Examination of the history of vaccination mandates typically focuses on those imposed by state and local governments, such as the one at issue in the famous 1905 United States Supreme Court case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts. However, the history of employers requiring their employees to be vaccinated is almost as lengthy, with notices and announcements heralding such mandates appearing in newspapers from as early as the 1880s.
For example, an 1885 news item in Vermont's Middlebury Register briefly stated that "[t]he Central Vermont and Delaware and Hudson railroads have ordered all their employees vaccinated." Railroads were one of the most prominent businesses to mandate vaccination in that era, due to the magnified possibility of exposure to disease accompanying far-flung travels. A number of railroads premised their employee vaccination requirements on the possibility that employees might come in contact with "immigrants" traveling by rail.
In the same era, an 1886 news report from St. Hyacinthe, Quebec, and an 1893 piece reported in Akron, Ohio, both reported that the business owners in those cities -- the "merchants" in St. Hyacinthe, and the "leading manufacturers and representatives of the largest industries of the city" in Akron -- had made the determination to require that all employees be vaccinated.
Middlebury Vermont Register, Oct. 9, 1885, p. 1.
Montreal Gazette, Apr. 12 1886, p. 3
Akron Beacon Journal, Jan. 17, 1893, p. 1.
Abilene Daily Chronicle, Jan. 30. 1901, p. 1.
Unlike the various legal cases objecting to state-mandated vaccination in this era, employer vaccination mandates did not draw such lawsuits. The few legal actions taken in response to early employer mandates were claims brought after the fact of vaccination asserting an injury caused thereby, most often without success on the part of the plaintiff.
In one particularly interesting case, Gulf & S.I.R. Co. v. Sullivan, 155 Miss. 1, 119 So. 501 (1928), the parents of a minor (aged 17) sued a railroad company for an alleged injury to their son, who was an employee of the company, from a smallpox vaccination administered by a company physician. The parents had neither consented nor objected to his employment by the railroad, nor to his receipt of the vaccination. The Mississippi Supreme Court dismissed the case, finding that the intellectual maturity demonstrated by the minor -- who, after all, had obtained gainful employment -- was sufficient to say that the minor understood and appreciated the consequences of vaccination, so that parental consent was not required.
Hartford Courant, May 15, 1903, p. 7.
The Perkasie Central News, Jan. 30, 1902, p. 1
Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, Oct. 11, 1910, p. 16.
The El Reno American, Apr. 20, 1922, p. 8
The Kansas City Times, Jan. 27, 1922, p. 18
Employer vaccination mandates for smallpox and other diseases persisted in the United States into the 1950s. By this time, however, the increasing propensity for individuals to be vaccinated led to a dwindling number of actual smallpox cases (the disease was declared eradicated in 1980), while the increasing uniformity of childhood vaccination meant that those reaching the age of employment were likely already vaccinated against most other vaccine-preventable diseases.
Employer vaccination mandates effectively disappeared outside of military service members, until the mid-2000s, when medical institutions began mandating influenza vaccination for their employees. This brought about a new regime of regulation of mandates and exemptions, one that drew only a little from the previous long history of employer vaccination mandates.