When was mandatory vaccination introduced to US schools?

[nia82]

I'm just wondering... I am talking about laws that a child needs to have a list of vaccines to attend public school or daycare. And did some states always have exemptions or are those newer additions?
And do you know who lobbied for those laws? I really would like to find out!
I now live in the US, but I'm from Germany and there are no laws for vaccines in school. I never even had a school physical, school and medical history are completely unrelated. So I find those laws here totally weird and oppressing (cause in East Germany we sure had those mandatory vaccination laws... So I find it quite dictatorial!).

[SoCaliMommy]

this might help

Mandatory Vaccines
pages 2 & 3 talk about state laws.

[Emmeline II]

I think that universal vaccination started around 1962, but that probably isn't the same as the laws pertaining to school.

A bit of history:

State mandatory vaccination laws have their roots in the 1905 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Jacobsen v Massachusetts. A Swedish Lutheran pastor, Reverend Henning Jacobsen and his son objected to a law requiring revaccination with smallpox vaccine because they had suffered severe reactions to the first vaccination. The nine Supreme Court justices at the turn of the century denied Jacobsen and his lawyers the right to present scientific evidence for harm caused by the smallpox vaccine, preferring to believe the lawyers representing public health officials who convinced them that doctors could predict ahead of time who would be injured by vaccination.

100wds.

[Gitti]

Originally Posted by nia82

I'm just wondering... I am talking about laws that a child needs to have a list of vaccines to attend public school or daycare. And did some states always have exemptions or are those newer additions?
And do you know who lobbied for those laws? I really would like to find out!
I now live in the US, but I'm from Germany and there are no laws for vaccines in school. I never even had a school physical, school and medical history are completely unrelated. So I find those laws here totally weird and oppressing (cause in East Germany we sure had those mandatory vaccination laws... So I find it quite dictatorial!).

You are right about this being oppressing!

My kids graduated around 1990 and we were never asked about vaccines during their school years. Never!

When they went to college I guess some vaccines were suggested but they didn't have to have them.

So this forceful push for vaccines is fairly new.

[Deborah]

No, in some states it goes back a lot further. I was living in NJ in 1957 or 58 and we couldn't attend school because none of us were vaccinated. My father was working in Patterson, but we ended up living in NY because the law was less stringent. I guess NY has gotten a lot worse in the last few years.

I remember having to do a form for my daughter in California in the 1970s.

[miriam]

It was a movement after WWII in the late 1940's by the public health departments to wipe out all childhood diseases in one generation through vaccination and quarantine that drove all jurisdictions to require proof of vaccination at the time of school enrollment.

Please keep in mind that the Jacobson decision has been used through eugenetics to enforce the sterilzation of children with low Intelligence Quotients in decisions since. Buck versus Bell decision of 1928 by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes relied heavily on the Jacobson decision. There are cases similar to this that reach into the early 1960s.

Marcella Gruelle supposedly received a smallpox vaccination at school without her parents' consent in 1915 and died from the side effects.

http://ftp.fas.org/sgp/crs/RS21414.pdf