Why James Wilson and The Economist supported compulsory vaccination

By C.R. | LONDON

SHOULD governments force parents to vaccinate their children? This question, which has been subjected to impassioned and sometime violent debate over the past two centuries, has come yet again to the forefront of American politics. Since the start of this year, more than 150 measles cases have been reported in 17 states, most stemming from an outbreak in December at California's Disneyland. The spread of the disease was mainly caused by falling vaccination rates, which have dropped as low as 82% in the state of Colorado. This is below the level needed to give children "herd immunity" from infection, the aim of universal vaccination. As a result, many left-leaning commentators have argued that governments should make it compulsory for parents to vaccinate their children, while right-wing libertarians have argued that individuals should have the right to refuse medical treatment. But what did The Economist and its founding editor, James Wilson, believe when Britain introduced its first laws making vaccination against smallpox compulsory in 1853?

Wilson is often (and incorrectly) remembered by historians as a passionate advocate of classical political economy. In practice, Wilson and The Economist believed in free trade and opposed government intervention in the lives of individuals more strongly than even the likes of Adam Smith or David Ricardo ever did themselves. Indeed, Smith was attacked by The Economist for supporting the so-called Navigation Laws that restricted trade with Britain to that carried by British ships, as well as his advocacy of public works. Ricardo was accused of making "fatal errors" in not producing a denunciation of tariffs strong enough to satisfy Wilson. And Thomas Malthus, who argued that population growth would eventually exceed the world's ability to grow food, was declared to be simply wrong. The Economist from its earliest days argued that technological progress and free trade would ensure that there would be enough food to adequately feed the world's population—a prediction that this newspaper has substantially got right over the past 172 years.

So, in short, it would be natural to expect that Wilson and The Economist—who counted themselves as among the most fanatical opponents of government intervention in 19th-century Britain—would have been against compulsory vaccination. But that could not have been further from the truth. Wilson was the Financial Secretary to the Treasury (a junior finance minister) in the government that introduced the legislation, and wholeheartedly supported it in public. By 1867, the extension of compulsory vaccination to Ireland and the sudden fall in the number of deaths from smallpox there was cited in the pages of The Economist as evidence that the policy was working.

Wilson supported the legislation because, in spite of his uncompromising free-trade views, he still retained a reverence for facts and figures. When the evidence, such as with compulsory vaccination or Britain's penny-post system, overwhelmingly suggested that government intervention would be benefical, he supported it. In the case of vaccination, the 1853 and 1867 legislation was for the compulsory treatment of babies—who cannot exercise free choice—whilst their parents, as adults, still had the personal liberty to get the jab themselves or refuse it. It stands as an irony of British history that the Whig government that introduced the legislation was one of its most laissez-faire—and the Labour government that abolished it in 1946, in the law establishing the National Health Service, Britain's nationalised health-care system, was one of its most socialist.

Today the case for the state to encourage parents to get their children vaccinated against the likes of measles is overwhelming, just as it was for smallpox in the 1850s. Worries about a supposed link between the measles-mumps-rubella (or MMR) vaccine and autism have been utterly discredited. What is clear is that not vaccinating children against measles kills. In the rich world, it is estimated that one in 5,000 children who catch the disease will die from its complications. With the news that an 18-month-old toddler in Germany succumbed to measles on February 23rd, modern-day libertarians should think hard again about whether their opposition to compulsory vaccination is practically and morally justifiable—just as Wilson himself did more than 160 years ago.