports The Epoch Times.
George W. Bush appointee, U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney, rejected a teacher’s lawsuit claiming her previous COV infection protected her and she didn’t need the shot. The mandate, Maloney said, didn’t violate her fundamental rights and pointed to a 1905 Supreme Court ruling.
“This Court must apply the law from the Supreme Court: Jacobson essentially applied rational basis review and found that the vaccine mandate was rational in ‘protect[ing] the public health and public safety,’” Maloney said in his order. “The Court cannot ignore this binding precedent.”
“In 1905, the Supreme Court ruled that Massachusetts could fine people who would not take a smallpox vaccine,” the Boston Globe recently reported. “That case established a precedent for a 1922 case, Zucht v. King, that allowed San Antonio to mandate vaccines for all public and private school students. More recently, the Supreme Court cited the Jacobson case in its decisions about whether to permit governors in California and New York to place occupancy limits on religious services during a pandemic.”
“The Jacobson ruling gives the state nearly unchecked power to decide how to handle a public health emergency,” the report continued. “But that decision, old enough to have been written by a Civil War veteran, is jarring today because of the rights revolution in 20th-century American law. In cases decided after Jacobson, the Supreme Court has maintained that the Constitution — particularly the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment — limits the power of the state to touch the body. These Supreme Court cases concerning bodily integrity apply to every level of government, and they have also shaped public norms about individuals’ right to make crucial decisions about their own bodies.”
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