H2N2

2496 Words5 Pages

In the face of a potential H2N2 epidemic, New Jersey’s Health Commissioner enforced a statute requiring the vaccination of all public health professionals, school-age children, pregnant mothers, and asthmatics. The law also prohibits people outside these high-risk groups from receiving inoculations voluntarily until these classes of people are fully vaccinated. The states, as governments of general jurisdiction, have police powers to pass legislation designed to protect society’s health and safety. As such, New Jersey needs no specifically enumerated constitutional power to enact such legislation. Indeed, the Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Massachusetts upheld a state law requiring mandatory immunization even in the face of concerns about vaccine safety and bodily integrity.

The issue before the court in this case concerns the constitutional legitimacy of requiring specific categories of people to receive vaccination and of restricting access to the vaccine for people outside of those categories. For its categories to be legitimate, the state must have some rational basis for requiring the specific groups to receive vaccination while not mandating it for the population at large. The state must also have a rational basis for restricting voluntary access to the vaccine until the target groups have been inoculated. In general, the court affirms both the vaccine mandates and the mandatory vaccination ban in the New Jersey statute. Before discussing several specific cases and caveats as to how the law applies to specific groups, it is necessary to justify the decision to hold these classifications only to the level of ordinary scrutiny.

First, appellants argue that the classifications merit heightened scrutiny because they violate th...

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... but New Jersey’s law goes farther, restricting voluntary vaccinations “until every person in categories (a) and (b) had been inoculated” (Prompt). The State’s interest in banning voluntary vaccination derives from the vaccine’s scarcity. Once enough of the vaccine has been produced to inoculate all of the target groups, the State may set aside enough vaccines to accomplish this task, but it may not restrict public access to surplus vaccines. As a practical matter, it could take weeks to find and vaccinate every last health care professional, asthmatic, child, or pregnant woman; the State has no rational basis for restricting access to the vaccine while it does so. As such we affirm the New Jersey statute’s prohibition on voluntary vaccination only until such time as the State has sufficient stockpiles of the vaccine to accommodate its mandatory vaccination targets.

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