Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [161]
The antivaccinationists saved their most powerful witnesses for the final day. The bodies of children—present or remembered—were placed, once again, into evidence. The petitioners presented to the committee one “little child whose head was almost one mass of sores.” Mrs. Smith of Winthrop introduced her son Benjamin, who she said had lost the use of his arm following vaccination. Fred W. Hatch of Dorchester said his daughter had suffered a severe case of eczema following vaccination. With the Camden tetanus cases still in the news, Mrs. Caswell of Cambridge told the committee of losing her five-year-old daughter Annie to lockjaw. The death certificate listed tetanus as the cause of death, with vaccination as the contributing cause.74
The antivaccinationists failed to move the committee. At the end of February, the committee adversely reported all of the antivaccination bills, effectively killing them. The following month, the committee favorably reported a new vaccination bill, introduced by Chairman Durgin. The Durgin bill, which was soon enacted by the General Court, made the exemption for “unfit” children from the school requirement more stringent. It required that a physician actually examine the child before signing a certificate. The antivaccinationists had tried to squeeze something for their side from the Durgin bill, submitting an amendment that would extend the health exemption to adults as well as children. But lawmakers rejected it.75
Despite their string of defeats on Beacon Hill, the antivaccinationists had succeeded in keeping the state lawmakers and the public focused on their cause through much of the winter of 1902. The State House debate provided the high political drama of a larger struggle over vaccination that would continue in the streets, the schools, and, increasingly, the courts.
During the next three years, American antivaccinationists won two more legislative victories. In Minnesota, in 1903, Lora Little and activists from Minneapolis and St. Paul placed an antivaccination bill before the state legislature. The bill made it unlawful for any public board to compel the vaccination of any child or make vaccination “a condition precedent to the school attendance.” Dr. Henry M. Bracken, secretary of the state board of health, recalled, “At first this bill hardly seemed worthy of notice on the part of sanitarians.” To his dismay, the House passed the bill. When doctors mobilized in opposition, the Senate amended the bill, adding a clause that allowed boards to require vaccination in the event of an actual smallpox epidemic. Little denounced the amended law as “a disgusting piece of legislative folly.” But health authorities would later complain that the law was all too effective. In 1906, AMA president William J. Mayo, a Minnesota physician, charged that his state’s “inability to enforce vaccination” had unleashed a smallpox epidemic, infecting 28,000 of the state’s citizens—“all due to a small but vociferous band of antivaccination agitators.”76
In California, a crowd of three hundred assembled in Berkeley in 1904 to form an Anti-Compulsory Vaccination Society and protest the “unjust” school vaccination law. The group’s leaders included the president of the local board of education and a local minister. The movement gained traction. In the winter of 1905, the state legislature passed a bill banning compulsory vaccination from the schools. Governor George C. Pardee, a physician, vetoed the bill on March 8, 1905. He cited the “vast preponderance of expert medical authority throughout the civilized world” that viewed vaccination as “the prime cause of the practical disappearance of smallpox.” Pardee insisted that the number of vaccination accidents was “infinitesimal” compared