Watching that Young Republican guy try to spin his wheels about why it was OK for George Washington to mandate vaccines but not contemporary leaders was fun. But technically George Washington didn’t institute a “vaccine” mandate for his troops because vaccines as we know them didn’t exist.
George Washington supported an inoculation mandate which carried orders of magnitude more risk for the recipients but was still a safer alternative than allowing smallpox to spread unchecked.
It still hurts my brain that so many people have decided that one of humanity’s greatest, hardest-fought accomplishments—the ability to prevent millions of deaths a year from contagious disease—has been reframed as something so sinister.
