Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [96]
Popular distrust of vaccine surged in the final months of the year, as newspapers across the country reported that batches of tetanus-contaminated diphtheria antitoxin and smallpox vaccine had caused the deaths of thirteen children in St. Louis, four in Cleveland, nine in Camden, and isolated fatalities in Philadelphia, Atlantic City, Bristol (Pennsylvania), and other communities. In all but St. Louis, where antitoxin was the culprit, the reports implicated vaccine. Even The New York Times, a relentless champion of compulsory vaccination, expressed horror at the news from Camden, the epicenter of the national vaccine scare. “Vaccination has been far more fatal here than smallpox,” the paper told its readers. “Parents are naturally averse to endangering their children to obey the law, claiming that the chances of smallpox seem to be less than those of tetanus.”4
Pain, sickness, and the occasional death after vaccination were nothing new. But the clustering, close sequence, and staggering toll of these events was unprecedented in America. Newspaper stories of children dying in terrible agony—their jaws locked and bodies convulsing, as helpless parents and physicians bore witness—turned domestic tragedies into galvanizing public events. Allegations of catastrophic vaccine failure triggered extraordinary levels of conflict between angry citizens and defensive officials. In one typical incident, which occurred as the ninth Camden child entered her death throes, the health officials of Plymouth, Pennsylvania, discovered that many parents, ordered to get their children vaccinated for school, were secretly wiping the vaccine from their sons’ and daughters’ arms.5
Jolted from their professional complacency, physicians and public health officials were forced to reconsider the existing distribution of coercion and risk in American public health law. In one sense, compulsory vaccination orders, whether they applied only to schoolchildren or to the public at large, already socialized risk. The orders imposed a legal duty upon individuals (and also parents) to assume the risks of vaccination in order to protect the entire community from the presumably much greater danger of smallpox. Spreading the risk of vaccination across the community made its social benefit (immunity of the herd) seem a great bargain. As any good progressive knew, the inescapable interdependence of modern social life required just such sacrifices for the public welfare and the health of the state. Still, the state did almost nothing to ensure vaccine quality. The bacteriological revolution spawned a proliferating array of “biologics”—vaccines, antitoxins, and sera of endless variety—that were manufactured in unregulated establishments and distributed, by the companies’ druggist representatives and traveling detail men, in unregulated markets. The risks of these products lay where they fell—on the person left unprotected by an inert vaccine or poisoned by a tainted one.6
The situation illustrates the larger dualism of American law at the turn of the century. Ordinary Americans, particularly working-class people, were caught between the increasingly strong state presence in their everyday social lives and the relatively weak state regulation of the economy. And the government insulated itself from liability. In a leading decision, handed down just three years before the Camden crisis, the Georgia Supreme Court took up the question of whether a municipal government could be sued for injuries caused by bad vaccine used by its public