ABSTRACT
In Massachusetts, a smallpox epidemic in 1901-1902 was the occasion for a court challenge to the state's compulsory vaccination law that ultimately led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling establishing the right of the government to use its "police powers" to control epidemic disease. The history of American public health is punctuated by controversies over the extent to which the state may legitimately impose restrictions on liberty in the name of the common good, and over the extent to which protection of the public's welfare has served as a pretext for erosion of fundamental rights. A common thread of the movement is the argument that public health officials have willfully denied the dangers of immunization, which render any attempt to compel the procedure ethically unjustifiable. In the late 1990s the threat of bioterrorism surfaced as a concern of a few public health officials and experts.
