Correcting Our Timeline: When Did the Mob Attack on Health Officials in Delaware Over Smallpox Vaccination Happen?

I was looking through the old vaccine timeline when I encountered an entry of a riot in Georgetown, Delaware, over smallpox vaccination. According to our timeline entry, the event happened in 1926. Several news sites and other papers have used our timeline entry as a reference when talking about the history of violence against public health officials. (They do this to put current threats and violence in historical context.) As it turns out, we were off by six years.

The entry attracted my attention because I live in Maryland, which borders Delaware. So I started looking into the story of what happened. I found , written in 2019. According to his blog post, an epidemic of smallpox hit Sussex County, Delaware, at Christmastime in 1919. To counter the epidemic, health officials at first recommended smallpox vaccination. Seeing that cases were still happening, health officials traveled to Georgetown in January 1920 to take a census of who was vaccinated and who was not. Upon hearing of the census, and the plans to (perhaps) forcibly vaccinate the unvaccinated, townspeople took up arms.

The Evening Public Ledger . We apologize for the error in the year of this event.