Back in 2021, COVID-19 vaccines were becoming widely available, and we saw the likelihood of vaccine mandates on the horizon.  We researched the legal implications, and it didn’t take us long to figure out that Jacobson v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), is the 500-pound gorilla precedent in this area.  An anti-vaxxer in Jacobson claimed that Due Process precluded him from being prosecuted for violating a municipal mandatory smallpox vaccination order.  He lost:

[T]he 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 freed from restraint.  There are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good.  On any other basis organized society could not exist with safety to its members.  Society based on the rule that each one is a law unto himself would soon be confronted with disorder and anarchy.

197 U.S. at 26 (emphasis added).

But the Jacobson gorilla is a silverback – decided well over a century ago at a time when “Due Process” often meant something much different than it does today (Jacobson was decided in the same term as Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905)).  Thus we devoted our “Survival of the Vaxxest” post to marshalling all of the precedent that had followed Jacobson during those 116 years, including several more recent Supreme Court decisions:  Employment Div., Dept. of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872, 888-89 (1990); Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158, 166-67 (1944); Zucht v. King, 260 U.S. 174, 176 (1922), see South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, ___ U.S. ___, 140 S. Ct. 1613, 1613-14 (2020) (Roberts, C.J. concurring in denial of certiorari).  We did that so that those defending vaccination requirements wouldn’t have to, since they might not have the kind of resources that we, as big-firm lawyers, do.

It is now over four years later.  How well did Jacobson weather the COVID-19 storm?

As this post demonstrates, pretty well.